Forgetful of Their Sex

Forgetful of Their Sex PDF Author: Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226740544
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 624

Get Book Here

Book Description
Invaluable for what they tell us about early medieval society and the Church, the Lives of these early saints also afford rare insight into the private world of medieval men and women, the special bonds of family and friendship, and the collective mentalities of the period. This book constitutes a major contribution to the study of medieval history, gender, and religion.

Forgetful of Their Sex

Forgetful of Their Sex PDF Author: Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226740544
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 624

Get Book Here

Book Description
Invaluable for what they tell us about early medieval society and the Church, the Lives of these early saints also afford rare insight into the private world of medieval men and women, the special bonds of family and friendship, and the collective mentalities of the period. This book constitutes a major contribution to the study of medieval history, gender, and religion.

Women in the Mission of the Church

Women in the Mission of the Church PDF Author: Leanne M. Dzubinski
Publisher: Baker Academic
ISBN: 1493429183
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
Women have been central to the work of Christian ministry from the time of Jesus to the twenty-first century. Yet the story of Christianity is too often told as a story of men. This accessibly written book tells the story of women throughout church history, demonstrating their integral participation in the church's mission. It highlights the legacies of a wide variety of women, showing how they have overcome obstacles to their ministries and have transformed cultural constraints to spread the gospel and build the church.

The Mystic Mind

The Mystic Mind PDF Author: Jerome Kroll
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415340519
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on a database of over 1400 medieval holy persons and in-depth studies of individual saints, this fascinating collaboration between a medieval historian and a professor of psychiatry applies modern biological and psychological research to the lives of medieval mystics and ascetics.

Women of the Gilte Legende

Women of the Gilte Legende PDF Author: Jacobus
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 9780859917711
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is a prose translation of a selection of women saints' lives from the Gilte Legende, the Middle English version of Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea, one of the most influential books to come from the middle ages. Because of its popularity and subject matter, the Gilte Legende was widely read and used as a model for everyday life, including the education of women through examples set by early Christian martyrs. Many of the women saints spoke passionately about their convictions and defended their faith and their bodies to the death. For over 400 years, these amazing vernacular stories have been inaccessible to a wider audience. This book divides the lives of female saints into: the "ryght hooly virgins", who vocally defend their bodies against Roman persecution; "holy mothers", who give up their traditional role to pursue a life of contemplation; the 'repentant sinners', who convert and voice their defiance against a society that demanded silence in women; and the "holy transvestites", who cast off their gender identity to find absolution and salvation. Their lives reach through the ages to speak to a modern audience, academic and non-academic, forcing a re-examination of women's roles in the medieval period. LARISSA TRACY is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University and George Mason University. Series editor JANE CHANCE

Forgetful of Their Sex

Forgetful of Their Sex PDF Author: Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226740539
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 595

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this remarkable study of over 2,200 female and male saints, Jane Schulenburg explores women's status and experience in early medieval society and in the Church by examining factors such as family wealth and power, patronage, monasticism, virginity, and motherhood. The result is a unique depiction of the lives of these strong, creative, independent-minded women who achieved a visibility in their society that led to recognition of sanctity. "A tremendous piece of scholarship. . . . This journey through more than 2,000 saints is anything but dull. Along the way, Schulenburg informs our ideas regarding the role of saints in the medieval psyche, gender-specific identification, and the heroics of virginity." —Library Journal "[This book] will be a kind of 'roots' experience for some readers. They will hear the voices, haunted and haunting, of their distant ancestors and understand more about themselves." —Christian Science Monitor "This fascinating book reaches far beyond the history of Christianity to recreate the 'herstory' of a whole gender." —Kate Saunders, The Independent

Dismemberment in the Medieval and Early Modern English Imaginary

Dismemberment in the Medieval and Early Modern English Imaginary PDF Author: Frederika Elizabeth Bain
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501512951
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Get Book Here

Book Description
The medieval and early modern English imaginary encompasses a broad range of negative and positive dismemberments, from the castration anxieties of Turk plays to the elite practices of distributive burial. This study argues that representations and instances of bodily fragmentation illustrated and performed acts of exclusion and inclusion, detaching not only limbs from bodies but individuals from identity groups. Within this context it examines questions of legitimate and illegitimate violence, showing that such distinctions largely rested upon particular acts’ assumed symbolic meanings. Specific chapters address ways dismemberments manifested gender, human versus animal nature, religious and ethnic identity, and social rank. The book concludes by examining the afterlives of body parts, including relics and specimens exhibited for entertainment and education, contextualized by discussion of the resurrection body and its promise of bodily reintegration. Grounded in dramatic works, the study also incorporates a variety of genres from midwifery manuals to broadside ballads.

The Cruelest of All Mothers

The Cruelest of All Mothers PDF Author: Mary Dunn
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823267229
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1631, Marie Guyart stepped over the threshold of the Ursuline convent in Tours, leaving behind her eleven-year-old son, Claude, against the wishes of her family and her own misgivings. Marie concluded, “God was dearer to me than all that. Leaving him therefore in His hands, I bid adieu to him joyfully.” Claude organized a band of schoolboys to storm the convent, begging for his mother’s return. Eight years later, Marie made her way to Quebec, where over the course of the next thirty-three years she opened the first school for Native American girls, translated catechisms into indigenous languages, and served some eighteen years as superior of the first Ursuline convent in the New World. She would also maintain, over this same period, an extensive and intimate correspondence with the son she had abandoned to serve God. The Cruelest of All Mothers is, fundamentally, an explanation of Marie de l’Incarnation’s decision to abandon Claude for religious life. Complicating Marie’s own explication of the abandonment as a sacrifice carried out in imitation of Christ and in submission to God’s will, the book situates the event against the background of early modern French family life, the marginalization of motherhood in the Christian tradition, and seventeenth-century French Catholic spirituality. Deeply grounded in a set of rich primary sources, The Cruelest of All Mothers offers a rich and complex analysis of the abandonment.

Signs of Virginity

Signs of Virginity PDF Author: Michael Rosenberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190845910
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although the theme of bloodied nuptial sheets seems pervasive in western culture, its association with female virginity is uniquely tied to a brief passage in the book of Deuteronomy detailing the procedure for verifying a young woman's purity; it seldom, if ever, appears outside of Abrahamic traditions. In Signs of Virginity, Michael Rosenberg examines the history of virginity testing in Judaism and early Christianity, and the relationship of these tests to a culture that encourages male sexual violence. Deuteronomy's violent vision of virginity has held sway in Jewish and Christian circles more or less ever since. However, Rosenberg points to two authors-the rabbinic collective that produced the Babylonian Talmud and the early Christian thinker Augustine of Hippo-who, even as they perpetuate patriarchal assumptions about female virginity, nonetheless attempt to subvert the emphasis on sexual dominance bequeathed to them by Deuteronomy. Unlike the authors of earlier Rabbinic and Christian texts, who modified but fundamentally maintained and even extended the Deuteronomic ideal, the Babylonian Talmud and Augustine both construct alternative models of female virginity that, if taken seriously, would utterly reverse cultural ideals of masculinity. Indeed this vision of masculinity as fundamentally gentle, rather than characterized by brutal and violent sexual behavior, fits into a broader idealization of masculinity propagated by both authors, who reject what Augustine called a "lust for dominance" as a masculine ideal.

The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages

The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages PDF Author: Shane Bobrycki
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691255598
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
The importance of collective behavior in early medieval Europe By the fifth and sixth centuries, the bread and circuses and triumphal processions of the Roman Empire had given way to a quieter world. And yet, as Shane Bobrycki argues, the influence and importance of the crowd did not disappear in early medieval Europe. In The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages, Bobrycki shows that although demographic change may have dispersed the urban multitudes of Greco-Roman civilization, collective behavior retained its social importance even when crowds were scarce. Most historians have seen early medieval Europe as a world without crowds. In fact, Bobrycki argues, early medieval European sources are full of crowds—although perhaps not the sort historians have trained themselves to look for. Harvests, markets, festivals, religious rites, and political assemblies were among the gatherings used to regulate resources and demonstrate legitimacy. Indeed, the refusal to assemble and other forms of “slantwise” assembly became a weapon of the powerless. Bobrycki investigates what happened when demographic realities shifted, but culture, religion, and politics remained bound by the past. The history of crowds during the five hundred years between the age of circuses and the age of crusades, Bobrycki shows, tells an important story—one of systemic and scalar change in economic and social life and of reorganization in the world of ideas and norms.

Tale of Boiarynia Morozova

Tale of Boiarynia Morozova PDF Author: Margaret Ziolkowski
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739101773
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 150

Get Book Here

Book Description
Margaret Ziolkowski's book comprises a thorough introduction to, skillful translation of, and erudite commentary on the four-hundred-year-old Tale of Boiarynia Morozova. The story of Feodosia Morozova, a member of the Russian aristocratic elite and a major participant in the Russian Othodox Schism, describes one of the most violent ruptures in religious history-the complete destabilization of the bastions of church and society in seventeenth-century Russia. In her explication of this famous text, Ziolkowski examines the hagiography of the Tale, the spiritual asceticism of Morozova in the context of Christian womens' struggles for independence, and the role this prominent female dissident has played as a symbol of resistance to corrupt authority. This work makes a significant contribution to the history of the Orthodox Church, pre-Petrine Russia, women in religion, and the study of medieval Russian literature.