The Life of Margaret of Ypres

The Life of Margaret of Ypres PDF Author: Thomas (de Cantimpré)
Publisher: Peregrina Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description

The Life of Margaret of Ypres

The Life of Margaret of Ypres PDF Author: Thomas (de Cantimpré)
Publisher: Peregrina Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description


Piety and Family in Early Modern Europe

Piety and Family in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Marc R. Forster
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351911171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
At first sight, the subjects of piety and family life may appear to have little in common. Yet, as the essays in this volume make clear, there are in fact a number of shared features and points of contact that make the study of these issues a particularly fertile area for scholars of the Reformation period. Whether it be the concept of an individual's relationship with God - so often articulated in familial terms, the place of domestic devotions, or the difficulties that faced families split by rival confessional beliefs and mixed marriages, this book demonstrates how piety and family life were interwoven in the social and theological landscape of early modern Europe. Inspired by the works of Steven Ozment, the volume is divided into two sections, each of which deals with a particular concern of his writings. The first four chapters address issues of Reformation theology and the medieval heritage, whilst the remaining seven examine the spiritual life of families. Together they underline how modern scholarship by broadening its conceptual outlook and bringing together seemingly unrelated subjects, can provide a more sophisticated understanding of the past.

Acts of Care

Acts of Care PDF Author: Sara Ritchey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 150175355X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
In Acts of Care, Sara Ritchey recovers women's healthcare work by identifying previously overlooked tools of care: healing prayers, birthing indulgences, medical blessings, liturgical images, and penitential practices. Ritchey demonstrates that women in premodern Europe were both deeply engaged with and highly knowledgeable about health, the body, and therapeutic practices, but their critical role in medieval healthcare has been obscured because scholars have erroneously regarded the evidence of their activities as religious rather than medical. The sources for identifying the scope of medieval women's health knowledge and healthcare practice, Ritchey argues, are not found in academic medical treatises. Rather, she follows fragile traces detectable in liturgy, miracles, poetry, hagiographic narratives, meditations, sacred objects, and the daily behaviors that constituted the world, as well as in testaments and land transactions from hospitals and leprosaria established and staffed by beguines and Cistercian nuns. Through its surprising use of alternate sources, Acts of Care reconstructs the vital caregiving practices of religious women in the southern Low Countries, reconnecting women's therapeutic authority into the everyday world of late medieval healthcare. Thanks to generous funding from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

Intimate Reading

Intimate Reading PDF Author: Jessica Barr
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472131699
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Intimate Reading: Textual Encounters in Medieval Women’s Visions and Vitae explores the ways that women mystics sought to make their books into vehicles for the reader’s spiritual transformation. Jessica Barr argues that the cognitive work of reading these texts was meant to stimulate intensely personal responses, and that the very materiality of the book can produce an intimate encounter with God. She thus explores the differences between mystics’ biographies and their self-presentation, analyzing as well the complex rhetorical moves that medieval women writers employ to render their accounts more effective. This new volume is structured around five case studies. Chapters consider the biographies of 13th-century holy women from Liège, the writings of Margery Kempe, Gertrude of Helfta, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Julian of Norwich. At the heart of Intimate Reading is the question of how reading works—what it means to enter imaginatively and intellectually into the words of another. The volume showcases the complexity of medieval understandings of the work of reading, deepening our perception of the written word’s capacity to signify something that lies even beyond rational comprehension.

The Gift of Tongues

The Gift of Tongues PDF Author: Christine F. Cooper-Rompato
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271099402
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Tales of xenoglossia—the instantaneous ability to read, to write, to speak, or to understand a foreign language—have long captivated audiences. Perhaps most popular in Christian religious literature, these stories celebrate the erasing of all linguistic differences and the creation of wider spiritual communities. The accounts of miraculous language acquisition that appeared in the Bible inspired similar accounts in the Middle Ages. Though medieval xenoglossic miracles have their origins in those biblical stories, the medieval narratives have more complex implications. In The Gift of Tongues, Christine Cooper-Rompato examines a wide range of sources to show that claims of miraculous language are much more important to medieval religious culture than previously recognized and are crucial to understanding late medieval English writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Margery Kempe.

The Sacred and the Sinister

The Sacred and the Sinister PDF Author: David J. Collins, S. J.
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271084375
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Inspired by the work of eminent scholar Richard Kieckhefer, The Sacred and the Sinister explores the ambiguities that made (and make) medieval religion and magic so difficult to differentiate. The essays in this collection investigate how the holy and unholy were distinguished in medieval Europe, where their characteristics diverged, and the implications of that deviation. In the Middle Ages, the natural world was understood as divinely created and infused with mysterious power. This world was accessible to human knowledge and susceptible to human manipulation through three modes of engagement: religion, magic, and science. How these ways of understanding developed in light of modern notions of rationality is an important element of ongoing scholarly conversation. As Kieckhefer has emphasized, ambiguity and ambivalence characterize medieval understandings of the divine and demonic powers at work in the world. The ten chapters in this volume focus on four main aspects of this assertion: the cult of the saints, contested devotional relationships and practices, unsettled judgments between magic and religion, and inconclusive distinctions between magic and science. Freshly insightful, this study of ambiguity between magic and religion will be of special interest to scholars in the fields of medieval studies, religious studies, European history, and the history of science. In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume are Michael D. Bailey, Kristi Woodward Bain, Maeve B. Callan, Elizabeth Casteen, Claire Fanger, Sean L. Field, Anne M. Koenig, Katelyn Mesler, and Sophie Page.

Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900-1300

Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900-1300 PDF Author: Elisabeth M. C. Van Houts
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019879889X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900-1300 contains an analysis of the experience of married life by men and women in Christian medieval Europe, c. 900-1300. The study focusses on the social and emotional life of the married couple rather than on the institutional history of marriage, breaking it into three parts: Getting Married - the process of getting married and wedding celebrations; Married Life - the married life of lay couples and clergy, their sexuality, and any remarriage; and Alternative Living - which explores concubinage and polygyny, as well as the single life in contrast to monogamous sexual unions. In this volume, van Houts deals with four central themes. First, the tension between patriarchal family strategies and the individual family member's freedom of choice to marry and, if so, to what partner; second, the role played by the married priesthood in their quest to have individual agency and self-determination accepted in their own lives in the face of the growing imposition of clerical celibacy; third, the role played by women in helping society accept some degree of gender equality and self-determination to marry and in shaping the norms for married life incorporating these principles; fourth, the role played by emotion in the establishment of marriage and in married life at a time when sexual and spiritual love feature prominently in medieval literature.

Sex, Gender and the Sacred

Sex, Gender and the Sacred PDF Author: Joanna de Groot
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118833945
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
Sex, Gender and the Sacred presents a multi-faith, multi-disciplinary collection of essays that explore the interlocking narratives of religion and gender encompassing 4,000 years of history. Contains readings relating to sex and religion that encompass 4,000 years of gender history Features new research in religion and gender across diverse cultures, periods, and religious traditions Presents multi-faith and multi-disciplinary perspectives with significant comparative potential Offers original theories and concepts relating to gender, religion, and sexuality Includes innovative interpretations of the connections between visual, verbal, and material aspects of particular religious traditions

The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims

The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims PDF Author: Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812291336
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
In 1384, a poor and illiterate peasant woman named Ermine moved to the city of Reims with her elderly husband. Her era was troubled by war, plague, and schism within the Catholic Church, and Ermine could easily have slipped unobserved through the cracks of history. After the loss of her husband, however, things took a remarkable but frightening turn. For the last ten months of her life, Ermine was tormented by nightly visions of angels and demons. In her nocturnal terrors, she was attacked by animals, beaten and kidnapped by devils in disguise, and exposed to carnal spectacles; on other nights, she was blessed by saints, even visited by the Virgin Mary. She confessed these strange occurrences to an Augustinian friar known as Jean le Graveur, who recorded them all in vivid detail. Was Ermine a saint in the making, an impostor, an incipient witch, or a madwoman? Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski ponders answers to these questions in the historical and theological context of this troubled woman's experiences. With empathy and acuity, Blumenfeld-Kosinski examines Ermine's life in fourteenth-century Reims, her relationship with her confessor, her ascetic and devotional practices, and her reported encounters with heavenly and hellish beings. Supplemented by translated excerpts from Jean's account, The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims brings to life an episode that helped precipitate one of the major clerical controversies of late medieval Europe, revealing surprising truths about the era's conceptions of piety and possession.

Women and Miracle Stories

Women and Miracle Stories PDF Author: Anna Korte
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047402871
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
This book contains a multidisciplinary collection of studies on women in miracle stories found in texts ranging from religious classics to contemporary literary fiction. Miracle stories are a genre of great importance for the study of women's religious inheritance and for the historical and cultural understanding of women as 'makers of faith'. Miracle stories are very generally speaking more open to popular religion and culture than, for instance, doctrinal and official ecclesiastical texts, and as such, they can be of special interest to the study of women's lives and religious aspirations. Remarkably, up till now this genre has not been looked at from this point of view. This book aims to open this field for further research by presenting case studies from diverse angles and disciplines. Some of the questions this book tries to answer are: What do miracle stories specifically tell us about women? Are there some (types of) miracles that are in particular related to (certain groups of) women? What do these stories tell us about women as performers and/or subjects of miracles? What can be said about the social function and religious meaning of miracles by specifically looking at the way certain groups of women are practising and experiencing miracles? By including research on miracle stories in contemporary fiction written by women this book also wants to acknowledge and research the disputed status of 'miracles' as well of 'women' in our present society which is moving from modernity to post-modernity. Please note that Women and Miracle Stories is previously published by Brill in hardback (ISBN 90 04 16681 8, still available).