New Trends in Feminine Spirituality

New Trends in Feminine Spirituality PDF Author: Juliette Dor
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Was there a women's movement in the thirteenth century and is such a question meaningful in its medieval context? Far from being resolved, the issue of whether women had a thirteenth-century renaissance has still decisively to unsettle the periodization of Western European history in twelfth and sixteenth-century humanist renaissances. Herbert Grundmann long ago demonstrated the participation of women in the eremitically-inspired reforming movements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in the production of vernacular literature. Yet it is upon his work that this volume builds, for the diocese of Liege is the key area in this development. It was from Liege that Jacques de Vitry approached the papacy to secure permission for the women of this bishopric of Liege, France and Germany to live together and to promote holiness in each other by mutual example. The seventeen contributors to this volume examine not only the beguine religious life in the southern Low Countries, but also the impact of this movement on later medieval Sweden, England and France, the new modes of influence exerted by women in their religious lives, and the revivals of feminine spirituality in the late medieval West through to contemporary North America. Research does not yet allow for a whole new synthesis, but this volume directs scholars to detailed work on specific localities and persons, with an awareness of the problems and possibilities of wider European comparisons.

New Trends in Feminine Spirituality

New Trends in Feminine Spirituality PDF Author: Juliette Dor
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book Here

Book Description
Was there a women's movement in the thirteenth century and is such a question meaningful in its medieval context? Far from being resolved, the issue of whether women had a thirteenth-century renaissance has still decisively to unsettle the periodization of Western European history in twelfth and sixteenth-century humanist renaissances. Herbert Grundmann long ago demonstrated the participation of women in the eremitically-inspired reforming movements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in the production of vernacular literature. Yet it is upon his work that this volume builds, for the diocese of Liege is the key area in this development. It was from Liege that Jacques de Vitry approached the papacy to secure permission for the women of this bishopric of Liege, France and Germany to live together and to promote holiness in each other by mutual example. The seventeen contributors to this volume examine not only the beguine religious life in the southern Low Countries, but also the impact of this movement on later medieval Sweden, England and France, the new modes of influence exerted by women in their religious lives, and the revivals of feminine spirituality in the late medieval West through to contemporary North America. Research does not yet allow for a whole new synthesis, but this volume directs scholars to detailed work on specific localities and persons, with an awareness of the problems and possibilities of wider European comparisons.

Women, Men, and Spiritual Power

Women, Men, and Spiritual Power PDF Author: John W. Coakley
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231508611
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
In Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, John Coakley explores male-authored narratives of the lives of Catherine of Siena, Hildegard of Bingen, Angela of Foligno, and six other female prophets or mystics of the late Middle Ages. His readings reveal the complex personal and literary relationships between these women and the clerics who wrote about them. Coakley's work also undermines simplistic characterizations of male control over women, offering an important contribution to medieval religious history. Coakley shows that these male-female relationships were marked by a fundamental tension between power and fascination: the priests and monks were supposed to hold authority over the women entrusted to their care, but they often switched roles, as the men became captivated with the women's spiritual gifts. In narratives of such women, the male authors reflect directly on the relationship between the women's powers and their own. Coakley argues that they viewed these relationships as gendered partnerships that brought together female mystical power and male ecclesiastical authority without placing one above the other. Women, Men, and Spiritual Power chronicles a wide-ranging experiment in the balance of formal and informal powers, in which it was assumed to be thoroughly imaginable for both sorts of authority, in their distinctly gendered terms, to coexist and build on each other. The men's writings reflect an extended moment in western Christianity when clerics had enough confidence in their authority to actually question its limits. After about 1400, however, clerics underwent a crisis of confidence, and such a questioning of institutional power was no longer considered safe. Instead of seeing women as partners, their revelatory powers began to be viewed as evidence of witchcraft.

Ancrene Wisse

Ancrene Wisse PDF Author: Cate Gunn
Publisher: University of Wales
ISBN: 0708320341
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
An introduction to 'Ancrene Wisse', one of the most important works in English of the 13th century. It offers a new contextualisation which engages with the history of lay piety and vernacular spirituality in the Middle Ages.

Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints

Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints PDF Author: Theresa Coletti
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201647
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
A sinner-saint who embraced then renounced sexual and worldly pleasures; a woman who, through her attachment to Jesus, embodied both erotic and sacred power; a symbol of penance and an exemplar of contemplative and passionate devotion: perhaps no figure stood closer to the center of late medieval debates about the sources of spiritual authority and women's contribution to salvation history than did Mary Magdalene, and perhaps nowhere in later medieval England was cultural preoccupation with the Magdalene stronger than in fifteenth-century East Anglia. Looking to East Anglian texts including the N-Town Plays, The Book of Margery Kempe, The Revelations of Julian of Norwich, and Bokenham's Legend of Holy Women, Theresa Coletti explores how the gendered symbol of Mary Magdalene mediates tensions between masculine and feminine spiritual power, institutional and individual modes of religious expression, and authorized and unauthorized forms of revelation and sacred speech. Using the Digby play Mary Magdalene as her touchstone, Coletti engages a wide variety of textual and visual resources to make evident the discursive and material ties of East Anglian dramatic texts and feminine religion to broader traditions of cultural commentary and representation. In bringing the disciplinary perspectives of literary history and criticism, gender studies, and social and religious history to bear on specific local instances of dramatic practice, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints highlights the relevance of Middle English dramatic discourse to the dynamic religious climate of late medieval England. In doing so, the book decisively challenges the marginalization of drama within medieval English studies, elucidates vernacular theater's kinship with influential late medieval religious texts and institutions, and articulates the changing possibilities for sacred representation in the decades before the Reformation.

Gendering the Master Narrative

Gendering the Master Narrative PDF Author: Mary C. Erler
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501723952
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Gendering the Master Narrative asks whether a female tradition of power might have existed distinct from the male one, and how such a tradition might have been transmitted. It describes women's progress toward power as a push-pull movement, showing how practices and institutions that ostensibly enabled women in the Middle Ages could sometimes erode their authority as well.This book provides a much-needed theoretical and historical reassessment of medieval women's power. It updates the conclusions from the editors' essential volume on that topic, Women and Power in the Middle Ages, which was published in 1988 and altered the prevailing view of female subservience by correcting the nearly ubiquitous equation of "power" with "public authority." Most scholars now accept a broader definition of power based on the interactions between men and women.In their Introduction, Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski survey the directions in which the study of medieval women's agency has developed in the past fifteen years. Like its predecessor, this volume is richly interdisciplinary. It contains essays by highly regarded scholars of history, literature, and art history, and features seventeen black-and-white illustrations and two maps.

Gendering the Master Narrative

Gendering the Master Narrative PDF Author: Mary Carpenter Erler
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801488306
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
A new economy of power relations: female agency in the middle ages / Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski -- Women and power through the family revisited / Jo Ann McNamara -- Women and confession: from empowerment to pathology / Dyan Elliott -- "With the heat of the hungry heart": empowerment and Ancrene wisse / Nicholas Watson -- Powers of record, powers of example: hagiography and women's history / Jocelyn Wogan-Browne -- Who is the master of this narrative? Maternal patronage of the cult of St. Margaret / Wendy R. Larson -- "The wise mother": the image of St. Anne teaching the Virgin Mary / Pamela Sheingorn -- Did goddesses empower women? the case of dame nature / Barbara Newman -- Women in the late medieval English parish / Katherine L. French -- Public exposure? consorts and ritual in late medieval Europe: the example of the entrance of the dogaresse of Venice / Holly S. Hurlburt -- Women's influence on the design of urban homes / Sarah Rees Jones -- Looking closely: authority and intimacy in the late medieval urban home / Felicity Riddy.

The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, Volume 3

The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, Volume 3 PDF Author: Saint Bridget (of Sweden)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195166272
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
St. Birgitta of Sweden was one of the most charismatic and influential female visionaries of the later Middle Ages. Her revelations influenced the spiritual lives of many individuals including Martin Luther. Interest in Birgitta has grown recently and she is now admired as a powerful voice and prophet of reform.

Women in Christianity in the Medieval Age

Women in Christianity in the Medieval Age PDF Author: Laura Kalas
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040193951
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This volume offers a comprehensive introduction to and investigation of the multivocality of women’s experience in the Middle Ages. In medieval Europe women saw their role in the Christian Church and society progressively confined to conflicting models of femininity epitomised by the dichotomy of Eve/Mary. Classical views of gender, predicated on misogynistic dichotomies which confined women to matter and the corruption of the flesh, were consolidated in powerful male-dominated clerical institutions and widely disseminated. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, however, women’s corporeality and somatic spirituality contributed to and influenced burgeoning modes of piety centred around the cult of the Virgin Mary and the veneration of the suffering body of Christ on the Cross. This shift in devotional practices afforded women as bodily beings the space for an increased level of self-expression, self-realisation, and authority. Ranging from philosophical and theological enquiry to education and art, as well as medical sciences and popular beliefs, the essays in this collection account for the complexities and richness of the conceptualisations and lived experiences of medieval Christian women. The book will be especially relevant to students and scholars of religion and history with an interest in medieval studies and gender. Whilst expounding the key strands of thinking in the field, it engages with and contributes to some of the latest scholarly research.

Agnes Blannbekin, Viennese Beguine

Agnes Blannbekin, Viennese Beguine PDF Author: Agnes Blannbekin
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 9780859916349
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Female mysticism, usually nourished in contemplative surroundings, in Blannbekin's case drew its inspiration from urban life; Weidhaus identifies her visions as 'street mysticism'. This early example of a spiritual diary incorporating the visions of a female mystic offers a glimpse of religious women's daily life and spiritual practices. Agnes Blannbekin was from an Austrian farming family, but as a Beguinelived an urban life: Ulrike Weithaus refers to her experiences as 'street mysticism'. Blannbekin's spiritual life revolved around the liturgical cycles of the church year, but also embraced the opportunities and vagaries of city life. Her visions comment on memorable events such as a popular bishop's visit to town during which people were trampled to death; the consequences of a rape committed by a priest; thefts of the Eucharist and the work of witches. Christ, for Blannbekin, is not only bridegroom, but also shopkeeper, apothecary, and axe-wielding soldier, and it was her vision of swallowing Christ's foreskin which led to the eventual censorship of her works. Life and Revelations has only recently been rediscovered by Austrian scholar Peter Dinzelbacher, and this translation is based on his critical edition.

Illuminating Jesus in the Middle Ages

Illuminating Jesus in the Middle Ages PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004409424
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
In Illuminating Jesus in the Middle Ages, editor Jane Beal and other scholars analyse the reception history of images and ideas about Jesus in medieval cultures (6th–15th c.). They consider representations of Jesus in the liturgy of the medieval church, Psalters and psalm commentaries, bestiaries, the Glossa ordinaria, and Middle English vitae Christi as well as among the English, the Irish, and Europeans, adherents to the cult of the Holy Name, participants in the Feast of Corpus Christi, and medieval contemplatives, including Bede, Theophylact of Ochrid, Saint Francis, Gertrude the Great, Dante, Julian of Norwich, and medieval English and European visionaries, among others. Contributors are Jane Beal, George Hardin Brown, Aaron Canty, Tomás Ó Cathasaigh, Thomas Cattoi, Andrew Galloway, Julia Bolton Holloway, Michael Kuczynski, Rob Lutton, Vittorio Montemaggi, Paul Patterson, Linda Stone, Lesley Sullivan Marcantonio, Larry Swain, Donna Trembinski, Nancy van Deusen, and Barbara Zimbalist.