Medieval Religion and its Anxieties

Medieval Religion and its Anxieties PDF Author: Thomas A. Fudgé
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137566108
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
This book examines the broad varieties of religious belief, religious practices, and the influence of religion within medieval society. Religion in the Middle Ages was not monolithic. Medieval religion and the Latin Church are not synonymous. While theology and liturgy are important, an examination of animal trials, gargoyles, last judgments, various aspects of the medieval underworld, and the quest for salvation illuminate lesser known dimensions of religion in the Middle Ages. Several themes run throughout the book including visual culture, heresy and heretics, law and legal procedure, along with sexuality and an awareness of mentalities and anxieties. Although an expanse of 800 years has passed, the remains of those other Middle Ages can be seen today, forcing us to reassess our evaluations of this alluring and often overlooked past.

Medieval Religion and its Anxieties

Medieval Religion and its Anxieties PDF Author: Thomas A. Fudgé
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137566108
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the broad varieties of religious belief, religious practices, and the influence of religion within medieval society. Religion in the Middle Ages was not monolithic. Medieval religion and the Latin Church are not synonymous. While theology and liturgy are important, an examination of animal trials, gargoyles, last judgments, various aspects of the medieval underworld, and the quest for salvation illuminate lesser known dimensions of religion in the Middle Ages. Several themes run throughout the book including visual culture, heresy and heretics, law and legal procedure, along with sexuality and an awareness of mentalities and anxieties. Although an expanse of 800 years has passed, the remains of those other Middle Ages can be seen today, forcing us to reassess our evaluations of this alluring and often overlooked past.

Christian Materiality

Christian Materiality PDF Author: Caroline Walker Bynum
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781935408116
Category : Church history
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Late Medieval Christianity's encounter with miraculous materials viewed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself. In the period between 1150 and 1550, an increasing number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where material objects--among them paintings, statues, relics, pieces of wood, earth, stones, and Eucharistic wafers--allegedly erupted into life through such activities as bleeding, weeping, and walking about. Challenging Christians both to seek ever more frequent encounters with miraculous matter and to turn to an inward piety that rejected material objects of devotion, such phenomena were by the fifteenth century at the heart of religious practice and polemic. In Christian Materiality, Caroline Walker Bynum describes the miracles themselves, discusses the problems they presented for both church authorities and the ordinary faithful, and probes the basic scientific and religious assumptions about matter that lay behind them. She also analyzes the proliferation of religious art in the later Middle Ages and argues that it called attention to its materiality in sophisticated ways that explain both the animation of images and the hostility to them on the part of iconoclasts. Seeing the Christian culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a paradoxical affirmation of the glory and the threat of the natural world, Bynum's study suggests a new understanding of the background to the sixteenth-century reformations, both Protestant and Catholic. Moving beyond the cultural study of "the body"--a field she helped to establish--Bynum argues that Western attitudes toward body and person must be placed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself. Her study has broad theoretical implications, suggesting a new approach to the study of material culture and religious practice.

The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336

The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 PDF Author: Caroline Walker Bynum
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231546084
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 712

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Book Description
A classic of medieval studies, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 traces ideas of death and resurrection in early and medieval Christianity. Caroline Walker Bynum explores problems of the body and identity in devotional and theological literature, suggesting that medieval attitudes toward the body still shape modern notions of the individual. This expanded edition includes her 1995 article “Why All the Fuss About the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective,” which takes a broader perspective on the book’s themes. It also includes a new introduction that explores the context in which the book and article were written, as well as why the Middle Ages matter for how we think about the body and life after death today.

The War on Heresy

The War on Heresy PDF Author: R. I. Moore
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674065379
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
Some of the most portentous events in medieval history—the Cathar crusade, the persecution and mass burnings of heretics, the papal inquisition—fall between 1000 and 1250, when the Catholic Church confronted the threat of heresy with force. Moore’s narrative focuses on the motives and anxieties of elites who waged war on heresy for political gain.

Contesting Inter-Religious Conversion in the Medieval World

Contesting Inter-Religious Conversion in the Medieval World PDF Author: Yosi Yisraeli
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317160274
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
The Mediterranean and its hinterlands were the scene of intensive and transformative contact between cultures in the Middle Ages. From the seventh to the seventeenth century, the three civilizations into which the region came to be divided geographically – the Islamic Khalifate, the Byzantine Empire, and the Latin West – were busily redefining themselves vis-à-vis one another. Interspersed throughout the region were communities of minorities, such as Christians in Muslim lands, Muslims in Christian lands, heterodoxical sects, pagans, and, of course, Jews. One of the most potent vectors of interaction and influence between these communities in the medieval world was inter-religious conversion: the process whereby groups or individuals formally embraced a new religion. The chapters of this book explore this dynamic: what did it mean to convert to Christianity in seventh-century Ireland? What did it mean to embrace Islam in tenth-century Egypt? Are the two phenomena comparable on a social, cultural, and legal level? The chapters of the book also ask what we are able to learn from our sources, which, at times, provide a very culturally-charged and specific conversion rhetoric. Taken as a whole, the compositions in this volume set out to argue that inter-religious conversion was a process that was recognizable and comparable throughout its geographical and chronological purview.

Blessing the World

Blessing the World PDF Author: Derek A. Rivard
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813215455
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
In Blessing the World, Derek A. Rivard studies liturgical blessing and its role in the religious life of Christians during the central and later Middle Ages, with a particular focus on the blessings of the Franco-Roman liturgical tradition from the tenth to late thirteenth centuries.

Rethinking Medieval and Renaissance Political Thought

Rethinking Medieval and Renaissance Political Thought PDF Author: Chris Jones
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000898326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
This collection of essays, written by leading experts, showcases historiographical problems, fresh interpretations, and new debates in medieval and Renaissance history and political thought. Recent scholarship on medieval and Renaissance political thought is witness to tectonic movements. These involve quiet, yet considerable, re-evaluations of key thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Machiavelli, as well as the string of lesser known "political thinkers" who wrote in western Europe between Late Antiquity and the Reformation. Taking stock of thirty years of developments, this volume demonstrates the contemporary vibrancy of the history of medieval and Renaissance political thought. By both celebrating and challenging the perspectives of a generation of scholars, notably Cary J. Nederman, it offers refreshing new assessments. The book re-introduces the history of western political thought in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the wider disciplines of History and Political Science. Recent historiographical debates have revolutionized discussion of whether or not there was an "Aristotelian revolution" in the thirteenth century. Thinkers such as Machiavelli and Marsilius of Padua are read in new ways; less well-known texts, such as the Irish On the Twelve Abuses of the Age, offer new perspectives. Further, the collection argues that medieval political ideas contain important lessons for the study of concepts of contemporary interest such as toleration. The volume is an ideal resource for both students and scholars interested in medieval and Renaissance history as well as the history of political thought.

Incarceration and Slavery in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age

Incarceration and Slavery in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793648298
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 529

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Book Description
People in the Middle Ages and the early modern age more often suffered from imprisonment and enslavement than we might have assumed. Incarceration and Slavery in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age approaches these topics from a wide variety of perspectives and demonstrates collectively the great relevance of the issues involved. Both incarceration and slavery were (and continue to be) most painful experiences, and no one was guaranteed exemption from it. High-ranking nobles and royalties were often the victims of imprisonment and, at times, had to wait many years until their ransom was paid. Similarly, slavery existed throughout Christian Europe and in the Arab world. However, while imprisonment occasionally proved to be the catalyst for major writings and creativity, slaves in the Ottoman empire and in Egypt succeeded in rising to the highest position in society (Janissaries, Mamluks, and others).

Julian Barnes from the Margins

Julian Barnes from the Margins PDF Author: Vanessa Guignery
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350125024
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Exploring the archives of the Man Booker prize-winning novelist Julian Barnes – including notebooks, drafts, typescripts and publishing correspondence – this book is an extraordinary in-depth study of the creative practice of a major contemporary novelist. In Julian Barnes from the Margins, Vanessa Guignery charts the genesis and publication history of all of Barnes's major novels, from his debut with Metroland, through Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10 1⁄2 Chapters to The Sense of an Ending.

Matthew Spinka, Howard Kaminsky, and the Future of the Medieval Hussites

Matthew Spinka, Howard Kaminsky, and the Future of the Medieval Hussites PDF Author: Thomas A. Fudge
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793650810
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The Hussite movement is essential for understanding medieval Europe and the development of Western civilization. Matthew Spinka and Howard Kaminsky stand at the forefront of scholarship introducing this subject to the Anglophone world. Thomas A. Fudge argues their role in the religious historiography of late medieval Europe is a precursor to global medievalism. Combining commitment to the Christian faith with firm opposition to the Soviet-mandated Marxist-Communist ideology that dominated twentieth-century Czechoslovakia, Spinka strove to present Jan Hus as a medieval figure driven by religious devotion. Motivated by Jewish atheism and a modified form of Marxist analysis, Kaminsky rescued the medieval Hussites from oblivion and political agendas. Fudge explores biography, history, and historiography as an essential intellectual segue between medieval Hussites and modern scholarship. Matthew Spinka, Howard Kaminsky, and the Medieval Hussites considers biography, evaluates the work of both historians, elaborates their methods, assesses their interpretations, and analyzes their historiographical significance for the study of Hussite history.