Author: Thomas (de Cantimpré)
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342
Book Description
Medieval saints' lives have only recently begun to be studied for what they say about the society in which they were written rather than as examples of medieval religious belief. The four lives translated here are the work of a Flemish monk of the thirteenth century, Thomas of Cantimpre. These lives demonstrate the variety of definitions of holiness in the Low Countries at this time. Three of the four tell of holy women, only one of whom, Lutgard of Aywieres, was a professed nun. The lives show Thomas' respect and admiration for the women he knew and the influence that holy laywomen had. Newman (English, Northwestern University) sets the stage on which Thomas acted, explaining in clear prose, the background to the stories and giving a biography of Thomas. Both Newman and King are well known for their scholarship on medieval women and for their lucid and accurate translations. This work is highly accessible and would be excellent for classroom use, especially the section on Christina the Astonishing, which would intrigue both historians and psychiatrists. Distributed in North America by The David Brown Book Co. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Thomas of Cantimpré
Author: Thomas (de Cantimpré)
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342
Book Description
Medieval saints' lives have only recently begun to be studied for what they say about the society in which they were written rather than as examples of medieval religious belief. The four lives translated here are the work of a Flemish monk of the thirteenth century, Thomas of Cantimpre. These lives demonstrate the variety of definitions of holiness in the Low Countries at this time. Three of the four tell of holy women, only one of whom, Lutgard of Aywieres, was a professed nun. The lives show Thomas' respect and admiration for the women he knew and the influence that holy laywomen had. Newman (English, Northwestern University) sets the stage on which Thomas acted, explaining in clear prose, the background to the stories and giving a biography of Thomas. Both Newman and King are well known for their scholarship on medieval women and for their lucid and accurate translations. This work is highly accessible and would be excellent for classroom use, especially the section on Christina the Astonishing, which would intrigue both historians and psychiatrists. Distributed in North America by The David Brown Book Co. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342
Book Description
Medieval saints' lives have only recently begun to be studied for what they say about the society in which they were written rather than as examples of medieval religious belief. The four lives translated here are the work of a Flemish monk of the thirteenth century, Thomas of Cantimpre. These lives demonstrate the variety of definitions of holiness in the Low Countries at this time. Three of the four tell of holy women, only one of whom, Lutgard of Aywieres, was a professed nun. The lives show Thomas' respect and admiration for the women he knew and the influence that holy laywomen had. Newman (English, Northwestern University) sets the stage on which Thomas acted, explaining in clear prose, the background to the stories and giving a biography of Thomas. Both Newman and King are well known for their scholarship on medieval women and for their lucid and accurate translations. This work is highly accessible and would be excellent for classroom use, especially the section on Christina the Astonishing, which would intrigue both historians and psychiatrists. Distributed in North America by The David Brown Book Co. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Excessive Saints
Author: Rachel J. D. Smith
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547935
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 318
Book Description
For thirteenth-century preacher, exorcist, and hagiographer Thomas of Cantimpré, the Southern Low Countries were a harbinger of the New Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit, he believed, was manifesting itself in the lives of lay and religious people alike. Thomas avidly sought out these new kinds of saints, writing accounts of their lives so that these models of sanctity might astound, teach, and trouble the convictions of his day. In Excessive Saints, Rachel J. D. Smith combines historical, literary, and theological approaches to offer a new interpretation of Thomas’s hagiographies, showing how they employ vivid narrative portrayals of typically female bodies to perform theological work in a rhetorically specific way. Written in an era of great religious experimentation, Thomas’s texts think with and through the bodies of particular figures: the narrative of the holy person’s life becomes a site of theological invention in a variety of registers, particularly the devotional, the mystical, and the dogmatic. Smith examines how these texts represent the lives and bodies of holy women to render them desirable objects of devotion for readers and how Thomas passionately narrates these lives even as he works through his uncertainties about the opportunities and dangers that these emerging forms of holiness present. Excessive Saints is the first book to consider Thomas’s narrative craft in relation to his theological projects, offering new visions for the study of theology, medieval Christianity, and medieval women’s history.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547935
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 318
Book Description
For thirteenth-century preacher, exorcist, and hagiographer Thomas of Cantimpré, the Southern Low Countries were a harbinger of the New Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit, he believed, was manifesting itself in the lives of lay and religious people alike. Thomas avidly sought out these new kinds of saints, writing accounts of their lives so that these models of sanctity might astound, teach, and trouble the convictions of his day. In Excessive Saints, Rachel J. D. Smith combines historical, literary, and theological approaches to offer a new interpretation of Thomas’s hagiographies, showing how they employ vivid narrative portrayals of typically female bodies to perform theological work in a rhetorically specific way. Written in an era of great religious experimentation, Thomas’s texts think with and through the bodies of particular figures: the narrative of the holy person’s life becomes a site of theological invention in a variety of registers, particularly the devotional, the mystical, and the dogmatic. Smith examines how these texts represent the lives and bodies of holy women to render them desirable objects of devotion for readers and how Thomas passionately narrates these lives even as he works through his uncertainties about the opportunities and dangers that these emerging forms of holiness present. Excessive Saints is the first book to consider Thomas’s narrative craft in relation to his theological projects, offering new visions for the study of theology, medieval Christianity, and medieval women’s history.
Holy Feast and Holy Fast
Author: Caroline Walker Bynum
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520908783
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496
Book Description
In the period between 1200 and 1500 in western Europe, a number of religious women gained widespread veneration and even canonization as saints for their extraordinary devotion to the Christian eucharist, supernatural multiplications of food and drink, and miracles of bodily manipulation, including stigmata and inedia (living without eating). The occurrence of such phenomena sheds much light on the nature of medieval society and medieval religion. It also forms a chapter in the history of women. Previous scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other and have sometimes applied modern medical or psychological theories to them. Using materials based on saints' lives and the religious and mystical writings of medieval women and men, Caroline Walker Bynum uncovers the pattern lying behind these aspects of women's religiosity and behind the fascination men and women felt for such miracles and devotional practices. She argues that food lies at the heart of much of women's piety. Women renounced ordinary food through fasting in order to prepare for receiving extraordinary food in the eucharist. They also offered themselves as food in miracles of feeding and bodily manipulation. Providing both functionalist and phenomenological explanations, Bynum explores the ways in which food practices enabled women to exert control within the family and to define their religious vocations. She also describes what women meant by seeing their own bodies and God's body as food and what men meant when they too associated women with food and flesh. The author's interpretation of women's piety offers a new view of the nature of medieval asceticism and, drawing upon both anthropology and feminist theory, she illuminates the distinctive features of women's use of symbols. Rejecting presentist interpretations of women as exploited or masochistic, she shows the power and creativity of women's writing and women's lives.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520908783
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496
Book Description
In the period between 1200 and 1500 in western Europe, a number of religious women gained widespread veneration and even canonization as saints for their extraordinary devotion to the Christian eucharist, supernatural multiplications of food and drink, and miracles of bodily manipulation, including stigmata and inedia (living without eating). The occurrence of such phenomena sheds much light on the nature of medieval society and medieval religion. It also forms a chapter in the history of women. Previous scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other and have sometimes applied modern medical or psychological theories to them. Using materials based on saints' lives and the religious and mystical writings of medieval women and men, Caroline Walker Bynum uncovers the pattern lying behind these aspects of women's religiosity and behind the fascination men and women felt for such miracles and devotional practices. She argues that food lies at the heart of much of women's piety. Women renounced ordinary food through fasting in order to prepare for receiving extraordinary food in the eucharist. They also offered themselves as food in miracles of feeding and bodily manipulation. Providing both functionalist and phenomenological explanations, Bynum explores the ways in which food practices enabled women to exert control within the family and to define their religious vocations. She also describes what women meant by seeing their own bodies and God's body as food and what men meant when they too associated women with food and flesh. The author's interpretation of women's piety offers a new view of the nature of medieval asceticism and, drawing upon both anthropology and feminist theory, she illuminates the distinctive features of women's use of symbols. Rejecting presentist interpretations of women as exploited or masochistic, she shows the power and creativity of women's writing and women's lives.
Early Dominicans
Author: Simon Tugwell
Publisher: Paulist Press
ISBN: 9780809124145
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 532
Book Description
The spirituality of St. Dominic and his early followers was a force in 13th-century Europe. Here is a selection of works that represent the simplicity, ruggedness and clarity of the Dominicans' biblically-based, Christ-centered spirituality.
Publisher: Paulist Press
ISBN: 9780809124145
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 532
Book Description
The spirituality of St. Dominic and his early followers was a force in 13th-century Europe. Here is a selection of works that represent the simplicity, ruggedness and clarity of the Dominicans' biblically-based, Christ-centered spirituality.
Albertus Magnus and the Sciences
Author: James A. Weisheipl
Publisher: PIMS
ISBN: 9780888440495
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 680
Book Description
Publisher: PIMS
ISBN: 9780888440495
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 680
Book Description
Cities of Ladies
Author: Walter Simons
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812200128
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title In the early thirteenth century, semireligious communities of women began to form in the cities and towns of the Low Countries. These beguines, as the women came to be known, led lives of contemplation and prayer and earned their livings as laborers or teachers. In Cities of Ladies, the first history of the beguines to appear in English in fifty years, Walter Simons traces the transformation of informal clusters of single women to large beguinages. These veritable single-sex cities offered lower- and middle-class women an alternative to both marriage and convent life. While the region's expanding urban economies initially valued the communities for their cheap labor supply, severe economic crises by the fourteenth century restricted women's opportunities for work. Church authorities had also grown less tolerant of religious experimentation, hailing as subversive some aspects of beguine mysticism. To Simons, however, such accusations of heresy against the beguines were largely generated from a profound anxiety about their intellectual ambitions and their claims to a chaste life outside the cloister. Under ecclesiastical and economic pressure, beguine communities dwindled in size and influence, surviving only by adopting a posture of restraint and submission to church authorities.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812200128
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title In the early thirteenth century, semireligious communities of women began to form in the cities and towns of the Low Countries. These beguines, as the women came to be known, led lives of contemplation and prayer and earned their livings as laborers or teachers. In Cities of Ladies, the first history of the beguines to appear in English in fifty years, Walter Simons traces the transformation of informal clusters of single women to large beguinages. These veritable single-sex cities offered lower- and middle-class women an alternative to both marriage and convent life. While the region's expanding urban economies initially valued the communities for their cheap labor supply, severe economic crises by the fourteenth century restricted women's opportunities for work. Church authorities had also grown less tolerant of religious experimentation, hailing as subversive some aspects of beguine mysticism. To Simons, however, such accusations of heresy against the beguines were largely generated from a profound anxiety about their intellectual ambitions and their claims to a chaste life outside the cloister. Under ecclesiastical and economic pressure, beguine communities dwindled in size and influence, surviving only by adopting a posture of restraint and submission to church authorities.
Mary of Oignies
Author: Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Book Description
Comprises revised editions of three texts formerly published by Peregrina Publishing, but reedited under the supervision of Barbara Newman and Constant Mews, and with supplementary contextual articles on the life and times of Mary Oignies.
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Book Description
Comprises revised editions of three texts formerly published by Peregrina Publishing, but reedited under the supervision of Barbara Newman and Constant Mews, and with supplementary contextual articles on the life and times of Mary Oignies.
Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture
Author: Bruce W. Holsinger
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804740586
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 500
Book Description
Ranging chronologically from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and philosophies of the European Middle Ages. Engaging a wide range of premodern texts and contexts, the author argues that medieval music was quintessentially a practice of the flesh. It will be of compelling interest to historians of literature, music, religion, and sexuality, as well as scholars of cultural, gender, and queer studies.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804740586
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 500
Book Description
Ranging chronologically from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and philosophies of the European Middle Ages. Engaging a wide range of premodern texts and contexts, the author argues that medieval music was quintessentially a practice of the flesh. It will be of compelling interest to historians of literature, music, religion, and sexuality, as well as scholars of cultural, gender, and queer studies.
Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe
Author: Katherine Allen Smith
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004171258
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
This collection builds on the foundational work of Penelope D. Johnson, John Boswell's most influential student outside queer studies, on integration and segregation in medieval Christianity. It documents the multiple strategies by which medieval people constructed identities and, in the process, wove the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion among various individuals and groups. The collection adopts an interdisciplinary approach, encompassing historical, art historical, and literary perpsectives to explore the definition of personal and communal spaces within medieval texts, the complex negotiation of the relationship between devotee and saint in both the early and the later Middle Ages, the forming of partnerships (symbolic, economic, devotional, etc.) between men and women across medieval Europe's considerable gender divide, and the ostracism of individuals and groups through various means including imprisonment, violence, and their identification with pollution. Contributors include: Diane Peters Auslander, Constance Hoffman Berman, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Alexandra Cuffel, Anne M. Schuchman, Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Katherine Allen Smith, Kathryn A. Smith, Christina Roukis-Stern, Susan Valentine, Susan Wade, and Scott Wells.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004171258
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
This collection builds on the foundational work of Penelope D. Johnson, John Boswell's most influential student outside queer studies, on integration and segregation in medieval Christianity. It documents the multiple strategies by which medieval people constructed identities and, in the process, wove the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion among various individuals and groups. The collection adopts an interdisciplinary approach, encompassing historical, art historical, and literary perpsectives to explore the definition of personal and communal spaces within medieval texts, the complex negotiation of the relationship between devotee and saint in both the early and the later Middle Ages, the forming of partnerships (symbolic, economic, devotional, etc.) between men and women across medieval Europe's considerable gender divide, and the ostracism of individuals and groups through various means including imprisonment, violence, and their identification with pollution. Contributors include: Diane Peters Auslander, Constance Hoffman Berman, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Alexandra Cuffel, Anne M. Schuchman, Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Katherine Allen Smith, Kathryn A. Smith, Christina Roukis-Stern, Susan Valentine, Susan Wade, and Scott Wells.
Send Me God
Author:
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271046389
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
In the early thirteenth century, the diocese of Liège witnessed an extraordinary religious revival, known to us largely through the abundant corpus of saints' lives from that region. Cistercian monks and nuns, along with beguines and recluses, formed close-knit networks of spiritual friendship that easily crossed the boundaries of gender, religious status, and even language. Holy women such as Mary of Oignies and Christina the Astonishing were held up by their biographers as models of orthodoxy and miraculous powers. Less familiar but no less fascinating are the male saints of the region. In this volume, Martinus Cawley has translated a trilogy of Cistercian lives composed by the same hagiographer, Goswin, who was a monk and cantor at the celebrated abbey of Villers in Brabant. Although all three of these saints were connected with the same order, their versions of holiness represent a study in contrasts, from the compassionate nun Ida of Nivelles, remarkable for her Eucharistic raptures, to the fiercely ascetic lay brother Arnulf, to the gentle monk Abundus, renowned for his deep liturgical and Marian piety. The title Send Me God derives from a revealing catchphrase that devout men and women used to request prayers from their spiritual friends. Send Me God is published as part of the Brepols Medieval Women Series.
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271046389
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
In the early thirteenth century, the diocese of Liège witnessed an extraordinary religious revival, known to us largely through the abundant corpus of saints' lives from that region. Cistercian monks and nuns, along with beguines and recluses, formed close-knit networks of spiritual friendship that easily crossed the boundaries of gender, religious status, and even language. Holy women such as Mary of Oignies and Christina the Astonishing were held up by their biographers as models of orthodoxy and miraculous powers. Less familiar but no less fascinating are the male saints of the region. In this volume, Martinus Cawley has translated a trilogy of Cistercian lives composed by the same hagiographer, Goswin, who was a monk and cantor at the celebrated abbey of Villers in Brabant. Although all three of these saints were connected with the same order, their versions of holiness represent a study in contrasts, from the compassionate nun Ida of Nivelles, remarkable for her Eucharistic raptures, to the fiercely ascetic lay brother Arnulf, to the gentle monk Abundus, renowned for his deep liturgical and Marian piety. The title Send Me God derives from a revealing catchphrase that devout men and women used to request prayers from their spiritual friends. Send Me God is published as part of the Brepols Medieval Women Series.