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Earlier scholarship has characterized female Franciscanism as an institution established by Clare of Assisi in collaboration with Saint Francis. This understanding is anachronistic, however, and overlooks the more complicated disputes over what it meant for enclosed women to have a mendicant vocation. This book clarifies Clare’s contributions to these debates by distinguishing the historical figure from the uses made of her legacy by the papacy, the Friars Minor, and, most importantly, the enclosed sisters between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. By examining the diversity of female communities and their complicated institutional formation in medieval Italy, it examines how and when Clare was appropriated as a model of spiritual authority by the women to shape their identity as Franciscans.
A People's Church brings together a distinguished international group of historians to provide a sweeping introduction to Christian religious life and institutions in medieval Italy. Each essay treats a single theme as broadly as possible, highlighting both the unique aspects of medieval Christianity on the Italian peninsula and the beliefs and practices it shared with other Christian societies. Because of its long tradition of communal self-governance, Christianity in medieval Italy, perhaps more than anywhere else, was truly a "people's church." At the same time, its exceptional urban wealth and literacy rates, along with its rich and varied intellectual and artistic culture, led to divers...
Southern Italy was conquered by the Norman Hauteville dynasty in the late eleventh century after over five hundred years of continuous Byzantine rule. At a stroke, the region's Greek Christian inhabitants were cut off from their Orthodox compatriots in Byzantium and became subject to the spiritual and legal jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic popes. Nonetheless, they continued to follow the religious laws of the Byzantine church; out of thirty-six surviving manuscripts of Byzantine canon law produced between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, the majority date to the centuries after the Norman conquest. Byzantine Religious Law in Medieval Italy is a historical study of these manuscripts, exp...
Since 1971, the International Congress for Neo-Latin Studies has been organised every three years in various cities of Europe and North America. In August 2015, Vienna in Austria was the venue of the sixteenth Neo-Latin conference, held by the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies. The proceedings of the Vienna conference have been collected in this volume under the motto “Contextus Neolatini – Neo-Latin in Local, Trans-Regional and Worldwide Contexts – Neulatein im lokalen, transregionalen und weltweiten Kontext”. Sixty-five individual and five plenary papers spanning the period from the Renaissance to the present offer a variety of themes covering a range of genres such as history, literature, philology, art history, and religion. The contributions will be of relevance not only for scholarly readers, but also for an interested non-professional audience.
Early in the thirteenth century a young woman named Clare was so moved by the teachings of Francis of Assisi that she renounced her possessions, vowing to live a life of radical poverty. Today Clare is remembered for her relationship with Francis, but her own dedication to poverty and her struggle to gain papal approval for a Franciscan Rule for women is a fascinating story that has not received the attention it deserves. In The Privilege of Poverty, Joan Mueller tells this story, and in so doing she reshapes our understanding of early Franciscan history. Clare knew, as did Francis, that she needed a Rule to preserve the &“privilege of poverty&”&—a papal exemption that gave monasteries...
Holiness on the Move: Mobility and Space in Byzantine Hagiography explores the literary, religious, and social functions of monastic mobility in Byzantine hagiography, touching on aspects of space, narrative, and identity. The ten chapters included in this volume highlight the multifaceted and rich nature of travel narratives, exploring topics such as authorship and audience, narrative structure and function, identity-making and practicalities of and discourse on travel. In terms of geographical span, the case studies cover Constantinople and its hinterland, Asia Minor, mainland Greece, Trebizond, the Balkans, and southern Italy and range chronologically from the end of the sixth to the four...
Clare of Assisi: Life, Writings and Spirituality examines Clare not merely as an obedient footnote to the friars, but as a Franciscan founder in her own right who kept primitive Franciscan ideals alive into the middle of the thirteenth century and transposed them into a woman s key. Bringing together the best of international research, the text examines Clare s importance within the early Franciscan milieu and her contribution to the thirteenth-century women's movement. It studies the radicalism of Clare's Franciscan choice, her life within the Monastery of San Damiano, her politicking with Agnes of Prague for the privilege of poverty," and her uniqueness among other women in Gregory IX's Damianite ordo. Following this historical study are critical translations and literary analyses of Clare's four letters to Agnes of Prague as well as a new translation and commentary on Clare s Forma Vitae."
Issues for Feb. 1957-July 1959 include a Checklist of the Vatican manuscript codices available for consultation at the Knights of Columbus Vatican Film Library at St. Louis University, pts. 1-8.
The case studies presented in this volume help illuminate the rationale for the founding of libraries in an age when books were handwritten, thus contributing to the comparative history of libraries. They focus on examples ranging from the seventh to the seventeenth century emanating from the Muslim World, East Asia, Byzantium and Western Europe. Accumulation and preservation are the key motivations for the development of libraries. Rulers, scholars and men of religion were clearly dedicated to collecting books and sought to protect these fragile objects against the various hazards that threatened their survival. Many of these treasured books are long gone, but there remain hosts of evidence enabling one to reconstruct the collections to which they belonged, found in ancient buildings, literary accounts, archival documentation and, most crucially, catalogues. With such material at hand or, in some cases, the manuscripts of a certain library which have come down to us, it is possible to reflect on the nature of these libraries of the past, the interests of their owners, and their role in the intellectual history of the manuscript age.