"Poor Sinning Folk"

Author: David Myers
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501744704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
In "Poor, Sinning Folk," W. David Myers investigates the sixteenth-century fate of the medieval Christian sacrament of penance, the process of confessing to a priest in secret one's sins against God and other humans. In Pre-Reformation Germany, numerous layers of public ritual, expectation, and display surrounded the central secret act of confessing and conditioned its meaning. Less frequent and less private than the ritual familiar to modern Catholics, medieval penance was for most German-speaking Christians a seasonal event with social as well as spiritual ramifications for participants. Protestantism swept confession away from many German lands. Even where Catholicism survived and flourished, as in the lands comprising modern Bavaria, the sacrament of penance changed profoundly. The modern confessional booth was introduced, making the sacrament more prominent, more secure from scandal, and ultimately more private. This reform coincided with the efforts of secular rulers to fashion a more disciplined, obedient population. New religious orders, most notably the Society of Jesus in Bavaria, saw the frequent confession of lay people as a means to piety and spiritual discipline amidst the temptations of worldly affairs. By the middle of the seventeenth century, political and religious forces combined to forge the sacrament of penance into an effective instrument of spiritual discipline which would fashion the modern Catholic conscience and endure essentially unchanged into the late twentieth century.

"Poor Sinning Folk"

Author: David Myers
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501744704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

Book Description
In "Poor, Sinning Folk," W. David Myers investigates the sixteenth-century fate of the medieval Christian sacrament of penance, the process of confessing to a priest in secret one's sins against God and other humans. In Pre-Reformation Germany, numerous layers of public ritual, expectation, and display surrounded the central secret act of confessing and conditioned its meaning. Less frequent and less private than the ritual familiar to modern Catholics, medieval penance was for most German-speaking Christians a seasonal event with social as well as spiritual ramifications for participants. Protestantism swept confession away from many German lands. Even where Catholicism survived and flourished, as in the lands comprising modern Bavaria, the sacrament of penance changed profoundly. The modern confessional booth was introduced, making the sacrament more prominent, more secure from scandal, and ultimately more private. This reform coincided with the efforts of secular rulers to fashion a more disciplined, obedient population. New religious orders, most notably the Society of Jesus in Bavaria, saw the frequent confession of lay people as a means to piety and spiritual discipline amidst the temptations of worldly affairs. By the middle of the seventeenth century, political and religious forces combined to forge the sacrament of penance into an effective instrument of spiritual discipline which would fashion the modern Catholic conscience and endure essentially unchanged into the late twentieth century.

The Souls of Poor Folk

The Souls of Poor Folk PDF Author: Alexander Irvine
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description


Sin Eater

Sin Eater PDF Author: Megan Campisi
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982124121
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
“For fans of The Handmaid’s Tale...a debut novel with a dark setting and an unforgettable heroine...is a riveting depiction of hard-won female empowerment” (The Washington Post). The Sin Eater walks among us, unseen, unheard Sins of our flesh become sins of Hers Following Her to the grave, unseen, unheard The Sin Eater Walks Among Us. For the crime of stealing bread, fourteen-year-old May receives a life sentence: she must become a Sin Eater—a shunned woman, brutally marked, whose fate is to hear the final confessions of the dying, eat ritual foods symbolizing their sins as a funeral rite, and thereby shoulder their transgressions to grant their souls access to heaven. Orphaned and friendless, apprenticed to an older Sin Eater who cannot speak to her, May must make her way in a dangerous and cruel world she barely understands. When a deer heart appears on the coffin of a royal governess who did not confess to the dreadful sin it represents, the older Sin Eater refuses to eat it. She is taken to prison, tortured, and killed. To avenge her death, May must find out who placed the deer heart on the coffin and why. “Very much reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale…it transcends its historical roots to give us a modern heroine” (Kirkus Reviews). “A novel as strange as it is captivating” (BuzzFeed), The Sin Eater “is a treat for fans of feminist speculative fiction” (Publishers Weekly) and “exactly what historical fiction lovers have unknowingly craved” (New York Journal of Books).

The Folk-lore of Herefordshire

The Folk-lore of Herefordshire PDF Author: Ella Mary Leather
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Folklore
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book Here

Book Description


Good for the Souls

Good for the Souls PDF Author: Nadieszda Kizenko
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192650572
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the moment that Tsars as well as hierarchs realized that having their subjects go to confession could make them better citizens as well as better Christians, the sacrament of penance in the Russian empire became a political tool, a devotional exercise, a means of education, and a literary genre. It defined who was Orthodox, and who was 'other.' First encouraging Russian subjects to participate in confession to improve them and to integrate them into a reforming Church and State, authorities then turned to confession to integrate converts of other nationalities. But the sacrament was not only something that state and religious authorities sought to impose on an unwilling populace. Confession could provide an opportunity for carefully crafted complaint. What state and church authorities initially imagined as a way of controlling an unruly population could be used by the same population as a way of telling their own story, or simply getting time off to attend to their inner lives. Good for the Souls brings Russia into the rich scholarly and popular literature on confession, penance, discipline, and gender in the modern world, and in doing so opens a key window onto church, state, and society. It draws on state laws, Synodal decrees, archives, manuscript repositories, clerical guides, sermons, saints' lives, works of literature, and visual depictions of the sacrament in those books and on church iconostases. Russia, Ukraine, and Orthodox Christianity emerge both as part of the European, transatlantic religious continuum-and, in crucial ways, distinct from it.

The Theologian and the Empire: A Biography of José de Acosta (1540–1600)

The Theologian and the Empire: A Biography of José de Acosta (1540–1600) PDF Author: Andrés I. Prieto
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004680861
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although Jesuit contributions to European expansion in the early modern period have attracted considerable scholarly interest, the legacy of José de Acosta (1540–1600) is still defined by his contributions to natural history. The Theologian and the Empire presents a new biography of Acosta, focused on his participation in colonial and imperial politics. The most important Jesuit active in the Americas in the sixteenth century, Acosta was fundamentally a political operator. His actions on both sides of the Atlantic informed both Peruvian colonial life and the Jesuit order at the dawn of the seventeenth century.

Penitence in the Age of Reformations

Penitence in the Age of Reformations PDF Author: Katharine Jackson Lualdi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351912348
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume is comprised of thirteen essays that explore penitential teachings and practices from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries in Western Europe and its colonies. Together the essays reveal that in this period, penitence was an increasingly important force shaping the individual and society. Consequently, the authors argue, penitence is central to our understanding of early modern Christianity as it was taught and experienced in everyday life. From Germany to France and to the Americas, Catholics turned to traditional forms of penitence not only to save individual souls, but also to assert their confessional identity. For their part, Protestants established distinctive penitential approaches and institutions in accordance with their own understandings of sin and salvation. In thus examining the treatment of post-baptismal sin across chronological and confessional boundaries, the volume breaks new ground in the history of penance. The volume concludes with a postscript assessing the ways in which the essays enrich the current state of scholarship on penitence and encourage further research. Katharine Jackson Lualdi is an independent scholar. Anne T. Thayer is Assistant Professor of Church History at Lancaster Theological Seminary, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Imagining the Witch

Imagining the Witch PDF Author: Laura Kounine
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019252481X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425

Get Book Here

Book Description
Imagining the Witch explores emotions, gender, and selfhood through the lens of witch-trials in early modern Germany. Witch-trials were clearly a gendered phenomenon, but witchcraft was not a uniquely female crime. While women constituted approximately three quarters of those tried for witchcraft in the Holy Roman Empire, a significant minority were men. Witchcraft was also a crime of unbridled passion: it centred on the notion that one person's emotions could have tangible and deadly physical consequences. Yet it is also true that not all suspicions of witchcraft led to a formal accusation, and not all witch-trials led to the stake. Indeed, just over half the total number put on trial for witchcraft in early modern Europe were executed. In order to understand how early modern people imagined the witch, we must first begin to understand how people understood themselves and each other; this can help us to understand how the witch could be a member of the community, living alongside their accusers, yet inspire such visceral fear. Through an examination of case studies of witch-trials that took place in the early modern Lutheran duchy of Württemberg in southwestern Germany, Laura Kounine examines how the community, church, and the agents of the law sought to identify the witch, and the ways in which ordinary men and women fought for their lives in an attempt to avoid the stake. The study further explores the visual and intellectual imagination of witchcraft in this period in order to piece together why witchcraft could be aligned with such strong female stereotypes on the one hand, but also be imagined as a crime that could be committed by any human, whether young or old, male or female. By moving beyond stereotypes of the witch, Imagining the Witch argues that understandings of what constituted witchcraft and the 'witch' appear far more contested and unstable than has previously been suggested. It also suggests new ways of thinking about early modern selfhood which moves beyond teleological arguments about the development of the 'modern' self. Indeed, it is the trial process itself that created the conditions for a diverse range of people to reflect on, and give meaning, to emotions, gender, and the self in early modern Lutheran Germany.

Military Occupation under the Eyes of the Lord

Military Occupation under the Eyes of the Lord PDF Author: Holger Berg
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
ISBN: 3647564559
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Get Book Here

Book Description
Diente der Krieg als Katalysator religiösen Wandels? Dieser Frage geht Holger Berg am Beispiel Erfurts in der Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges nach. Zuwiderlaufende Thesen über die Stärkung bzw. den Abbruch bestehender Lehren infolge des Krieges werden anhand des reichhaltigen Quellenmaterials erstmals empirisch überprüft. Während u.a. Predigten und Erbauungsbücher die Lehren vierer Pfarrer dokumentieren, geben historiographische Handschriften Auskunft über die Überzeugungen der Laien. Der breit angelegte Blickwinkel auf Pfarrer und Gemeindeglieder bietet nuancierte Ergebnisse sowohl für die Kirchengeschichte als auch für die historisch-anthropologische Forschung. Wer sich für den Zusammenhang von Leid, gelebtem Glauben und Kriegserfahrungen interessiert, gewinnt hier ungewöhnliche Einblicke.

The Reform of Christian Doctrine in the Catechisms of Peter Canisius

The Reform of Christian Doctrine in the Catechisms of Peter Canisius PDF Author: Thomas Flowers
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004537708
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
The catechisms of Peter Canisius highlight the struggle within the Catholic Church to reframe Christian identity after the Protestant Reformation. In contrast to the defensive catechesis of Rome, Canisius's catechisms proposed to achieve orthodoxy by encouraging Christian piety.