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After a century of Rationalist scepticism and political upheaval, the nineteenth century awakened to a fierce battle between the forces of secularization and the crusaders of a Christian revival. From this battlefield arose an art movement that would become the torchbearer of a new religious art: Nazarenism. From its inception in the Lukasbund of 1809, this art was controversial. It nonetheless succeeded in becoming a lingua franca in religious circles throughout Europe, America, and the world at large. This is the first major study of the evolution, structure, and conceptual complexity of this archetypically nineteenth-century language of belief. The Nazarene quest for a modern religious id...
This is the first comprehensive study of Greek language ordinary chants (Gloria/Doxa, Credo/Pisteuo, Sanctus/Hagios and Agnus Dei/Amnos tu theu) in Western manuscripts from the 9th to 14th centuries. These chants – known as “Missa Graeca” – have been the subject of academic research for over a hundred years. So far, however, research has been almost exclusively from a Western point of view, without knowledge of the Byzantine sources. For the first time, this book presents an in-depth analysis of these chants and their historical, linguistic and theological-liturgical environment from a Byzantine perspective. The new approach enables the author to refute numerous (and largely contradictory) theories on the origin and development of the Missa Graeca and provides new answers to old questions.
While comparative studies on purity and impurity presented in the last decades have mostly concentrated on the ancient world or on modern developments, this volume focusses the hitherto comparatively neglected period between ca. 300 and 1600 c. E. The collection is innovative because it not only combines papers on both European and Asian cultures but also considers a wide variety of religions and confessions. The articles are written by leading experts in the field and are presented in six systematic sections. This analytical categorization facilitates understanding the functional spectrum that the binomial purity and impurity could cover in past societies. The volume thus presents an in-depth comparative analysis of a category of paramount importance for interfaith relations and processes of transfer. Contributors are: Aziz al-Azmeh, Matthias Bley, Sven Bretfeld, Miriam Czock, Licia Di Giacinto, Hans-Werner Goetz, Elisabeth Hollender, Nikolas Jaspert, Stefan Köck, Stefan Leder, Hanna Liss, Christopher MacEvitt, Hermann-Josef Röllicke, Paolo Santangelo, and Ephraim Shoham-Steiner.
The ordines coronationis are essentially the scripts for the coronation of Frankish and French sovereigns. Combining detailed religious, ceremonial, and political material, they are an extraordinarily important source for the study of individual rulers or dynasties, as well as for the study of kingship, queenship, and the evolution of political institutions. Complete in two volumes, Richard A. Jackson's is the first full edition of these texts, including all the ordines from the early thirteenth century through the end of the fifteenth century, a period during which the texts shift from Latin to the vernacular, and the institutions of kingship become distinctively French.
The real history and meaning of the Feast of Fools—usually misunderstood as a sacrilegious festival.
Spanning the backs of choir stalls above the heads of the canons and their officials, large-scale tapestries of saints' lives functioned as both architectural elements and pictorial narratives in the late Middle Ages. In an extensively illustrated book that features sixteen color plates, Laura Weigert examines the role of these tapestries in ritual performances. She situates individual tapestries within their architectural and ceremonial settings, arguing that the tapestries contributed to a process of storytelling in which the clerical elite of late medieval cities legitimated and defended their position in the social sphere.Weigert focuses on three of the most spectacular and little-studie...