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Although John Calvin often likened sacramental confession to butchery, the Council of Trent declared that for those who approached it worthily, it was made easy by its "great benefits and consolations." Thomas Tentler describes and evaluates the effectiveness of sacramental confession as a functioning institution designed "to cause guilt as well as cure guilt," seeing it in its proper place as a part of the social fabric of the Middle Ages. The author examines the institution of confession in practice as well as in theory, providing an analysis of a practical literature whose authors wanted to explain as clearly as they safely could what confessors and penitents had to believe, do, feel, say...
Shakespearean Tragedy brings together fifteen major contemporary essays on individual plays and the genre as a whole. Each piece has been carefully chosen as a key intervention in its own right and as a representative of an influential critical approach to the genre. The collection as a whole, therefore, provides both a guide and explanation to the various ways in which contemporary criticism has determined our understanding of the tragedies, and the opportunity for assessing the wider issues such criticism raises. The collection begins by considering the impact of social semiotics on approaches to the tragedies, before moving on to deal, in turn, with the various forms of Marxist criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Poststructuralism.
A critical history of European sovereignty and property rights as the foundation of the international order in 1300-1870.
Amanda Porterfield offers a survey of ideas, rituals, and experiences of healing in Christian history. Jesus himself performed many miracles of healing, and Christians down the ages have seen this as a prominent feature of their faith. Indeed, healing is one of the most constant themes in the long and sprawling history of Christianity. Changes in healing beliefs and practices offer a window into changes in religious authority, church structure, and ideas about sanctity, history, resurrection, and the kingdom of God. Porterfield chronicles these changes, at the same time shedding important new light on the universality of religious healing. Finally, she looks at recent scientific findings about religion's biological effects, and considers the relation of these findings to ages-old traditions about belief and healing.
This volume is the first to explore the breadth of vision types in late medieval English lay spirituality. Analyzing 1000+ accounts, it proposes that visions buttressed five core dynamics (relating to purgatory, saints, demons, sacramental faith, and the Church's authority).
This is the first collection of criticism on Shakespeare's romances to register the impact of modern literary theory on interpretations of these plays. Kiernan Ryan brings together the most important recent essays on Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, the greatest of the `last plays', staging a dynamic debate between feminist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and new historicist views of the masterpieces Shakespeare wrote at the close of his career. The book aims not only to anthologise accounts of the last plays by leading Shakespearean critics, including Stephen Greenblatt, Janet Adelman, Leah Marcus, Howard Felperin and Steven Mullaney, but also to dramatise what is ...
Sacred Stories brings together the work of leading scholars writing on the history of religion and religiosity in late imperial Russia during the critical decades preceding the 1917 revolutions. Embodying new research and new methodologies, this book reshapes our understanding of the place of religion in modern Russian history. Topics examined include miraculous icons and healing, pilgrim narratives, confessions, women and Orthodox domesticity, marriage and divorce, conversion and tolerance, Jewish folk beliefs, mysticism in Russian art, and philosophical aspects of Orthodox religious thought. Sacred Stories demonstrates that belief, spirituality, and the sacred were powerful and complex cultural expressions central to Russian political, social, economic, and cultural life. Contributors are Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heather J. Coleman, Gregory L. Freeze, Nadieszda Kizenko, Alexei A. Kurbanovsky, Roy R. Robson, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Gabriella Safran, Vera Shevzov, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Mark Steinberg, Paul Valliere, William G. Wagner, Paul W. Werth, and Christine D. Worobec.
Receptive to influences of such diverse theorists as Derrida, Jameson, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacan and Althusser, materialist Shakespeare criticism has long since left behind the days of 'vulgar' Marxism and has emerged as a rich interpretive practice. The essays chosen for this book cover all of Shakespeare's dramatic genres and include works on King Lear, Othello, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, Henry V, Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew and Julius Caesar. Contributors: Paul Delany; Louis Adrian Montrose; Walter Cohen; Alan Sinfield; Stephen Greenblatt; Michael D. Bristol; Katherine Eismann Maus; James R. Andreas; Robert Weimann; Graham Holderness; Lynda E. Boose; John Drakakis; Claire McEacherm; Frederic Jameson; and Ivo Kamps.
At the close of the sixteenth century, despite Protestant attempts to discourage popular devotion to saints and shrines, the Roman Church in Bavaria initiated a propagandistic campaign through the publishing of pilgrimage books and pamphlets. Philip Soergel's cogent exploration of this little-known pilgrimage literature yields a vivid portrait of religion before, during, and after the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. These "advertisements," combining testimonies of miracles with fantastic legends about shrines, fueled the conflict between Catholics and Protestants and helped shape a distinctive Catholic historical consciousness. Soergel stresses the power of the printed word as a defense...