Culture and Spirituality in Medieval Europe PDF Download

Author: Giles Constable
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A collection of articles concentrating on culture and spirituality in the 11th and 12th centuries. The cultural articles are concerned with perceptions of time and the past and entry to religious life. The articles on spirituality deal with themes of suffering and attitudes towards the self.

Author: Andrew P. Roach
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131712250X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
Scholars and analysts seeking to illuminate the extraordinary creativity and innovation evident in European medieval cultures and their afterlives have thus far neglected the important role of religious heresy. The papers collected here - reflecting the disciplines of history, literature, theology, philosophy, economics and law - examine the intellectual and social investments characteristic of both deliberate religious dissent such as the Cathars of Languedoc, the Balkan Bogomils, the Hussites of Bohemia and those who knowingly or unknowingly bent or broke the rules, creating their own 'unofficial orthodoxies'. Attempts to understand, police and eradicate all these, through methods such as the Inquisition, required no less ingenuity. The ambivalent dynamic evident in the tensions between coercion and dissent is still recognisable and productive in the world today.

Author: James G. Clark
Publisher: Boydell Press
ISBN: 9781843833215
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Examinations of the culture - artistic, material, musical - of English monasteries in the six centuries between the Conquest and the Dissolution. The cultural remains of England's abbeys and priories have always attracted scholarly attention but too often they have been studied in isolation, appreciated only for their artistic, codicological or intellectual features and notfor the insights they offer into the patterns of life and thought - the underlying norms, values and mentalité - of the communities of men and women which made them. Indeed, the distinguished monastic historian David Knowles doubted there would ever be sufficient evidence to recover "the mentality of the ordinary cloister monk". These twelve essays challenge this view. They exploit newly catalogued and newly discovered evidence - manuscript books, wall paintings, and even the traces of original monastic music - to recover the cultural dynamics of a cross-section of male and female communities. It is often claimed that over time the cultural traditions of the monasteries were suffocated by secular trends but here it is suggested that many houses remained a major cultural force even on the verge of the Reformation. James G. Clark is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. Contributors: DAVID BELL, ROGER BOWERS, JAMES CLARK, BARRIE COLLETT, MARY ERLER, G. R. EVANS, MIRIAM GILL, JOAN GREATREX, JULIAN HASELDINE, J. D. NORTH, ALAN PIPER, AND R. M. THOMSON.

Author: Michael Foster
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443824364
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Nowadays, many take for granted that time is quantifiable and measurable; did the people of medieval Europe feel the same way? How was their perception of time influenced by their religious faith? How did their faith change over time? This book collects various attempts to trace changes to perceptions of time throughout medieval Europe by examining both how time was a spiritual experience for medieval people and how spiritual experiences changed over time in the Middle Ages. The essays in this volume demonstrate from a variety of perspectives that Christian faith was extremely malleable in the late-medieval period, and that various artists, scribes, and writers negotiated with their spiritual tradition. These are the “spiritual temporalities” of the medieval world, and by studying them we gain an understanding of how medieval culture was a dynamic gathering of different voices, movements, and beliefs, which constantly influenced and changed one another.

Author: John Raymond Shinners
Publisher: Peterborough, Ont. : Broadview Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
Comprising a variety of translated documents from the 11th to the early 16th centuries John Shinners' book demonstrates the rich diversity of religious life led by people in medieval Western Europe.

Author: Thomas A. Fudgé
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137566108
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This book examines the broad varieties of religious belief, religious practices, and the influence of religion within medieval society. Religion in the Middle Ages was not monolithic. Medieval religion and the Latin Church are not synonymous. While theology and liturgy are important, an examination of animal trials, gargoyles, last judgments, various aspects of the medieval underworld, and the quest for salvation illuminate lesser known dimensions of religion in the Middle Ages. Several themes run throughout the book including visual culture, heresy and heretics, law and legal procedure, along with sexuality and an awareness of mentalities and anxieties. Although an expanse of 800 years has passed, the remains of those other Middle Ages can be seen today, forcing us to reassess our evaluations of this alluring and often overlooked past.

Author: Christopher Dawson
Publisher: Image
ISBN: 0307569160
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
In this new edition of his classic work, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Christopher Dawson addresses two of the most pressing subjects of our day: the origin of Europe and the religious roots of Western culture. With the magisterial sweep of Toynbee, to whom he is often compared, Dawson tells here the tale of medieval Christendom. From the brave travels of sixth-century Irish monks to the grand synthesis of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, Dawson brilliantly shows how vast spiritual movements arose from tiny origins and changed the face of medieval Europe from one century to the next. The legacy of those years of ferment remains with us in the great cathedrals, Gregorian chant, and the works of Giotto and Dante. Even more, though, for Dawson these centuries charged the soul of the West with a spiritual concern -- a concern that he insists "can never be entirely undone except by the total negation or destruction of Western man himself."

Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110434873
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 551

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Book Description
Death is not only the final moment of life, it also casts a huge shadow on human society at large. People throughout time have had to cope with death as an existential experience, and this also, of course, in the premodern world. The contributors to the present volume examine the material and spiritual conditions of the culture of death, studying specific buildings and spaces, literary works and art objects, theatrical performances, and medical tracts from the early Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century. Death has always evoked fear, terror, and awe, it has puzzled and troubled people, forcing theologians and philosophers to respond and provide answers for questions that seem to evade real explanations. The more we learn about the culture of death, the more we can comprehend the culture of life. As this volume demonstrates, the approaches to death varied widely, also in the Middle Ages and the early modern age. This volume hence adds a significant number of new facets to the critical examination of this ever-present phenomenon of death, exploring poetic responses to the Black Death, types of execution of a female murderess, death as the springboard for major political changes, and death reflected in morality plays and art.

Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110377853
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 744

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Book Description
This volume continues the critical exploration of fundamental issues in the medieval and early modern world, here concerning mental health, spirituality, melancholy, mystical visions, medicine, and well-being. The contributors, who originally had presented their research at a symposium at The University of Arizona in May 2013, explore a wide range of approaches and materials pertinent to these issues, taking us from the early Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, capping the volume with some reflections on the relevance of religion today. Lapidary sciences matter here as much as medical-psychological research, combined with literary and art-historical approaches. The premodern understanding of mental health is not taken as a miraculous panacea for modern problems, but the contributors suggest that medieval and early modern writers, scientists, and artists commanded a considerable amount of arcane, sometimes curious and speculative, knowledge that promises to be of value and relevance even for us today, once again. Modern palliative medicine finds, for instance, intriguing parallels in medieval word magic, and the mystical perspectives encapsulated highly productive alternative perceptions of the macrocosm and microcosm that promise to be insightful and important also for the post-modern world.

Author: Ludovicus Milis
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
"Ludo Mills graduated from Ghent University in 1961 as the last student of Francois-Louis Ganshof, who in the years after Henri Pirenne's retirement was the most prominent representative of the famous "Ghent School" of medieval history." "This collection contains eleven essays published between 1969 and 1990. Most of them appeared in Dutch or French and have now been translated into English; two essays previously published in English were newly edited. All provide unique insight in the major themes of Milis's work: the religious history of the Low Countries during the early and high Middle Ages, as well as the problem of religious conversion and persuasion; the rise of regular canons in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (also the subject of his doctoral dissertation on the order of Arrouaise, published in 1969); the uses of power and ideology; and the history of French Flanders. All bear witness to Milis's inspiring ability to ask original, probing questions and to write historical syntheses accessible to a wide audience."--BOOK JACKET.