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Author: Sophie Page
Publisher: Neale UCL Studies in British History
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
The unorthodox imagination in late medieval Britain explores how medieval people responded to images, stories, beliefs and practices which were at odds with the normative world view, from the heretical and subversive to the marvellous and exotic. The Neale lecture by Jean-Claude Schmitt examines why some unorthodox images were viewed as provocative and threatening and explores how successfully ecclesiastical authorities contained their impact. The power of unorthodoxy to provoke wonder, skepticism or disapproval provides an opportunity to view medieval culture from fresh perspectives. The essays in this volume show that unorthodoxy was embedded in mainstream medieval culture, from stories of fairies and witches which promoted orthodox moral values to the social conformity of practitioners of ritual magic. This book provides a guide to understanding medieval unorthodoxy and the roles played by experience and imagination in medieval encounters with the unorthodox. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the exotic, provocative and deviant in medieval culture.
Author: Sophie Page
Publisher: Neale UCL Studies in British History
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Get Book
Book Description
The unorthodox imagination in late medieval Britain explores how medieval people responded to images, stories, beliefs and practices which were at odds with the normative world view, from the heretical and subversive to the marvellous and exotic. The Neale lecture by Jean-Claude Schmitt examines why some unorthodox images were viewed as provocative and threatening and explores how successfully ecclesiastical authorities contained their impact. The power of unorthodoxy to provoke wonder, skepticism or disapproval provides an opportunity to view medieval culture from fresh perspectives. The essays in this volume show that unorthodoxy was embedded in mainstream medieval culture, from stories of fairies and witches which promoted orthodox moral values to the social conformity of practitioners of ritual magic. This book provides a guide to understanding medieval unorthodoxy and the roles played by experience and imagination in medieval encounters with the unorthodox. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the exotic, provocative and deviant in medieval culture.
Author: Sophie Page
Publisher: Neale UCL Studies in British History
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Get Book
Book Description
The unorthodox imagination in late medieval Britain explores how medieval people responded to images, stories, beliefs and practices which were at odds with the normative world view, from the heretical and subversive to the marvellous and exotic. The Neale lecture by Jean-Claude Schmitt examines why some unorthodox images were viewed as provocative and threatening and explores how successfully ecclesiastical authorities contained their impact. The power of unorthodoxy to provoke wonder, skepticism or disapproval provides an opportunity to view medieval culture from fresh perspectives. The essays in this volume show that unorthodoxy was embedded in mainstream medieval culture, from stories of fairies and witches which promoted orthodox moral values to the social conformity of practitioners of ritual magic. This book provides a guide to understanding medieval unorthodoxy and the roles played by experience and imagination in medieval encounters with the unorthodox. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the exotic, provocative and deviant in medieval culture.
Author: Mary Dzon
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812248848
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
Beginning in the twelfth century, clergy and laity alike started wondering with intensity about the historical and developmental details of Jesus' early life. Was the Christ Child like other children, whose characteristics and capabilities depended on their age? Was he sweet and tender, or formidable and powerful? Not finding sufficient information in the Gospels, which are almost completely silent about Jesus' childhood, medieval Christians turned to centuries-old apocryphal texts for answers. In The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages, Mary Dzon demonstrates how these apocryphal legends fostered a vibrant and creative medieval piety. Popular tales about the Christ Child entertained the laity and at the same time were reviled by some members of the intellectual elite of the church. In either case, such legends, so persistent, left their mark on theological, devotional, and literary texts. The Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx urged his monastic readers to imitate the Christ Child's development through spiritual growth; Francis of Assisi encouraged his followers to emulate the Christ Child's poverty and rusticity; Thomas Aquinas, for his part, believed that apocryphal stories about the Christ Child would encourage youths to be presumptuous, while Birgitta of Sweden provided pious alternatives in her many Marian revelations. Through close readings of such writings, Dzon explores the continued transmission and appeal of apocryphal legends throughout the Middle Ages and demonstrates the significant impact that the Christ Child had in shaping the medieval religious imagination.
Author: Nicholas Orme
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300262612
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
An engaging, richly illustrated account of parish churches and churchgoers in England, from the Anglo-Saxons to the mid-sixteenth century Parish churches were at the heart of English religious and social life in the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century. In this comprehensive study, Nicholas Orme shows how they came into existence, who staffed them, and how their buildings were used. He explains who went to church, who did not attend, how people behaved there, and how they—not merely the clergy—affected how worship was staged. The book provides an accessible account of what happened in the daily and weekly services, and how churches marked the seasons of Christmas, Lent, Easter, and summer. It describes how they celebrated the great events of life: birth, coming of age, and marriage, and gave comfort in sickness and death. A final chapter covers the English Reformation in the sixteenth century and shows how, alongside its changes, much that went on in parish churches remained as before.
Author: Catherine Rider
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780230745
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
During the Middle Ages, many occult rituals and beliefs existed and were practiced alongside those officially sanctioned by the church. While educated clergy condemned some of these as magic, many of these practices involved religious language, rituals, or objects. For instance, charms recited to cure illnesses invoked God and the saints, and love spells used consecrated substances such as the Eucharist. Magic and Religion in Medieval England explores the entanglement of magical practices and the clergy during the Middle Ages, uncovering how churchmen decided which of these practices to deem acceptable and examining the ways they persuaded others to adopt their views. Covering the period from 1215 to the Reformation, Catherine Rider traces the change in the church’s attitude to vernacular forms of magic. She shows how this period brought the clergy more closely into contact with unofficial religious practices than ever before, and how this proximity prompted them to draw up precise guidelines on distinguishing magic from legitimate religion. Revealing the necessity of improving clerical education and the pastoral care of the laity, Magic and Religion in Medieval England provides a fascinating picture of religious life during this period.
Author: John H. Arnold
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191015008
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 640
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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity takes as its subject the beliefs, practices, and institutions of the Christian Church between 400 and 1500AD. It addresses topics ranging from early medieval monasticism to late medieval mysticism, from the material wealth of the Church to the spiritual exercises through which certain believers might attempt to improve their souls. Each chapter tells a story, but seeks also to ask how and why 'Christianity' took particular forms at particular moments in history, paying attention to both the spiritual and otherwordly aspects of religion, and the material and political contexts in which they were often embedded. This Handbook is a landmark academic collection that presents cutting-edge interpretive perspectives on medieval religion for a wide academic audience, drawing together thirty key scholars in the field from the United States, the UK, and Europe. Notably, the Handbook is arranged thematically, and focusses on an analytical, rather than narrative, approach, seeking to demonstrate the variety, change, and complexity of religion throughout this long period, and the numerous different ways in which modern scholarship can approach it. While providing a very wide-ranging view of the subject, it also offers an important agenda for further study in the field.
Author: Tabitha Stanmore
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009286730
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
Magic is ubiquitous across the world and throughout history. Yet if witchcraft is acknowledged as a persistent presence in the medieval and early modern eras, practical magic by contrast – performed to a useful end for payment, and actually more common than malign spellcasting – has been overlooked. Exploring many hundred instances of daily magical usage, and setting these alongside a range of imaginative and didactic literatures, Tabitha Stanmore demonstrates the entrenched nature of 'service' magic in premodern English society. This, she shows, was a type of spellcraft for needs that nothing else could address: one well established by the time of the infamous witch trials. The book explores perceptions of magical practitioners by clients and neighbours, and the way such magic was utilised by everyone: from lowliest labourer to highest lord. Stanmore reveals that – even if technically illicit – magic was for most people an accepted, even welcome, aspect of everyday life.
Author: Keagan Brewer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317430344
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages explores the response by medieval society to tales of marvels and the supernatural, which ranged from firm belief to outright rejection, and asks why the believers believed, and why the skeptical disbelieved. Despite living in a world whose structures more often than not supported belief, there were still a great many who disbelieved, most notably scholastic philosophers who began a polemical programme against belief in marvels. Keagan Brewer reevaluates the Middle Ages’ reputation as an era of credulity by considering the evidence for incidences of marvels, miracles and the supernatural and demonstrating the reasons people did and did not believe in such things. Using an array of contemporary sources, he shows that medieval responders sought evidence in the commonality of a report, similarity of one event to another, theological explanations and from people with status to show that those who believed in marvels and miracles did so only because the wonders had passed evidentiary testing. In particular, he examines both emotional and rational reactions to wondrous phenomena, and why some were readily accepted and others rejected. This book is an important contribution to the history of emotions and belief in the Middle Ages.
Author: Mishtooni Bose
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004309853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
In A Companion to Lollardy, Patrick Hornbeck sums up what we know about lollardy, describes, its fortunes in the hands of its most recent chroniclers, explores the many individuals, practices, texts, and beliefs that have been called lollard.
Author: Tara Williams
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271081767
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182
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Book Description
This multidisciplinary volume illustrates how representations of magic in fourteenth-century romances link the supernatural, spectacle, and morality in distinctive ways. Supernatural marvels represented in vivid visual detail are foundational to the characteristic Middle English genres of romance and hagiography. In Middle English Marvels, Tara Williams explores the didactic and affective potential of secular representations of magic and shows how fourteenth-century English writers tested the limits of that potential. Drawing on works by Augustine, Gervase of Tilbury, Chaucer, and the anonymous poets of Sir Orfeo and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, among others, Williams examines how such marvels might convey moral messages within and beyond the narrative. She analyzes examples from both highly canonical and more esoteric texts and examines marvels that involve magic and transformation, invoke visual spectacle, and invite moral reflection on how one should relate to others. Within this shared framework, Williams finds distinct concerns—chivalry, identity, agency, and language—that intersect with the marvelous in significant ways. Integrating literary and historical approaches to the study of magic, this volume convincingly shows how certain fourteenth-century texts eschewed the predominant trends and developed a new theory of the marvelous. Williams’s engaging, erudite study will be of special interest to scholars of the occult, the medieval and early modern eras, and literature.
