Saints as Intercessors between the Wealthy and the Divine

Saints as Intercessors between the Wealthy and the Divine PDF Author: Emily Kelley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351171348
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Offering snapshots of mercantile devotion to saints in different regions, this volume is the first to ask explicitly how merchants invoked saints, and why. Despite medieval and modern stereotypes of merchants as godless and avaricious, medieval traders were highly devout – and rightly so. Overseas trade was dangerous, and merchants’ commercial activities were seen as jeopardizing their souls. Merchants turned to saints for protection and succor, identifying those most likely to preserve their goods, families, reputations, and souls. The essays in this collection, written from diverse angles, range across later medieval western Europe, from Spain to Italy to England and the Hanseatic League. They offer a multi-disciplinary examination of the ways that medieval merchants, from petty traders to influential overseas wholesalers, deployed the cults of saints. Three primary themes are addressed: danger, community, and the unity of spiritual and cultural capital. Each of these themes allows the international panel of contributors to demonstrate the significant role of saints in mercantile life. This book is unique in its exploration of saints and commerce, shedding light on the everyday role religion played in medieval life. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of religious history, medieval history, art history, and literature.

Saints as Intercessors between the Wealthy and the Divine

Saints as Intercessors between the Wealthy and the Divine PDF Author: Emily Kelley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351171348
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Get Book

Book Description
Offering snapshots of mercantile devotion to saints in different regions, this volume is the first to ask explicitly how merchants invoked saints, and why. Despite medieval and modern stereotypes of merchants as godless and avaricious, medieval traders were highly devout – and rightly so. Overseas trade was dangerous, and merchants’ commercial activities were seen as jeopardizing their souls. Merchants turned to saints for protection and succor, identifying those most likely to preserve their goods, families, reputations, and souls. The essays in this collection, written from diverse angles, range across later medieval western Europe, from Spain to Italy to England and the Hanseatic League. They offer a multi-disciplinary examination of the ways that medieval merchants, from petty traders to influential overseas wholesalers, deployed the cults of saints. Three primary themes are addressed: danger, community, and the unity of spiritual and cultural capital. Each of these themes allows the international panel of contributors to demonstrate the significant role of saints in mercantile life. This book is unique in its exploration of saints and commerce, shedding light on the everyday role religion played in medieval life. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of religious history, medieval history, art history, and literature.

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.

The Cults of Sainte Foy and the Cultural Work of Saints

The Cults of Sainte Foy and the Cultural Work of Saints PDF Author: Kathleen Ashley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000396789
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Bringing together artifacts, texts, and practices within an interpretive framework that stresses the cultural work performed by saints, Kathleen Ashley presents a comparative study of the cults of the medieval Sainte Foy at a number of the sites where she was especially venerated. This book analyzes how each cult site produced the saint it needed, appropriating or creating whatever was required to that end. Ashley’s approach is thoroughly interdisciplinary, incorporating visual, religious, medieval, and women’s and gender studies as well as literary studies and social history. She uses the theoretical framework of "cultural work" to analyze how the cult of Sainte Foy was sponsored and received by specific groups in different locales in Europe. The book is comprehensive in terms of historical as well as geographical range, tracing the history of the cult from the early Middle Ages into the present day. It also includes historiographical analysis, examining the way the cults of Sainte Foy have been represented in various historical accounts. Ashley’s narrative challenges the boundary between "elite" and "popular" culture and complicates the traditional vernacular vs. Latin language binary. A chief aim of the study is to show how "art" objects always operated in conjunction with other cultural texts to construct a saint’s cult. The volume is heavily illustrated, showing artifacts such as stained-glass windows and wall paintings which are not readily available from any other source. This book will be of special interest to scholars in art history, medieval history, gender studies, and religion.

English Birth Girdles

English Birth Girdles PDF Author: Mary Morse
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501513907
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
In medieval England, women in labor wrapped birth girdles around their abdomens to protect themselves and their unborn children. These parchment or paper rolls replicated the "girdle relics" of the Virgin Mary and other saints loaned to queens and noblewomen, extending childbirth protection to women of all classes. This book examines the texts and images of nine English birth girdles produced between the reigns of Richard II and Henry VIII. Cultural artifacts of lay devotion within the birthing chamber, the birth girdles offered the solace and promise of faith to the parturient woman and her attendants amid religious dissent, political upheaval, recurring epidemics, and the onset of print.

The Afterlife of St Cuthbert

The Afterlife of St Cuthbert PDF Author: Christiania Whitehead
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108490352
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This book surveys the textual representation of Cuthbert, the premier northern English saint, from the seventh to fifteenth centuries.

Souls under Siege

Souls under Siege PDF Author: Nicole Archambeau
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501753681
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In Souls under Siege, Nicole Archambeau explores how the inhabitants of southern France made sense of the ravages of successive waves of plague, the depredations of mercenary warfare, and the violence of royal succession during the fourteenth century. Many people, she finds, understood both plague and war as the symptoms of spiritual sicknesses caused by excessive sin, and they sought cures in confession. Archambeau draws on a rich evidentiary base of sixty-eight narrative testimonials from the canonization inquest for Countess Delphine de Puimichel, which was held in the market town of Apt in 1363. Each witness in the proceedings had lived through the outbreaks of plague in 1348 and 1361, as well as the violence inflicted by mercenaries unemployed during truces in the Hundred Years' War. Consequently, their testimonies unexpectedly reveal the importance of faith and the role of affect in the healing of body and soul alike. Faced with an unprecedented cascade of crises, the inhabitants of Provence relied on saints and healers, their worldview connecting earthly disease and disaster to the struggle for their eternal souls. Souls under Siege illustrates how medieval people approached sickness and uncertainty by using a variety of remedies, making clear that "healing" had multiple overlapping meanings in this historical moment.

Medieval Historical Writing

Medieval Historical Writing PDF Author: Jennifer Jahner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316732207
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 689

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Book Description
History writing in the Middle Ages did not belong to any particular genre, language or class of texts. Its remit was wide, embracing the events of antiquity; the deeds of saints, rulers and abbots; archival practices; and contemporary reportage. This volume addresses the challenges presented by medieval historiography by using the diverse methodologies of medieval studies: legal and literary history, art history, religious studies, codicology, the history of the emotions, gender studies and critical race theory. Spanning one thousand years of historiography in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland, the essays map historical thinking across literary genres and expose the rich veins of national mythmaking tapped into by medieval writers. Additionally, they attend to the ways in which medieval histories crossed linguistic and geographical borders. Together, they trace multiple temporalities and productive anachronisms that fuelled some of the most innovative medieval writing.

Vera Lex Historiae?

Vera Lex Historiae? PDF Author: Catalin Taranu
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1685710301
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
Writing circa 731 CE, Bede professes in the introduction to his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum that he will write his account of the past of the English following only vera lex historiae. Whether explicitly or (most often) implicitly, historians narrate the past according to a conception of what constitutes historical truth that emerges in the use of narrative strategies, of certain formulae or textual forms, in establishing one's own ideological authority or that of one's informants, in faithfulness to a cultural, narrative, or poetic tradition. If we extend the scope of what we understand by history (especially in a pre-modern setting) to include not just the writings of historians legitimated by their belonging to the Latinate matrix of christianized classical history writing, but also collective narratives, practices, rituals, oral poetry, liturgy, artistic representations, and acts of identity - all re-enacting the past as, or as representation of, the present, we find a plethora of modes of constructions of historical truth, narrative authority, and reliability. Vera Lex Historiae? will be constituted by contributions that reveal the variety of evental strategies by which historical truth was constructed in late antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages, and the range of procedures by which such narratives were established first as being historical and then as "true" histories. This is not only a matter of narrative strategies, but also habitus, ways of living and acting in the world that feed on and back into the commemoration and re-enactment of the past by communities and by individuals. In doing this, we hope to recover something of the plurality of modes of preserving and reenacting the past available in late antiquity and the earlier middle ages which we pass by because of preconceived notions of what constitutes history writing.

Five Parishes in Late Medieval and Tudor London

Five Parishes in Late Medieval and Tudor London PDF Author: Gary G Gibbs
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429640439
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Five Parishes in Late Medieval and Tudor London presents linked microhistorical studies of five London parishes, using their own parish records to reconstruct their individual operations, religious practices, and societies. The parish was a foundational institution in Tudor London. Every layperson inhabited one and they interacted with their neighbors in a variety of parochial activities and events. Each chapter in this book explores a different parish in a different part of the city, revealing their unique cultures, societies,, and economies against the backdrop of presiding themes and developments of the age. Through detailed microhistorical analysis, patterns of collective behavior, parishioner relationships, and parish leadership are highlighted, providing a new perspective on the period. The reader is drawn into the local neighborhoods and able to trace how people living in the Tudor era experienced the tumultuous changes of their time. This book is ideal for scholars and students of early modern history, microhistory, parish studies, the history of the English reformation, and those with an interest in administrative history of the late medieval and early modern periods.

Bible Proofs for Catholic Truths

Bible Proofs for Catholic Truths PDF Author: Dave Armstrong
Publisher: Sophia Institute Press
ISBN: 1622820053
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Over 2,000 Bible Proofs for Catholic Truths! Contrary to what many believe, Catholic doctrine is not made up by popes and theologians but is derived entirely from revelation, as this book shows. In it, veteran Catholic apologist Dave Armstrong gathers in one place countless passages from Holy Scripture that point directly to the teachings of the Catholic Church. This galaxy of more than 2,000 passages from the Bible is overwhelming evidence that on every side Catholic teachings are confirmed by Scripture. Indeed, these passages show that the Catholic Church has a more complete grasp of the meaning of Scripture than those who try to use Scripture to discredit the Church. That’s because Catholic teaching is based not on selective readings of Scripture but on understanding and veneration of the whole Bible in its organic interrelatedness. Catholic doctrines are not distilled from single passages quoted in isolation or out of context; they arise from an encounter with the whole of Scripture, wherein passages on the same theme are read in light of each other, so that together they lead the mind to a complete picture of the truth. That’s why Dave Armstrong has gathered here under 115 thematic headings all the passages in Scripture relating to key Catholic doctrines. This arrangement makes it easy for readers to consider systematically — as the Church does — all the parts of the Bible that relate to any particular Catholic belief. Whether you’re a Protestant seeking to understand Catholicism, or a Catholic wanting to defend Catholic teaching or learn more about its biblical basis, this is the one book you need.