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Medieval scholars and cultural historians have recently turned their attention to the question of “smells” and what olfactory sensations reveal about society in general and holiness in particular. Sacred Scents in Early Christianity and Islam contributes to that conversation, explaining how early Christians and Muslims linked the “sweet smell of sanctity” with ideals of the body and sexuality; created boundaries and sacred space; and imagined their emerging communal identity. Most importantly, scent—itself transgressive and difficult to control—signaled transition and transformation between categories of meaning. Christian and Islamic authors distinguished their own fragrant ethi...
Chosen among Women: Mary and Fatima in Medieval Christianity and Shi`ite Islam combines historical analysis with the tools of gender studies and religious studies to compare the roles of the Virgin Mary in medieval Christianity with those of Fatima, daughter of the prophet Muhammad, in Shi`ite Islam. The book explores the proliferation of Marian imagery in Late Antiquity through the Church fathers and popular hagiography. It examines how Merovingian authors assimilated powerful queens and abbesses to a Marian prototype to articulate their political significance and, at the same time, censure holy women's public charisma. Mary Thurlkill focuses as well on the importance of Fatima in the evolu...
This book focuses on history, and the use of Mary as either a bridge or barrier between Islam and Christianity.
First major feminist reading of Fatima's sermon of protest, presenting the Prophet's daughter as a serious theologian and social activist.
Holy Body: Gender and Sexual Difference in Theological Anthropology and Ecclesiology argues that all bodies across sexual difference are procreative. The author lays the ground for her argument with chapters that summarize the current debate over the gender binary in theology, modern scientific evidence about sexual difference, philosophical arguments about gender as a social construction, the development of the gender binary in Christian history, and the effects of the gender binary today. With this foundation laid, Brianne Bell Jacobs argues for a theological anthropology in which all bodies, by performatively expanding who is loved, are generative. Then, in the context of Roman Catholic e...
This book explores the interface of bodies and religion by investigating the impacts human-induced global warming will have on the embodied and performed practices of religion in ecologies of place. By utilizing analytical insights from religion and nature theory, posthumanism, queer ecologies, ecological animisms, indigenous knowledges, material feminisms, and performance studies the book advocates for a need to update how religious studies theorizes bodies and religion. It does so by in the first half of the book advocating for religious studies as a field, and the academy as a whole, to take the ongoing and deleterious future impacts of climate change seriously--to re-member that those la...
Intro -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1. The English Lives of Mary -- 2. John of Garland, Gram/Marian -- 3. The Musical Mother Tongue in Anglo-Latin Poetry for Meditation -- 4. Chaucer and Dame School -- 5. Mary's Mild Voice in the Middle English Lyrics -- 6. Margery Kempe and the Virgin Birth of Her Book -- Conclusion -- Selected Bibliography -- Index.
Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynda Coon unpacks these paradoxical representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women's roles in the early Christian centuries. Coon discerns three distinct paradigms for female sanctity in saints' lives and patristic and monastic writings. Women are recurrently figured as repentant desert hermits, wealthy widows, or cloistered ascetic nuns, and biblical discourse informs the narrative content, rhetorical strategies, and symbolic meanings of these texts in complex and multival...
Drawing from nature experience, dance, anthropology, and shamanism, Dr. Eline Kieft explores improvised movement as a pathway to insight, healing, transformation, and direct interaction with source. Dancing in the Muddy Temple takes the reader on a journey through multiple layers of embodied spirituality based in movement and embedded in the land. Addressing existential questions outside of mainstream religions, the book seeks possibilities for a spirituality that dances with the sacred life force within and all around us. Starting within the body, and always using movement as a way of knowing, Kieft expands on further concrete and subtle layers of connection. A sensorial immersion in the la...
Stories about the Virgin Mary began to appear in the second century, a spring of tradition that branched off from the mainstream teaching of the canonical gospels. This developed into a torrent of texts about Mary, her relationship with God and her motherhood. This book translates and interprets such stories about Mary from the beginnings of Christianity to modern times. The narrative or story theology of these works shows her to be a partner with her son Jesus in the work of salvation. Early stories depict Mary as chosen from childhood, and she is shown at the Last Supper with other women. Medieval tales recount the miracles she works to cure both physical and moral failings. Stories of her appearances--Our Lady of Guadalupe (Mexico), Our Lady of Lourdes (France) and Our Lady of Fatima (Portugal)--have been told and retold across the centuries. Today, Mary is still seen as an icon of women's agency, celebrated in song, film and art of every kind. This book uncovers her history and reveals her power through the life and message of this woman of faith.