Medieval Hagiography

Medieval Hagiography PDF Author: Thomas Head
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317325141
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 892

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Book Description
This collection presents-through the medium of translated sources-a comprehensive guide to the development of hagiography and the cult of the saints in western Christendom during the middle ages. It provides an unparalleled resource for the study of the ideals of sanctity and the practice of religion in the medieval west. Intended for the classroom, for the medieval scholar who wishes to explore sources in unfamiliar languages, and for the general reader fascinated by the saints, this collection provides the reader a chance to explore in depth a full range of writings about the saints (the term hagiography is derived from Greek roots: hagios=holy and graphe=writing). The thirty-six chapters contain sources either in their entirety or in selections of substantial length. The great majority of the texts have never previously appeared in English translation. Those which have appeared in earlier translation, are here presented in versions based on significant new textual and historical scholarship which makes them significant improvements on the earlier versions. All the translations are accompanied by introductions, notes, and suggestions for further reading in order to help guide the reader. The first selections date to the fourth century, when the ideals of Christian sanctity were evolving to meet the demands of a world in which Christianity was an accepted religion and when the public veneration of relics was growing greatly in scope. The last selections date to the period immediately prior to the Reformation, a period in which the traditional concept of sanctity and acceptability of de cult of relics was being questioned. In addition to numerous works from the clerical languages of Latin and Greek, the selections include translations from Romance, Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic vernacular languages, s well as Hebrew texts concerning the martyrdom of Jews at the hands of Christians. Originating in lands from Iceland to Hungary and from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, they are taken from a full range of the many genres which constituted hagiography: lives of the saints, collections of miracle stories, accounts of the discovery or movement of relics, liturgical books, visions, canonization inquests, and even heresy trials.

Medieval Hagiography

Medieval Hagiography PDF Author: Thomas Head
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317325141
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 892

Get Book

Book Description
This collection presents-through the medium of translated sources-a comprehensive guide to the development of hagiography and the cult of the saints in western Christendom during the middle ages. It provides an unparalleled resource for the study of the ideals of sanctity and the practice of religion in the medieval west. Intended for the classroom, for the medieval scholar who wishes to explore sources in unfamiliar languages, and for the general reader fascinated by the saints, this collection provides the reader a chance to explore in depth a full range of writings about the saints (the term hagiography is derived from Greek roots: hagios=holy and graphe=writing). The thirty-six chapters contain sources either in their entirety or in selections of substantial length. The great majority of the texts have never previously appeared in English translation. Those which have appeared in earlier translation, are here presented in versions based on significant new textual and historical scholarship which makes them significant improvements on the earlier versions. All the translations are accompanied by introductions, notes, and suggestions for further reading in order to help guide the reader. The first selections date to the fourth century, when the ideals of Christian sanctity were evolving to meet the demands of a world in which Christianity was an accepted religion and when the public veneration of relics was growing greatly in scope. The last selections date to the period immediately prior to the Reformation, a period in which the traditional concept of sanctity and acceptability of de cult of relics was being questioned. In addition to numerous works from the clerical languages of Latin and Greek, the selections include translations from Romance, Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic vernacular languages, s well as Hebrew texts concerning the martyrdom of Jews at the hands of Christians. Originating in lands from Iceland to Hungary and from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, they are taken from a full range of the many genres which constituted hagiography: lives of the saints, collections of miracle stories, accounts of the discovery or movement of relics, liturgical books, visions, canonization inquests, and even heresy trials.

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography

Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography PDF Author: Alicia Spencer-Hall
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789048559190
Category : HISTORY
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiographypresents an interdisciplinary examination of trans and genderqueer subjects in medieval hagiography. Scholarship has productively combined analysis of medieval literary texts with modern queer theory - yet, too often, questions of gender are explored almost exclusively through a prism of sexuality, rather than gender identity. This volume moves beyond such limitations, foregrounding the richness of hagiography as a genre integrally resistant to limiting binaristic categories, including rigid gender binaries. The collection showcases scholarship by emerging trans and genderqueer authors, as well as the work of established researchers. Working at the vanguard of historical trans studies, these scholars demonstrate the vital and vitally political nature of their work as medievalists. Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiographyenables the re-creation of a lineage linking modern trans and genderqueer individuals to their medieval ancestors, providing models of queer identity where much scholarship has insisted there were none, and re-establishing the place of non-normative gender in history.

Narrating Power and Authority in Late Antique and Medieval Hagiography Across East and West

Narrating Power and Authority in Late Antique and Medieval Hagiography Across East and West PDF Author: Ghazzal Dabiri
Publisher:
ISBN: 9782503590653
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores the multifaceted representation of power and authority in a variety of late antique and medieval hagiographical narratives (Lives, Martyr Acts, oneiric and miraculous accounts). The narratives under analysis, written in some of the major languages of the Islamicate world and the Christian East and Christian West - Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Greek, Latin, Middle Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Persian - prominently feature a diverse range of historical and fictional figures from a wide cross-section of society - from female lay saints in Italy and Zoroastrians in Sasanian and Islamic Iran to apostles and bishops and emperors and caliphs. Each chapter investigates how power and authority were narrated from above (courts/saints) and below (saints/laity) and, by extension, navigated in various communities. As each chapter delves into the specific literary and social scene of a particular time, place, or hagiographer, the volume as a whole offers a broad view; it brings to the fore important shared literary and social historical aspects such as the possible itineraries of popular narratives and motifs across Eurasia and commonly held notions in the religio-political thought worlds of hagiographers and their communities. Through close readings and varied analyses, this collection contributes to the burgeoning interest in reading hagiography as literature while it offers new perspectives on the social and religious history of late antique and medieval communities.

The Eminent Monk

The Eminent Monk PDF Author: John Kieschnick
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824818418
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
In an attempt to reconstruct an elusive aspect of the medieval Chinese imagination, The Eminent Monk examines biographies of Chinese Buddhist monks, from the uncompromising ascetic to the unfathomable wonder-worker. While analyzing images of the monk in medieval China, the author addresses some questions encountered along the way: What are we to make of accounts in “eminent monk” collections of deviant monks who violate monastic precepts? Who wrote biographies of monks and who read them? How did different segments of Chinese society contend for the image of the monk and which image prevailed? By placing biographies of monks in the context of Chinese political and religious rhetoric, The Eminent Monk explores both the role of Buddhist literature in Chinese history and the monastic imagination that inspired this literature.

Medieval Saints and Modern Screens

Medieval Saints and Modern Screens PDF Author: Alicia Spencer-Hall
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9048532175
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This ground-breaking book brings theoretical perspectives from twenty-first century media, film, and cultural studies to medieval hagiography. Medieval Saints and Modern Screens stakes the claim for a provocative new methodological intervention: consideration of hagiography as media. More precisely, hagiography is most productively understood as cinematic media. Medieval mystical episodes are made intelligible to modern audiences through reference to the filmic - the language, form, and lived experience of cinema. Similarly, reference to the realm of the mystical affords a means to express the disconcerting physical and emotional effects of watching cinema. Moreover, cinematic spectatorship affords, at times, a (more or less) secular experience of visionary transcendence: an 'agape-ic encounter'. The medieval saint's visions of God are but one pole of a spectrum of visual experience which extends into our present multi-media moment. We too conjure godly visions: on our smartphones, on the silver screen, and on our TVs and laptops. This book places contemporary pop-culture media - such as blockbuster movie The Dark Knight, Kim Kardashian West's social media feeds, and the outputs of online role-players in Second Life - in dialogue with a corpus of thirteenth-century Latin biographies, 'Holy Women of Liège'. In these texts, holy women see God, and see God often. Their experiences fundamentally orient their life, and offer the women new routes to knowledge, agency, and belonging. For the holy visionaries of Liège, as with us modern 'seers', visions are physically intimate, ideologically overloaded spaces. Through theoretically informed close readings, Medieval Saints and Modern Screens reveals the interconnection of decidedly 'old' media - medieval textualities - and artefacts of our 'new media' ecology, which all serve as spaces in which altogether human concerns are brought before the contemporary culture's eyes.

A Companion to Middle English Hagiography

A Companion to Middle English Hagiography PDF Author: Sarah Salih
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 9781843840725
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
The saints were the superheroes and the celebrities of medieval England, bridging the gap between heaven and earth, the living and the dead. A vast body of literature evolved during the middle ages to ensure that everyone, from kings to peasants, knew the stories of the lives, deaths and afterlives of the saints. However, despite its popularity and ubiquity, the genre of the Saint's Life has until recently been little studied. This collection introduces the canon of Middle English hagiography; places it in the context of the cults of saints; analyses key themes within hagiographic narrative, including gender, power, violence and history; and, finally, shows how hagiographic themes survived the Reformation. Overall it offers both information for those coming to the genre for the first time, and points forward to new trends in research. Dr SARAH SALIH is a Lecturer in English at the University of East Anglia. Contributors: SAMANTHA RICHES, MARY BETH LONG, CLAIRE M. WATERS, ROBERT MILLS, ANKE BERNAU, KATHERINE J. LEWIS, MATTHEW WOODCOCK

A Paradise of Priests

A Paradise of Priests PDF Author: Catherine Saucier
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580464807
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
In the "priestly paradise" of medieval Liège, sacred music became a pervasive and versatile medium by which the clergy promoted the holy status of their city. While this hotbed of female piety and Eucharistic devotion is recognized as a center of liturgical innovation and clerical writing, the symbiosis of saintly and civic ideals voiced in locally composed plainchant and polyphony has remained overlooked. The key to unlocking the civic meaning of this music lies in the saints' legends and bishops' deeds from which it emerged and in the rituals and performance spaces in which it was heard. In A Paradise of Priests, Catherine Saucier forges new interdisciplinary connections between musicology, the liturgical arts, the cult of saints, church history, and urban studies to demonstrate how liégeois clerics constructed a civic sacred identity through sung rituals in conjunction with hagiographic writing and relic display. Focusing on the veneration and influence of five bishops active between the seventh and sixteenth centuries, Saucier explains how the performance of sacred music accrued new meanings at moments of signal importance in the life of the city. A Paradise of Priests is an essential resource for scholars and students interested in the history of the Low Countries, hagiography and its reception, and ecclesiastical institutions. Catherine Saucier is Assistant Professor of Music History at Arizona State University.

Thecla and Medieval Sainthood

Thecla and Medieval Sainthood PDF Author: Ghazzal Dabiri
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131651921X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Explores Saint Thecla and her story as preeminent models for medieval hagiographers across Eurasia and North Africa.

The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography

The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography PDF Author: Gail Ashton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113467449X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
In this interdisciplinary and boundary-breaking study, Gail Ashton examines the portrayals of women saints in a wide range of medieval texts. She deploys the French feminist critical theory of Cixous and Iriguray to illuminate these depictions of women by men and to further our understanding of both the lives and deeds of female saints and the contemporary, and almost always male, attitudes to them.

Early Christian Hagiography and Roman History

Early Christian Hagiography and Roman History PDF Author: Timothy David Barnes
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161502262
Category : Christian hagiography
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
"In their present form, the first five chapters are revised versions of lectures delivered in German at the University of Jena on 10-14 November 2008"--P. xi.