You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Documents recording the interrogation of sixteen women and the nature of their unusual spiritual practices, now available in a full edition and, for the first time, a full English translation. In September 1332, in the town of Świdnica, an important economic and communication centre of what was then Silesia, a group of sixteen women stood before the Dominican inquisitor, John of Schwenkenfeld, to testify about the local community of beguines, who called themselves the Hooded Sisters or the Daughters of Odelindis. We are fortunate that the original records of this heresy interrogation have survived, preserved as a notarial instrument drawn up shortly afterwards, eventually transferred to the...
Devout laywomen raise a number of provocative questions about gender and religion in the early modern world. How did some groups or individuals evade the Tridentine legislation that required third order women to take solemn vows and observe active and passive enclosure? How did their attempts to exercise a female apostolate (albeit with varying degrees of success and assertiveness) destabilize hierarchies of class and gender? To the extent that their beliefs and practices diverged from approved doctrine and rituals, what insights can they provide into the tensions between official religion and lay religiosity? Addressing these and many other questions, Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World reflects new directions in gender history, offering a more nuanced approach to the paradigm of woman as the prototypical "disciplined" subject of church-state power.
Love Lost in Translation systematically examines the biblical stories and passages that are generally assumed to deal with, or comment on, homoerotic relationships: Noah and Ham, Sodom and Gomorrah, Leviticus 18:22, Deuteronomy 23:17-18, Judges 19, Romans 1:26-27, and 1 Corinthians 6:9. K. Renato Lings convincingly demonstrates that mistranslations of these texts into Greek, Latin and other languages occurred early, and that serious errors continue to be committed by translators today. This explains the painful controversy about same-sex relationships, which has rocked Christian churches for decades.
The late Middle Ages provide us with a fascinating religious landscape. The quest for new religious ideals and intense spirituality can be observed in movements such as the Modern Devotion and the Franciscan Observance, marking the late fourteenth and fifteenth century with new institutional dynamics and the formation of a variety of religious communities. The dissemination of these new religious ideas and ideals profited from the advent of the printing press. It is these subjects that Koen Goudriaan, professor of Medieval History at VU University Amsterdam, has studied for decades. This volume, edited by Anna Dlabačová and Ad Tervoort, presents a collection of eleven of his best essays. It focuses on three themes: the institutional parameters of late medieval religious movements, the cult of remembrance, and the interaction between religious movements and the early printing press. Together, these essays provide a representative sample of Goudriaan’s substantial contribution to scholarship on late medieval history.
As much historiography as reception history, Past Convictions analyzes and explicates the production of historical narratives, the subsequent contestation and appropriation of these narratives, and the insight such activities allows us into how people understand change and its remembrance.
What did it mean to be a Frankish nobleman in an age of reform? How could Carolingian lay nobles maintain their masculinity and their social position, while adhering to new and stricter moral demands by reformers concerning behaviour in war, sexual conduct and the correct use of power? This book explores the complex interaction between Christian moral ideals and social realities, and between religious reformers and the lay political elite they addressed. It uses the numerous texts addressed to a lay audience (including lay mirrors, secular poetry, political polemic, historical writings and legislation) to examine how biblical and patristic moral ideas were reshaped to become compatible with the realities of noble life in the Carolingian empire. This innovative analysis of Carolingian moral norms demonstrates how gender interacted with political and religious thought to create a distinctive Frankish elite culture, presenting a new picture of early medieval masculinity.
In Anglophone literature, historical questions about urban, socio-economic, political, religious, and cultural development have often been answered using Anglo-French, Anglo-Low Countries, and Anglo-Italian paradigms and sources. Medieval Germany has been largely overlooked, seen as a peripheral and irrelevant anomaly. Conversely, scholars from the German Rhineland have mostly remained within the traditions of civic public history and Landesgeschichte. As a result, they rarely engage with the historical questions raised in wider European discourses. This volume challenges these historiographical propensities by offering a fresh perspective on medieval urban Germany. It aims to integrate Cologne and the Rhineland more accurately and equitably into the wider histories of medieval Europe. The book engages with historical questions of wider relevance across both German and European medieval histories. It invites all scholars and students of medieval Europe to utilize Cologne as a key source for their research and writing.
This book offers a chronological and geographical study of royal divorce cases from the Middle Ages through to the Reformation period.
"She declares, so the bishops will write in their report on the council, that she is unworthy to continue as a married woman. 'Before God and his angels' she bares her heart and confesses to them 'every secret relating to the rumor that had arisen.' The 'rumor'--as will become apparent--concerns her sexual relations with her brother. True, the 'inner wound' which she 'confesses' to God and the bishops was not dealt her of her own volition but under duress, but it is in any event so terrible that she no longer feels herself worthy to share a royal or a marital bed or to marry anyone at all. The bishops and abbots allow her, as she had supposedly requested, to enter a convent."--from The Divor...
In the thirteenth century, Paris was the largest city in Western Europe, the royal capital of France, and the seat of one of Europe's most important universities. In this vibrant and cosmopolitan city, the beguines, women who wished to devote their lives to Christian ideals without taking formal vows, enjoyed a level of patronage and esteem that was uncommon among like communities elsewhere. Some Parisian beguines owned shops and played a vital role in the city's textile industry and economy. French royals and nobles financially supported the beguinages, and university clerics looked to the beguines for inspiration in their pedagogical endeavors. The Beguines of Medieval Paris examines these...