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This book is a collaborative contribution that expands our understanding of how interfaith relations, both real and imagined, developed across medieval Iberia and the Mediterranean. The volume pays homage to the late Olivia Remie Constable’s scholarship and presents innovative, thought-provoking, interdisciplinary investigations of cross-cultural exchange, ranging widely across time and geography. Divided into two parts, “Perceptions of the ‘Other’” and “Interfaith relations,” this volume features scholars engaging with church art, literature, historiography, scientific treatises, and polemics, in order to study how the religious “Other” was depicted to serve different purposes and audiences. There are also microhistories that examine the experiences of individual families, classes, and communities as they interacted with one another in their own specific contexts. Several of these studies draw their source material from church and state archives as well as jurisprudential texts, and span the centuries from the late medieval to early modern periods.
An unprecedented art-historical account of practices of image ingestion from ancient Egypt to the twentieth century Eating and drinking images may seem like an anomalous notion but, since antiquity, in the European and Mediterranean worlds, people have swallowed down frescoes, icons, engravings, eucharistic hosts stamped with images, heraldic wafers, marzipan figures, and other sculpted dishes. Either specifically made for human consumption or diverted from their original purpose so as to be ingested, these figured artifacts have been not only gazed upon but also incorporated—taken into the body—as solids or liquids. How can we explain such behavior? Why take an image into one’s own bo...
"One of the most challenging questions for Christian ecumenical theology is how the relationship between the eucharistic bread and wine and Jesus Christ's body and blood can be appropriately described. This book takes a new approach to controverted questions of eucharistic presence by drawing on cognitive linguistics. Arguing that human cognition is grounded in sensorimotor experience and that phenomena such as metaphor and conceptual blending are basic building blocks of thought, the book proposes that inherited models of eucharistic presence are not necessarily mutually exclusive but can serve as complementary members of a shared ecumenical repertoire. The central element of this repertoir...
In graduate theology programs across the United States and elsewhere, Maxwell Johnson's The Rites of Christian Initiation: Their Evolution and Interpretation has become a standard text. Now Johnson and Paul Bradshaw together offer a companion volume on the historical development of the liturgy and theology of the Eucharist. Like the earlier volume, this study proceeds historically, from the origins of the Eucharist up to our own day. Unlike most studies of this kind, it includes an introduction to and developmental summary of the diverse eucharistic liturgies of the Christian East. It also explores the various Western rites (Ambrosian, Gallican, and Mozarabic) in addition to the Roman. With regard to theological themes, the authors give special attention to the topics of real presence (including the "consecration" of the bread and wine) and eucharistic sacrifice, the most central and most ecumenically challenging issues since the sixteenth-century Reformations. Making the book especially teacher- and student-friendly are the summary points at the end of each chapter. Each chapter also contains an abundance of liturgical texts for ease of reference.
Late Medieval and Renaissance art was surprisingly pushy; its architecture demanded that people move through it in prescribed patterns, its sculptures played elaborate games alternating between concealment and revelation, while its paintings charged viewers with imaginatively moving through them. Viewers wanted to interact with artwork in emotional and/or performative ways. This inventive and personal interface between viewers and artists sometimes conflicted with the Church s prescribed devotional models, and in some cases it complemented them. Artists and patrons responded to the desire for both spontaneous and sanctioned interactions by creating original ways to amplify devotional experie...
The seventeen authors of this volume present an all-round picture of the person, the work, and the influence of the Russian medievalist Aron Gurevich who introduced innovative approaches to scholarship against all odds. Professor Janos Bak, Central European University
Athens and Wittenberg explores how Luther and early Lutheranism did not neglect the classics of Greece and Rome, but continued to draw from the philosophy and poetry of antiquity in their quest to reform the church.
By the end of the fifteenth century, the Eucharist had come to encompass theology, liturgy, art, architecture, and music. In the sixteenth century, each of these dimensions was questioned, challenged, rethought, as western European Christians divided over their central act of worship. This volume offers an introduction to early modern thinking on the Eucharist—as theology, as Christology, as a moment of human and divine communion, as that which the faithful do, as taking place, and as visible and audible. The scholars gathered in this volume speak from a range of disciplines—liturgics, history, history of art, history of theology, philosophy, musicology, and literary theory. The volume t...
Those who have a passing knowledge of John Calvin’s theology and reforms in Geneva in the sixteenth century may picture the confident and mature theologian and preacher without appreciating the various events, people, and circumstances that shaped the man. Before there was Protestantism’s first and eminent systematic theologian, there was the French youth, the law student and humanist, the Protestant convert and homeless exile, the reluctant reformer and anguished city leader. Snapshots of the young Calvin create a collage that give a bigger picture to the grey-bearded Protestant reformer. Eleven scholars of early-modern history have joined in this volume to depict the people, movements, politics, education, sympathizers, nemeses, and controversies from which Calvin immerged in his young adulthood.