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In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Franciscan friar John of Rupescissa sent a dramatic warning to his followers: the end times were coming; the apocalypse was near. Rupescissa's teachings were unique in his era. He claimed that knowledge of the natural world, and alchemy in particular, could act as a defense against the calamity of the last days. He treated alchemy as medicine (his work was the conceptual forerunner of pharmacology), and reflected emerging technologies and views that sought to combat famine, plague, religious persecution, and war. In order to understand scientific knowledge as it is today, Leah DeVun asks that we revisit the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, and the Avignon Papacy through Rupescissa's eyes. The advances he pioneered, along with the exciting strides made by his contemporaries, shed critical light on future developments in medicine, pharmacology, and chemistry.
How Albert the Great's Speculum Astonomiae Was Interpreted and Used by Four Centuries of Readers : A Study in Late Medieval Medicine, Astronomy, and Astrology
In The Lay Saint, Mary Harvey Doyno investigates the phenomenon of saintly cults that formed around pious merchants, artisans, midwives, domestic servants, and others in the medieval communes of northern and central Italy. Drawing on a wide array of sources—vitae documenting their saintly lives and legends, miracle books, religious art, and communal records—Doyno uses the rise of and tensions surrounding these civic cults to explore medieval notions of lay religiosity, charismatic power, civic identity, and the church's authority in this period. Although claims about laymen's and laywomen's miraculous abilities challenged the church's expanding political and spiritual dominion, both papa...
More than any other topic, prophecy represents the point at which the Divine meets the human, the Absolute meets the relative. How can a human being attain the Word of God? In what manner does God, when conceived as eternal and transcendent, address corporeal, transitory creatures? What happens to God's divine Truth when it is beheld by minds limited in their power to apprehend, and influenced by the intellectual currents of their time and place? How were these issues viewed by the great Jewish philosophers of the past, who took the divine communication and all it entails seriously, while at the same time desired to understand it as much as humanly possible in the course of dealing with a my...
Praise for the first edition: "Aberth wears his very considerable and up-to-date scholarship lightly and his study of a series of complex and somber calamites is made remarkably vivid." -- Barrie Dobson, Honorary Professor of History, University of York The later Middle Ages was a period of unparalleled chaos and misery -in the form of war, famine, plague, and death. At times it must have seemed like the end of the world was truly at hand. And yet, as John Aberth reveals in this lively work, late medieval Europeans' cultural assumptions uniquely equipped them to face up postively to the huge problems that they faced. Relying on rich literary, historical and material sources, the book brings ...
"The essays in this volume examine the impact of printing on the expression, representation, and reproduction of sanctity on the Italian peninsula between 1400 and 1600 and how the imperatives of cult were expressed in various media, both old and new. In so doing, they advance a fuller and more nuanced understanding of both cult and media, and mark the nexus of cult and media as a site of cultural production and innovation. They are thus initial steps in a new area and an invitation to further study of saints of all sorts--canonized, popularly recognized, or self-proclaimed--in the fluid media environment of early modernity."--
In Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski looks beyond the political and ecclesiastical storm and finds an outpouring of artistic, literary, and visionary responses to one of the great calamities of the late Middle Ages.
Inspired by the work of eminent scholar Richard Kieckhefer, The Sacred and the Sinister explores the ambiguities that made (and make) medieval religion and magic so difficult to differentiate. The essays in this collection investigate how the holy and unholy were distinguished in medieval Europe, where their characteristics diverged, and the implications of that deviation. In the Middle Ages, the natural world was understood as divinely created and infused with mysterious power. This world was accessible to human knowledge and susceptible to human manipulation through three modes of engagement: religion, magic, and science. How these ways of understanding developed in light of modern notions...
Hagiography and the History of Latin Christendom, 500–1500 shows the historical value of texts celebrating saints—both the most abundant medieval source material and among the most difficult to use. Hagiographical sources present many challenges: they are usually anonymous, often hard to date, full of topoi, and unstable. Moreover, they are generally not what we would consider factually accurate. The volume’s twenty-one contributions draw on a range of disciplines and employ a variety of innovative methods to address these challenges and reach new discoveries about the medieval world that extend well beyond the study of sanctity. They show the rich potential of hagiography to enhance our knowledge of that world, and some of the ways to unlock it. Contributors are Ellen Arnold, Helen Birkett, Edina Bozoky, Emma Campbell, Adrian Cornell du Houx, David Defries, Albrecht Diem, Cynthia Hahn, Samantha Kahn Herrick, J.K. Kitchen, Jamie Kreiner, Klaus Krönert, Mathew Kuefler, Katherine J. Lewis, Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, Charles Mériaux, Paul Oldfield, Sara Ritchey, Catherine Saucier, Laura Ackerman Smoller, and Ineke van ‘t Spijker. See inside the book.
“This amply illustrated, attractive book is valuable for dress history scholars . . . [an] ideal textbook for courses on clothing and cultural history.” —The Journal of Dress History Ottoman Dress and Design in the West is a richly illustrated exploration of the relationship between West and Near East through the visual culture of dress. Charlotte Jirousek examines the history of dress and fashion in the broader context of western relationships with the Mediterranean world from the dawn of Islam through the end of the twentieth century. The significance of dress is made apparent by the author’s careful attention to its political, economic, and cultural context. The reader comes to un...