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In tenth- and eleventh-century England, Anglo-Saxon Christians retained an old folk belief in elves as extremely dangerous creatures capable of harming unwary humans. To ward off the afflictions caused by these invisible beings, Christian priests modified traditional elf charms by adding liturgical chants to herbal remedies. In Popular Religion in Late Saxon England, Karen Jolly traces this cultural intermingling of Christian liturgy and indigenous Germanic customs and argues that elf charms and similar practices represent the successful Christianization of native folklore. Jolly describes a dual process of conversion in which Anglo-Saxon culture became Christianized but at the same time left its own distinct imprint on Christianity. Illuminating the creative aspects of this dynamic relationship, she identifies liturgical folk medicine as a middle ground between popular and elite, pagan and Christian, magic and miracle. Her analysis, drawing on the model of popular religion to redefine folklore and magic, reveals the richness and diversity of late Saxon Christianity.
Between the age of St. Augustine and the sixteenth century reformations magic continued to be both a matter of popular practice and of learned inquiry. This volume deals with its use in such contexts as healing and divination and as an aspect of the knowledge of nature's occult virtues and secrets.>
Lum diddle lum diddle lum diddle lo, lum diddle lum diddle le. Mr. Goat has a special talent. But all of his life, he's hidden that talent because he was afraid the other animals would make fun of him. One day, encouraged by the songbirds, Mr. Goat dared to sing aloud and something wonderful happened! Join Karen Jolly in The Singing Goat—a story about sharing your God-given talents with the world.
Interrogations of materiality and geography, narrative framework and boundaries, and the ways these scholarly pursuits ripple out into the wider cultural sphere. Early medieval England as seen through the lens of comparative and interconnected histories is the subject of this volume. Drawn from a range of disciplines, its chapters examine artistic, archaeological, literary, and historical artifacts, converging around the idea that the period may not only define itself, but is often defined from other perspectives, specifically here by modern scholarship. The first part considers the transmission of material culture across borders, while querying the possibilities and limits of comparative an...
This collection explores multiple artefactual, visual, textual and conceptual adaptations, developments and exchanges across the medieval world in the context of their contemporary and subsequent re-appropriations.
New readings demonstrate the centrality of the rood to the visual, material and devotional cultures of the Middle Ages, its richness and complexity.
The cross pervaded the whole of Anglo-Saxon culture, in art, in sculpture, in religion, in medicine. These new essays explore its importance and significance.
The Codex Amiatinus and its “Sister” Bibles examines the full Bibles made at Wearmouth–Jarrow under Ceolfrith (d. 716) and Bede (d. 735), and the circumstances of their production. Amiatinus is the oldest Latin full Bible to survive largely intact.
Uncovers new insights about the Chester-le-Street scribes and their tumultuous time, rife as it was with various political tensions, from vikings and local Northumbrian nobles to an increasingly dominant West Saxon monarchy.
It is difficult to assess an explanation of a belief, or a belief system in words, Tobienne begins, and harder still to assign signification to such inexplicable conviction s]. This book addresses the often blurred line s] between magic, religion, and