Demons in the Middle Ages

Demons in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Juanita Feros Ruys
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781641899048
Category : Church history
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
"Demons-evil angels or fallen angels-form an inescapable part of the religious and cultural landscape of the European Middle Ages. This book explores their significance across fifteen hundred years of European history, from the North African desert homes of the eremites in the Late Antique period, to the miracle tales of the medieval monasteries of Western Europe, the academic disputes of the Scholastics, and conjuring of necromancers in the later Middle Ages. It argues that for all these groups, demons constituted a necessary part of the cosmic structure, whether by defining a monastic calling, fulfilling a role in God's properly ordered universe, or holding out the promise of untold wealth and knowledge. By the end of the Middle Ages, however, concern about the impact of demons and their connection with heresy would lead to the witch hunts that would sweep Europe and the New World in the early modern era."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Demons in the Middle Ages

Demons in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Juanita Feros Ruys
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781641899048
Category : Church history
Languages : en
Pages : 122

Get Book

Book Description
"Demons-evil angels or fallen angels-form an inescapable part of the religious and cultural landscape of the European Middle Ages. This book explores their significance across fifteen hundred years of European history, from the North African desert homes of the eremites in the Late Antique period, to the miracle tales of the medieval monasteries of Western Europe, the academic disputes of the Scholastics, and conjuring of necromancers in the later Middle Ages. It argues that for all these groups, demons constituted a necessary part of the cosmic structure, whether by defining a monastic calling, fulfilling a role in God's properly ordered universe, or holding out the promise of untold wealth and knowledge. By the end of the Middle Ages, however, concern about the impact of demons and their connection with heresy would lead to the witch hunts that would sweep Europe and the New World in the early modern era."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Demons in the Middle Ages

Demons in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Juanita Feros Ruys
Publisher: Past Imperfect
ISBN: 9781942401261
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
For medieval people, demons constituted a real and everyday phenomenon. This book traces the beliefs associated with demons throughout the European Middle Ages.

Demons and Illness from Antiquity to the Early-Modern Period

Demons and Illness from Antiquity to the Early-Modern Period PDF Author: Siam Bhayro
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004338543
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
Demons and Illness from Antiquity to the Early-Modern Period explores the relationship between demons and illness from the ancient world to the early modern period. Its twenty chapters range from Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt to seventeenth-century England and Spain, and include studies of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Fallen Bodies

Fallen Bodies PDF Author: Dyan Elliott
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081220073X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Medieval clerics believed that original sin had rendered their "fallen bodies" vulnerable to corrupting impulses—particularly those of a sexual nature. They feared that their corporeal frailty left them susceptible to demonic forces bent on penetrating and polluting their bodies and souls. Drawing on a variety of canonical and other sources, Fallen Bodies examines a wide-ranging set of issues generated by fears of pollution, sexuality, and demonology. To maintain their purity, celibate clerics combated the stain of nocturnal emissions; married clerics expelled their wives onto the streets and out of the historical record; an exemplum depicting a married couple having sex in church was told and retold; and the specter of the demonic lover further stigmatized women's sexuality. Over time, the clergy's conceptions of womanhood became radically polarized: the Virgin Mary was accorded ever greater honor, while real, corporeal women were progressively denigrated. When church doctrine definitively denied the physicality of demons, the female body remained as the prime material presence of sin. Dyan Elliott contends that the Western clergy's efforts to contain sexual instincts—and often the very thought and image of woman—precipitated uncanny returns of the repressed. She shows how this dynamic ultimately resulted in the progressive conflation of the female and the demonic, setting the stage for the future persecution of witches.

Discerning Spirits

Discerning Spirits PDF Author: Nancy Mandeville Caciola
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501702173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
Trance states, prophesying, convulsions, fasting, and other physical manifestations were often regarded as signs that a person was seized by spirits. In a book that sets out the prehistory of the early modern European witch craze, Nancy Caciola shows how medieval people decided whom to venerate as a saint infused with the spirit of God and whom to avoid as a demoniac possessed of an unclean spirit. This process of discrimination, known as the discernment of spirits, was central to the religious culture of Western Europe between 1200 and 1500.Since the outward manifestations of benign and malign possession were indistinguishable, a highly ambiguous set of bodily features and behaviors were carefully scrutinized by observers. Attempts to make decisions about individuals who exhibited supernatural powers were complicated by the fact that the most intense exemplars of lay spirituality were women, and the "fragile sex" was deemed especially vulnerable to the snares of the devil. Assessments of women's spirit possessions often oscillated between divine and demonic interpretations. Ultimately, although a few late medieval women visionaries achieved the prestige of canonization, many more were accused of possession by demons.Caciola analyzes a broad array of sources from saints' lives to medical treatises, exorcists' manuals to miracle accounts, to find that observers came to rely on the discernment of bodies rather than seeking to distinguish between divine and demonic possession in purely spiritual terms.

Colors Demonic and Divine

Colors Demonic and Divine PDF Author: Herman Pleij
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231130226
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Including a wealth of vivid detail and ranging over theology, poetry, painting, heraldry, fashion, and daily life, this book elucidates the attitudes toward color in medieval times and the effect these attitudes still have on modern society.

Ghosts in the Middle Ages

Ghosts in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Jean-Claude Schmitt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226738871
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
In this fascinating study, Schmitt examines the significance of the widespread belief in ghosts during the Middle Ages and traces the imaginative, political, and religious contexts of these everyday haunts. Ghosts were pitiful or terrifying, usually solitary, creatures who arose from their tombs to haunt their friends and relatives. Including numerous color illustrations of ghosts and their trappings, this book presents a unique and intriguing look at medieval culture. 28 color plates.

Battling Demons

Battling Demons PDF Author: Michael D. Bailey
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271046051
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
It was during the late Middle Ages that the full stereotype of demonic witchcraft developed in Europe, and this is the subject of this volume which places the Dominican theologian Johannes Nider at the centre of an emerging set of beliefs about diabolical sorcery and witchcraft in the 15th century.

Demons

Demons PDF Author: Ruth Petzoldt
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description


The Middle Ages in 50 Objects

The Middle Ages in 50 Objects PDF Author: Elina Gertsman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108340814
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
The extraordinary array of images included in this volume reveals the full and rich history of the Middle Ages. Exploring material objects from the European, Byzantine and Islamic worlds, the book casts a new light on the cultures that formed them, each culture illuminated by its treasures. The objects are divided among four topics: The Holy and the Faithful; The Sinful and the Spectral; Daily Life and Its Fictions, and Death and Its Aftermath. Each section is organized chronologically, and every object is accompanied by a penetrating essay that focuses on its visual and cultural significance within the wider context in which the object was made and used. Spot maps add yet another way to visualize and consider the significance of the objects and the history that they reveal. Lavishly illustrated, this is an appealing and original guide to the cultural history of the Middle Ages.