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In this absorbing book, Michael Goodich explores the changing perception of the miracle in medieval Western society. He employs a wealth of primary sources, including canonization dossiers, hagiographical texts, theological treatises and sermons, to examine the Christian church's desire to create a sounder legal definition of the miracle.
As war, pestilence, and famine spread through Europe in the Middle Ages, so did reports of miracles, of hopeless victims wondrously saved from disaster. These "rescue miracles," recorded by over one hundred fourteenth-century cults, are the basis of Michael Goodich's account of the miraculous in everyday medieval life. Rescue miracles offer a wide range of voices rarely heard in medieval history, from women and children to peasants and urban artisans. They tell of salvation not just from the ravages of nature and war, but from the vagaries of a violent society—crime, unfair judicial practices, domestic squabbles, and communal or factional conflict. The stories speak to a collapse of confid...
Sinds de elfde eeuw (Gregoriaanse hervormingsbeweging) worden er vastberaden pogingen gedaan de katholieke seksuele moraal dwingend op te leggen aan een vaak onverschillig publiek. Er waren evenwel uitzonderingen, vooral ten aanzien van vorsten.
Seldom heard from in modern times, those on the margins of Medieval Europe have much to tell us about the society that defined them. More than just a fascinating cast of characters, the visionaries and sexual dissidents, the suicidal and psychologically unbalanced, the lepers and converts of Medieval times reveal the fears of a people for whom life was made both meaningful and terrifying by the sacred. After centuries of historical silence, these and other disenfranchised members of the medieval public have been given voice by Michael Goodich in a unique collection of texts from the mid-eleventh through the fourteenth century. Translated from their original Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic, these t...
This book explores the relationship between the writings of the saint biographer, the hagiographer and contemporary medical, theological and pedagogical sources. Concentrating on a period of great economic and social advance prior to the crises of the fourteenth century, the author determines whether the theoretical musings of the medieval 'developmental psychologists' were the product of changing material and demographic circumstances. It represents a unique attempt to compare Jewish and Christian sources, exploits previously unexamined materials, and for the first time attempts to link changes in attitudes toward the various stages of life to contemporary demographic, economic and social development. Contents: Introduction-Study of Life Cycle in the Late Middle Ages; Prolegomena to the Sources; Common Themes of Life Cycle Theory; Infancy and Childhood; Adolescence; The Sexual Strains of Late Adolescence and Early Adulthood; and Adulthood and Old Age.
Medieval clerics believed that original sin had rendered their "fallen bodies" vulnerable to corrupting impulses—particularly those of a sexual nature. They feared that their corporeal frailty left them susceptible to demonic forces bent on penetrating and polluting their bodies and souls. Drawing on a variety of canonical and other sources, Fallen Bodies examines a wide-ranging set of issues generated by fears of pollution, sexuality, and demonology. To maintain their purity, celibate clerics combated the stain of nocturnal emissions; married clerics expelled their wives onto the streets and out of the historical record; an exemplum depicting a married couple having sex in church was told...
Seven hundred years ago, executioners led a Welsh rebel named William Cragh to a wintry hill to be hanged. They placed a noose around his neck, dropped him from the gallows, and later pronounced him dead. But was he dead? While no less than nine eyewitnesses attested to his demise, Cragh later proved to be very much alive, his resurrection attributed to the saintly entreaties of the defunct Bishop Thomas de Cantilupe. The Hanged Man tells the story of this putative miracle--why it happened, what it meant, and how we know about it. The nine eyewitness accounts live on in the transcripts of de Cantilupe's canonization hearings, and these previously unexamined documents contribute not only to a...
This is a paperback edition of a collection of ten papers by different authors on the cult of saints, first published in hard covers in 1983. Six have been translated from French including a pioneering study by Robert Hertz, one of Durkheim's most eminent pupils. The editor provides a wide-ranging general and historical introduction, and a 100- page annotated bibliography covering material on the subject in all disciplines and in four main languages.
Hagiography is a rich source for our knowledge of many aspects of medieval culture and tradition. The lives and miracles of the saints may be read on several levels, both as an expression of the dominant ideology and as a reflection of long-term themes in medieval society. The essays in this volume attempt to exploit the Latin hagiographical sources of the medieval West as means of illuminating our understanding of a variety of such themes: childhood and adolescence, elite and popular religion, sainthood and politics, the mechanism of canonisation, women in the church, dreams, visions and the concept of the miraculous, and the convergence of heresy, disbelief and piety.