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Moral Conversion in Scripture, Self, and Society offers a broad – historical, theological, and philosophical – reflection on the phenomenon of moral conversion. Examining life-changing transformations within trajectories of spiritual and moral growth, the contributors to this volume show how individuals move, or should move, in one way or another, away from the pursuit of solipsistic satisfactions, through the practice of self-awareness and the performance of social attentiveness, toward the prioritization of shared values. Together, they address the difficulty of realizing in selves and societies some sort of definitive moral conversion – of final turn toward the truly good. Contributors are: David Couturier, Matthew Dugandzic, Erik Eynikel, Aaron Gies, Patrick Jones, Angela Knobel, Daniel Lightsey, Peter Lovas, Giulia Lovison, Krijn Pansters, Hanna Roose, Anton ten Klooster, Willem Marie Speelman, Mark Therrien, Luke Togni, Brian Treanor, Louke van Wensveen, Archibald van Wieringen, and Jamie Washam.
A investigation into the thirteenth-century Norwich circumcision case and its meaning for Christians and Jews In 1230, Jews in the English city of Norwich were accused of having seized and circumcised a five-year-old Christian boy named Edward because they "wanted to make him a Jew." Contemporaneous accounts of the "Norwich circumcision case," as it came to be called, recast this episode as an attempted ritual murder. Contextualizing and analyzing accounts of this event and others, with special attention to the roles of children, Paola Tartakoff sheds new light on medieval Christian views of circumcision. She shows that Christian characterizations of Jews as sinister agents of Christian apos...
The century between c. 650 and 750 was one of major religious, social and political transformations in northwest Europe. In the Frankish kingdom, clerics from Ireland and Britain played an important role in these processes. One of the most prominent figures to emerge from this period was Willibrord – a Northumbrian educated in Ireland who became the first bishop of Utrecht and founded the monastery of Echternach in modern Luxembourg. Through his involvement in the Christianisation of Frisia, his cooperation with the eastern Frankish elite, including the ancestors of Charlemagne, and his connection with the pope, Willibrord was at the centre of the developments which led to the formation of...
In this volume, leading scholars provide essay-length coverage of slavery in a wide variety of medieval contexts around the globe.
The conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, occurring in the golden glint of the sunset of the Ancient World, was not a concluding chapter but an opening one. The sequential conversion of the barbarian tribal invaders of the Empire and the subsequent conversion of those beyond the old imperial limes was the making of European culture, a prototypical Christendom. The process has been well studied from the perspective of kings, popes, and missionaries by some of the finest historians of our era. But the missing component in this civilizational change is that of the decisive influence of barbarian queens, Christian women who led their royal husbands in the dangerous journey from one religion to another. In recent years, much has been done to illuminate queenship in general, but a study focusing specifically on the queen’s role in conversion is lacking. This book seeks to remedy that and provide a missing piece in women’s history.
In vormodernen Monarchien beobachten wir Widerspruch und Widerstand gegen einzelne Herrscher, ihre politischen Entscheidungen und ihre Verwaltung, aber in der Regel keine direkten Angriffe auf die Ordnungsprinzipien und das politische System. Wenn Unzufriedenheit zu Aufständen und Revolten führten, blieb es normalerweise bei einem bloßen Austausch des Regenten. Subtilere Methoden der Herrscherkritik konnten sich mittels fester Usancen oder spezifischer Codes und Spielregeln innerhalb des legalen Rahmens Gehör verschaffen und zielten darauf ab, die Qualitäten des Regenten zu verbessern oder spezifische Modi der Amtsführung zu reformieren. Diese verschiedenen Formen und Praktiken von Her...
A revelatory account of how Christian monks identified distraction as a fundamental challenge—and how their efforts to defeat it can inform ours, more than a millennium later. The digital era is beset by distraction, and it feels like things are only getting worse. At times like these, the distant past beckons as a golden age of attention. We fantasize about escaping our screens. We dream of recapturing the quiet of a world with less noise. We imagine retreating into solitude and singlemindedness, almost like latter-day monks. But although we think of early monks as master concentrators, a life of mindfulness did not, in fact, come to them easily. As historian Jamie Kreiner demonstrates in...
Female Power and Religious Change in the Medieval Near East engages with two levels of scholarly discussion that are all too often dealt with separately in modern scholarship: the Islamization of the Near East and the place of women in pre-modern Near Eastern societies. It outlines how these two lines of inquiry can and should be read in an integrative manner. Major historical themes such as conversion to Islam, Islamization, religious violence, and the regulation of Muslim/non-Muslim ties are addressed and reframed by attending to the relatively hidden, yet highly meaningful, role that women played throughout this period. This book is about the history of Islam from the perspective of femal...
As the Roman Empire in the west crumbled over the course of the fifth century, new polities, ruled by 'barbarian' elites, arose in Gaul, Hispania, Italy, and Africa. This political order occurred in tandem with growing fissures within Christianity, as the faithful divided over two doctrines, Nicene and Homoian, that were a legacy of the fourth-century controversy over the nature of the Trinity. In this book, Marta Szada offers a new perspective on early medieval Christianity by exploring how interplays between religious diversity and politics shaped post-Roman Europe. Interrogating the ecclesiastical competition between Nicene and Homoian factions, she provides a nuanced interpretation of religious dissent and the actions of Christians in successor kingdoms as they manifested themselves in politics and social practices. Szada's study reveals the variety of approaches that can be applied to understanding the conflict and coexistence between Nicenes and Homoians, showing how religious divisions shaped early medieval Christian culture.