Friars, Scribes, and Corpses

Friars, Scribes, and Corpses PDF Author: Kimberly J. Vrudny
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
The Speculum humanae salvationis (Mirror of Human Salvation), a medieval book recounting in forty-five chapters the story of human redemption within the larger context of the Virgin Mary's life, was something of a best seller in the Middle Ages, surviving in over 400 copies. Because the author wrote anonymously, however, little about the book's initial context is known despite a century's-long effort to uncover the author's identity. Friars, Scribes, and Corpses investigates a Marian confraternal setting for the Speculum's emergence, and newly proposes consideration of Nicola da Milano as the poem's author. Its central chapters show how the scribes who copied the Speculum preserved the author's rhetorical considerations that served so well the purposes of Marian confraternal preaching, including elements that suit memory training techniques used in the Middle Ages, such as building an architectural structure in one's mind, tagging memories with emotion, and internalizing the transformative nature of spiritual lessons. The final chapter asserts that the poem's lessons would have been particularly desired in the context of plague, when the number of corpses threatened to destroy people's faith in a merciful God. Friars, Scribes, and Corpses challenges assumptions about the Speculum, as well as the dominantly held view that there was an overwhelming emphasis on death in the late medieval period. Rather, this book demonstrates that there was a competing emphasis on life as glimpsed in the glass of the Speculum.

Friars, Scribes, and Corpses

Friars, Scribes, and Corpses PDF Author: Kimberly J. Vrudny
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Speculum humanae salvationis (Mirror of Human Salvation), a medieval book recounting in forty-five chapters the story of human redemption within the larger context of the Virgin Mary's life, was something of a best seller in the Middle Ages, surviving in over 400 copies. Because the author wrote anonymously, however, little about the book's initial context is known despite a century's-long effort to uncover the author's identity. Friars, Scribes, and Corpses investigates a Marian confraternal setting for the Speculum's emergence, and newly proposes consideration of Nicola da Milano as the poem's author. Its central chapters show how the scribes who copied the Speculum preserved the author's rhetorical considerations that served so well the purposes of Marian confraternal preaching, including elements that suit memory training techniques used in the Middle Ages, such as building an architectural structure in one's mind, tagging memories with emotion, and internalizing the transformative nature of spiritual lessons. The final chapter asserts that the poem's lessons would have been particularly desired in the context of plague, when the number of corpses threatened to destroy people's faith in a merciful God. Friars, Scribes, and Corpses challenges assumptions about the Speculum, as well as the dominantly held view that there was an overwhelming emphasis on death in the late medieval period. Rather, this book demonstrates that there was a competing emphasis on life as glimpsed in the glass of the Speculum.

The Fellowship of the Beatific Vision

The Fellowship of the Beatific Vision PDF Author: Norm Klassen
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1498283683
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer asks a basic human question: How do we overcome tyranny? His answer goes to the heart of a revolutionary way of thinking about the very end of human existence and the nature of created being. His answer, declared performatively over the course of a symbolic pilgrimage, urges the view that humanity has an intrinsic need of grace in order to be itself. In portraying this outlook, Chaucer contributes to what has been called the "palaeo-Christian" understanding of creaturely freedom. Paradoxically, genuine freedom grows out of the dependency of all things upon God. In imaginatively inhabiting this view of reality, Chaucer aligns himself with that other great poet-theologian of the Middle Ages, Dante. Both are true Christian humanists. They recognize in art a fragile opportunity: not to reduce reality to a set of dogmatic propositions but to participate in an ever-deepening mystery. Chaucer effectively calls all would-be members of the pilgrim fellowship that is the church to behave as artists, interpretively responding to God in the finitude of their existence together.

Representations of Eve in Antiquity and the English Middle Ages

Representations of Eve in Antiquity and the English Middle Ages PDF Author: John Flood
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136837779
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
As the first woman, Eve was the pattern for all her daughters. The importance of readings of Eve for understanding how women were viewed at various times is a critical commonplace, but one which has been only narrowly investigated. This book systematically explores the different ways in which Eve was understood by Christians in antiquity and in the English Middle Ages, and it relates these understandings to female social roles. The result is an Eve more various than she is often depicted by scholars. Beginning with material from the bible, the Church Fathers and Jewish sources, the book goes on to look at a broad selection of medieval writing, including theological works and literary texts in Old and Middle English. In addition to dealing with famous authors such as Augustine, Aquinas, Dante and Chaucer, the writings of authors who are now less well-known, but who were influential in their time, are explored. The book allows readers to trace the continuities and discontinuities in the way Eve was portrayed over a millennium and a half, and as such it is of interest to those interested in women or the bible in the Middle Ages.

The Art of Mystical Narrative

The Art of Mystical Narrative PDF Author: Eitan P. Fishbane
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019994864X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 535

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Book Description
In the study of Judaism, the Zohar has captivated the minds of interpreters for over seven centuries, and continues to entrance readers in contemporary times. Yet despite these centuries of study, very little attention has been devoted to the literary dimensions of the text, or to formal appreciation of its status as one of the great works of religious literature. The Art of Mystical Narrative offers a critical approach to the zoharic story, seeking to explore the interplay between fictional discourse and mystical exegesis. Eitan Fishbane argues that the narrative must be understood first and foremost as a work of the fictional imagination, a representation of a world and reality invented by the thirteenth-century authors of the text. He claims that the text functions as a kind of dramatic literature, one in which the power of revealing mystical secrets is demonstrated and performed for the reading audience. The Art of Mystical Narrative offers a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on the Zohar and on the intersections of literary and religious studies.

The Christian Theological Tradition

The Christian Theological Tradition PDF Author: Mark McInroy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134979746
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 948

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Book Description
The fourth edition of The Christian Theological Tradition provides students with essential theological knowledge of key persons and events of the Bible and the Christian faith, and of Christianity's multifaceted encounter with Western culture. Historically arranged, the textbook addresses major theological themes such as revelation, God, Jesus Christ, Creation, salvation, and the church. The textbook deals with the entire Christian tradition from an orientation that is both Catholic and ecumenical, with the fourth edition including expanded coverage of modern Protestant Christianity. The Christian Theological Tradition has been thoroughly revised and updated with nine new or rewritten chapters, including: A new section on the reception of the Second Vatican Council, including the pontificate of Pope Francis. A new treatment of contemporary developments in liberation and environmental theology. A new examination of the relationship between science and Christianity. An entirely rewritten treatment of Islam that focuses on the ways in which the Christian tradition has historically understood and responded to Islam. A new discussion of the "New Atheism," with theological responses to this influential movement. New textboxes on aspects of religious life, such as liturgy, prayer, art, moral teaching, and social institutions, appropriate to given chapters. With the assistance of images and maps, key words, and recommended reading, this textbook outlines the methods for Christian theology and demonstrates the relevance of the Christian theological tradition for our contemporary world. This is an ideal resource for students of theology, biblical studies, or religious studies, and anyone wanting an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the Christian theological tradition.

Visual Theology

Visual Theology PDF Author: Robin Margaret Jensen
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 9780814653999
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
At least since the time of Paul (see Acts 18), Christians have wrestled with the power and danger of religious imagery in the visual arts. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that there emerged in Western Christianity an integrated, academic study of theology and the arts. Here, one of the pioneers of that movement, H. Wilson Yates, along with fourteen theologians, examine how visual culture reflects or addresses pressing contemporary religious questions. The aim throughout is to engage the reader in theological reflection, mediated and enhanced by the arts. This beautifully illustrated book includes more than fifty images in full color.

She who Imagines

She who Imagines PDF Author: Laurie M. Cassidy
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0814680275
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The idea and ideal of "beauty" has been used to oppress women of different ages, body types, skin color, and physical ability. The theoretical discussion of aesthetics has also been conditioned by these same dynamics of power and oppression. In She Who Imagines, a diverse set of scholars challenges the exclusion and false definitions while constructing capacious ideas that discover beauty in unexpected places. In these essays, the authors draw on a variety of arts media-painting, photography, portraiture, craftwork, poetry, and hip-hop music-thereby joining beauty to truth and, in a richly defining way, to the practice of justice. In a variety of ways all the essays link women's definitions of beauty with experiences of suffering and hence with the yearning for justice. All clearly prize resistance to degradation as an essential element of thought.

Reading by Design

Reading by Design PDF Author: Pauline Reid
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487511639
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Renaissance readers perceived the print book as both a thing and a medium - a thing that could be broken or reassembled, and a visual medium that had the power to reflect, transform, or deceive. At the same historical moment that print books remediated the visual and material structures of manuscript and oral rhetoric, the relationship between vision and perception was fundamentally called into question. Investigating this crisis of perception, Pauline Reid argues that the visual crisis that suffuses early modern English thought also imbricates sixteenth- and seventeenth-century print materials. These vision troubles in turn influenced how early modern books and readers interacted. Platonic, Aristotelian, and empirical models of sight vied with one another in a culture where vision had a tenuous relationship to external reality. Through situating early modern books’ design elements, such as woodcuts, engravings, page borders, and layouts, as important rhetorical components of the text, Reading by Design articulates how the early modern book responded to epistemological crises of perception and competing theories of sight.

Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in the Middle Ages

Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Elisheva Baumgarten
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812297520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in the Middle Ages, Elisheva Baumgarten examines how medieval Jewish engagement with the Bible--especially in the tellings, retellings, and illustrations of stories of women--offers a window onto aspects of the daily lives and cultural mentalités of Ashkenazic Jews in the High Middle Ages.

Beauty's Vineyard

Beauty's Vineyard PDF Author: Kimberly J. Vrudny
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN: 0814684076
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Beauty's Vineyard: A Theological Aesthetic of Anguish and Anticipation, part spiritual memoir, part systematic theology, opens with an interpretation of the parable of the tenants and concludes with the parable of the workers in the vineyard. In between unfolds a systematic theology of anguish and anticipation in which the author wrestles with the social evils that plague our society and expresses hopeful anticipation for the coming of the "kingdom of God" about which Jesus spoke--a just and peaceful reality in the here and now that will find its ultimate consummation, Christians hope, in the hereafter. A theological understanding of Beauty as the incarnation of the Compassion of God guides the way, bringing the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas into conversation with the liberative theologies of the Global South, through treatments of Trinity, imago Dei, sin, Christology, salvation, theodicy, and hope.