Preaching, Building, and Burying

Preaching, Building, and Burying PDF Author: Caroline Astrid Bruzelius
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300203844
Category : ARCHITECTURE
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Friars transformed the relationship of the church to laymen by taking religion outside to public and domestic spaces. Mendicant commitment to apostolic poverty bound friars to donors in an exchange of donations in return for intercessory prayers and burial: association with friars was believed to reduce the suffering of purgatory. Mendicant convents became urban cemeteries, warehouses filled with family tombs, flags, shields, and private altars. As mendicants became progressively institutionalized and sought legitimacy, friars adopted the architectural structures of monasticism: chapter houses, cloisters, dormitories, and refectories. They also created piazzas for preaching and burying outside their churches. Construction depended on assembling adequate funding from communes, confraternities, and private individuals; it was also sometimes supported by the expropriation of property from heretics. Because of irregular funding, construction was episodic, with substantial changes in scale and design. Choir screens served as temporary west facades while funds were raised for completion. This is the first book to analyze the friars' influence on the growth and transformation of medieval buildings and urban spaces. "--

Preaching, Building, and Burying

Preaching, Building, and Burying PDF Author: Caroline Astrid Bruzelius
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300203844
Category : ARCHITECTURE
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Friars transformed the relationship of the church to laymen by taking religion outside to public and domestic spaces. Mendicant commitment to apostolic poverty bound friars to donors in an exchange of donations in return for intercessory prayers and burial: association with friars was believed to reduce the suffering of purgatory. Mendicant convents became urban cemeteries, warehouses filled with family tombs, flags, shields, and private altars. As mendicants became progressively institutionalized and sought legitimacy, friars adopted the architectural structures of monasticism: chapter houses, cloisters, dormitories, and refectories. They also created piazzas for preaching and burying outside their churches. Construction depended on assembling adequate funding from communes, confraternities, and private individuals; it was also sometimes supported by the expropriation of property from heretics. Because of irregular funding, construction was episodic, with substantial changes in scale and design. Choir screens served as temporary west facades while funds were raised for completion. This is the first book to analyze the friars' influence on the growth and transformation of medieval buildings and urban spaces. "--

Memorializing the Middle Classes in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Memorializing the Middle Classes in Medieval and Renaissance Europe PDF Author: Anne Leader
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 158044346X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Offering a broad overview of memorialization practices across Europe and the Mediterranean, this book examines local customs through particular case studies. These essays explore complementary themes through the lens of commemorative art, including social status; personal and corporate identities; the intersections of mercantile, intellectual, and religious attitudes; upward (and downward) mobility; and the cross-cultural exchange.

The Place of the Social Margins, 1350-1750

The Place of the Social Margins, 1350-1750 PDF Author: Andrew Spicer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317630254
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary volume illuminates the shadowy history of the disadvantaged, sick and those who did not conform to the accepted norms of society. It explores how marginal identity was formed, perceived and represented in Britain and Europe during the medieval and early modern periods. It illustrates that the identities of marginal groups were shaped by their place within primarily urban communities, both in terms of their socio-economic status and the spaces in which they lived and worked. Some of these groups – such as executioners, prostitutes, pedlars and slaves – performed a significant social and economic function but on the basis of this were stigmatized by other townspeople. Language was used to control and limit the activities of others within society such as single women and foreigners, as well as the victims of sexual crimes. For many, such as lepers and the disabled, marginal status could be ambiguous, cyclical or short-lived and affected by key religious, political and economic events. Traditional histories have often considered these groups in isolation. Based on new research, a series of case studies from Britain and across Europe illustrate and provide important insights into the problems faced by these marginal groups and the ways in which medieval and early modern communities were shaped and developed.

Queen of Sorrows

Queen of Sorrows PDF Author: Bianca M. Lopez
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501775928
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Queen of Sorrows takes an original approach to both late-medieval Italian history and the history of Christianity, using quantitative and qualitative analyses of a remarkable archive of 1,904 testaments to determine patterns in giving to the Virgin of Loreto shrine in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Bianca M. Lopez argues that in central Italy, as elsewhere, the cult of the Virgin Mary gained new prominence at this time of unprecedented mortality. Individuals gave to Santa Maria di Loreto, which houses the structure in which Mary is believed to have lived, as an expression of their grief in the hope of strengthening family lineages beyond death and to care for loved ones believed to be languishing in purgatory. Lopez establishes statistical correlations between different social groups and their donations to Loreto over time, uncovering informative new historical patterns such as the prominence of widow and migrant donors in the notarial record. The testaments also provide a social history of Recanati, revealing how its denizens venerated Mary as a saint with unrivaled spiritual power and uniquely sympathetic to grief, having lost her own son, Jesus. In the fourteenth century, plague survivors transformed their anguish into Marian devotion. The devastation of the plague brought the Virgin out of noble courts and monasteries and onto city streets. As Queen of Sorrows details, however, the popularity and growing wealth of Loreto's Marian shrine attracted the attention of the papacy and peninsular seigneurial lords, who eventually brought Santa Maria di Loreto under the control of the Church.

The Fluctuating Sea

The Fluctuating Sea PDF Author: Saygin Salgirli
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000426122
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
This volume fluctuates between conceptualizations of movement; either movements that buildings in the medieval Mediterranean facilitated, or the movements of the users and audiences of architecture. From medieval Anatolia to Southern France and the Genoese colony of Pera across Constantinople, The Fluctuating Sea investigates how the relationship between movement and the experiences of a multiplicity of users with different social backgrounds can provide a new perspective on architectural history. The book acknowledges the shared characteristics of medieval Mediterranean architecture, but it also argues that for the majority of people inhabiting the fragmented microecologies of the Mediterranean, architecture was a highly localized phenomenon. It is the connectivity of such localized experiences that The Fluctuating Sea uncovers. The Fluctuating Sea is a valuable source for students and scholars of the medieval Mediterranean and architectural history.

Life Inside the Cloister

Life Inside the Cloister PDF Author: Thomas Coomans
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9462701431
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Sacred architecture as reality and metaphor in secularised Western society Christian monasteries and convents, built throughout Europe for the best part of 1,500 years, are now at a crossroads. This study attempts to understand the sacred architecture of monasteries as a process of the tangible and symbolic organisation of space and time for religious communities. Despite the weight of seemingly immutable monastic tradition, architecture has contributed to developing specific religious identities and played a fundamental part in the reformation of different forms of religious life according to the changing needs of society. The cloister is the focal point of this book because it is both architecture, a physically built reality, and a metaphor for the religious life that takes place within it. Life Inside the Cloister also addresses the afterlife and heritagisation of monastic architecture in secularised Western society.

Medieval Monasticism

Medieval Monasticism PDF Author: C.H. Lawrence
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000955885
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Medieval Monasticism traces the Western Monastic tradition from its fourth-century origins in the deserts of Egypt and Syria through the many and varied forms of religious life it assumed during the Middle Ages. It explores the relationship between monasteries and the secular world around them. For a thousand years, the great monastic houses and religious orders were a prominent feature of the social landscape of the West, and their leaders figured as much in the political as on the spiritual map of the medieval world. In this book many of them, together with their supporters and critics, are presented to us and speak their minds to us. We are shown, for instance, the controversy between the Benedictines and the reformed monasticism of the twelfth century and the problems that confronted women in religious life. A detailed glossary offers readers a helpful vocabulary of the subject. This fifth edition has been revised by Janet Burton to include an updated bibliography and an introduction which discusses recent trends in monastic studies, including reinterpretations of issues of reform and renewal, new scholarship on religious women, and interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches. This book is essential reading for both students and scholars of the medieval world.

Medieval Urban Planning

Medieval Urban Planning PDF Author: Mickey Abel
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443878650
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Broadly defined, urban planning today is a process one might describe as half design and half social engineering. It considers not only the aesthetic and visual product, but also the economic, political, and social implications, as well as the environmental impact. This collection of essays explores the question of whether this sort of multifaceted planning took place in the Middle Ages, and how it manifested itself outside of the monastic realm. Bringing together the monastic historian and archaeologist, with scholars of art and architecture, this volume expands our comprehension of how those in roles of authority saw the planning process and implemented their plans to structure a particular outcome. The examination of architectural complexes, literary sources, commercial legers, and political records highlights the multiple avenues for viewing the growing awareness of the social potential of an urban environment.

Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics

Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics PDF Author: Janine Larmon Peterson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501742353
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
In Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics Janine Larmon Peterson investigates regional saints whose holiness was contested. She scrutinizes the papacy's toleration of unofficial saints' cults and its response when their devotees challenged church authority about a cult's merits or the saint's orthodoxy. As she demonstrates, communities that venerated saints increasingly clashed with popes and inquisitors determined to erode any local claims of religious authority. Local and unsanctioned saints were spiritual and social fixtures in the towns of northern and central Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In some cases, popes allowed these saints' cults; in others, church officials condemned the saint and/or their followers as heretics. Using a wide range of secular and clerical sources—including vitae, inquisitorial and canonization records, chronicles, and civic statutes—Peterson explores who these unofficial saints were, how the phenomenon of disputed sanctity arose, and why communities would be willing to risk punishment by continuing to venerate a local holy man or woman. She argues that the Church increasingly restricted sanctification in the later Middle Ages, which precipitated new debates over who had the authority to recognize sainthood and what evidence should be used to identify holiness and heterodoxy. The case studies she presents detail how the political climate of the Italian peninsula allowed Italian communities to use saints' cults as a tool to negotiate religious and political autonomy in opposition to growing papal bureaucratization. Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities

Roads to Health

Roads to Health PDF Author: G. Geltner
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812296311
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In Roads to Health, G. Geltner demonstrates that urban dwellers in medieval Italy had a keen sense of the dangers to their health posed by conditions of overcrowding, shortages of food and clean water, air pollution, and the improper disposal of human and animal waste. He consults scientific, narrative, and normative sources that detailed and consistently denounced the physical and environmental hazards urban communities faced: latrines improperly installed and sewers blocked; animals left to roam free and carcasses left rotting on public byways; and thoroughfares congested by artisanal and commercial activities that impeded circulation, polluted waterways, and raised miasmas. However, as Geltner shows, numerous administrative records also offer ample evidence of the concrete measures cities took to ameliorate unhealthy conditions. Toiling on the frontlines were public functionaries generally known as viarii, or "road-masters," appointed to maintain their community's infrastructures and police pertinent human and animal behavior. Operating on a parallel track were the camparii, or "field-masters," charged with protecting the city's hinterlands and thereby the quality of what would reach urban markets, taverns, ovens, and mills. Roads to Health provides a critical overview of the mandates and activities of the viarii and camparii as enforcers of preventive health and safety policies between roughly 1250 and 1500, and offers three extended case studies, for Lucca, Bologna, and the smaller Piedmont town of Pinerolo. In telling their stories, Geltner contends that preventive health practices, while scientifically informed, emerged neither solely from a centralized regime nor as a reaction to the onset of the Black Death. Instead, they were typically negotiated by diverse stakeholders, including neighborhood residents, officials, artisans, and clergymen, and fostered throughout the centuries by a steady concern for people's greater health.