Sacred And Secular In Medieval And Early Modern Cultures

Author : L. Besserman
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1403977275
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures written by L. Besserman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-02-04 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book illuminates the pervasive interplay of 'sacred' and 'secular' phenomena in the literature, history, politics, and religion of the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. The essays gathered here constitute a new way of applying a classic dichotomy to major cultural phenomena of the pre-modern era.

Author : Robin Macdonald
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 131705718X
Total Pages : 422 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture written by Robin Macdonald and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-20 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume traces transformations in attitudes toward, ideas about, and experiences of religion and the senses in the medieval and early modern period. Broad in temporal and geographical scope, it challenges traditional notions of periodisation, highlighting continuities as well as change. Rather than focusing on individual senses, the volume’s organisation emphasises the multisensoriality and embodied nature of religious practices and experiences, refusing easy distinctions between asceticism and excess. The senses were not passive, but rather active and reactive, res-ponding to and initiating change. As the contributions in this collection demonstrate, in the pre-modern era, sensing the sacred was a complex, vexed, and constantly evolving process, shaped by individuals, environment, and religious change. The volume will be essential reading not only for scholars of religion and the senses, but for anyone interested in histories of medieval and early modern bodies, material culture, affects, and affect theory.

Author : Eric Nelson
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1317107209
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Layered Landscapes written by Eric Nelson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the conceptualization and construction of sacred space in a wide variety of faith traditions: Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and the religions of Japan. It deploys the notion of "layered landscapes" in order to trace the accretions of praxis and belief, the tensions between old and new devotional patterns, and the imposition of new religious ideas and behaviors on pre-existing religious landscapes in a series of carefully chosen locales: Cuzco, Edo, Geneva, Granada, Herat, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kanchipuram, Paris, Philadelphia, Prague, and Rome. Some chapters hone in on the process of imposing novel religious beliefs, while others focus on how vestiges of displaced faiths endured. The intersection of sacred landscapes with political power, the world of ritual, and the expression of broader cultural and social identity are also examined. Crucially, the volume reveals that the creation of sacred space frequently involved more than religious buildings and was a work of historical imagination and textual expression. While a book of contrasts as much as comparisons, the volume demonstrates that vital questions about the location of the sacred and its reification in the landscape were posed by religious believers across the early-modern world.

Author : Sari Katajala-Peltomaa
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192591010
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe written by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonic possession was a spiritual state that often had physical symptoms; however, in Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa argues that demonic possession was a social phenomenon which should be understood with regard to the community and culture. She focuses on significant case studies from canonization processes (c. 1240-1450) which show how each set of sources formed its own specific context, in which demonic presence derived from different motivations, reasonings, and methods of categorization. The chosen perspective is that of lived religion, which is both a thematic approach and a methodology: a focus on rituals, symbols, and gestures, as well as sensitivity to nuances and careful contextualizing of the cases are constitutive elements of the argumentation. The analysis contests the hierarchy between the 'learned' and the 'popular' within religion, as well as the existence of a strict polarity between individual and collective religious participation. Demonic presence disclosed negotiations over authority and agency; it shows how the personal affected the communal, and vice versa, and how they were eventually transformed into discourses and institutions of the Church; that is, definitions of the miraculous and the diabolical. Geographically, the volume covers Western Europe, comparing Northern and Southern material and customs. The structure follows the logic of the phenomenon, beginning with the background reasons offered as a cause of demonic possession, continuing with communities' responses and emotions, including construction of sacred caregiving methods. Finally, the ways in which demonic presence contributed to wider societal debates in the fields of politics and spirituality are discussed. Alterity and inversion of identity, gender, and various forms of corporeality and the interplay between the sacred and diabolical are themes that run all through the volume.

Author :
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9401202079
Total Pages : 206 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communities have often shaped themselves around cultural spaces set apart and declared sacred. For this purpose, churches, priests or scholars no less than writers frequently participate in giving sacred figures a local habitation and, sometimes, voice or name. But whatever sites, rites, images or narratives have thus been constructed, they also raise some complex questions: how can the sacred be presented and yet guarded, claimed yet concealed, staged in public and at the same time kept exclusive? Such questions are pursued here in a variety of English texts historically employed to manifest and manage versions of the sacred. But since their performances inhabit social space, this often functions as a theatrical arena which is also used to stage modes of dissent, difference, sacrifice and sacrilege. In this way, all aspects of social life – the family, the nation, the idea of kingship, gender identities, courtly ideals, love making or smoking – may become sacralized and buttress claims for power by recourse to a repertoire of religious symbolic forms. Through critical readings of central texts and authors – such as Sir Gawain, Foxe, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, or Vaughan – as well as less canonical examples – the Croxton play, Buchanan, Lanyer, Wroth, or the tobacco pamphlets – the twelve contributions all engage with the crucial question how, and to what end, performances of the sacred affect, or effect, cultural transformation.

Author : Dafna Nissim
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3111243893
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Blurred Boundaries and Deceptive Dichotomies in Pre-Modern Texts and Images written by Dafna Nissim and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-12-18 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays focuses on the way blurred boundaries are represented in pre-modern texts and visual art and how they were received and perceived by their audiences: readers, listeners, and viewers. According to the current understanding that opposing cognitive categories that are so common in modern thinking do not apply to pre-modern mentalities, we argue that individuals in medieval and pre-modern societies did not necessarily consider sacred and secular, male and female, real and fictional, and opposing emotions as absolute dichotomies. The contributors to the present collection examine a wide range of cultural artifacts – literary texts, wall paintings, sculptures, jewelry, manuscript illustrations, and various objects as to what they reflect regarding the dominant perceptual system – the network of beliefs, worldviews, presumptions, values, and norms of viewing/reading/hearing different from modern epistemology strongly predicated on the binary nature of things and people. The essays suggest that analyzing pre-modern cultural works of art or literature in light of reception theory can lead to a better understanding of how those cultural products influenced individuals and impacted their thoughts and actions.

Author : K. Attar
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137465727
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-Cultural Encounters written by K. Attar and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-12-17 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from theatre, English studies, and art history, among others, these essays discuss the challenges and rewards of teaching medieval and early modern texts in the 21st-century university. Topics range from the intersections of race, religion, gender, and nation in cross-cultural encounters to the use of popular culture as pedagogical tools.

Author : E. Francomano
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230612466
Total Pages : 195 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literature written by E. Francomano and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-05-26 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how Medieval and Early Modern writers reconstructed, and also how readers read, the contradictory meanings of "Lady" Wisdom.

Author : Sarah Hamilton
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351945610
Total Pages : 323 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Defining the Holy written by Sarah Hamilton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holy sites, both public - churches, monasteries, shrines - and more private - domestic chapels, oratories - populated the landscape of medieval and early modern Europe, providing contemporaries with access to the divine. These sacred spaces thus defined religious experience, and were fundamental to both the geography and social history of Europe over the course of 1,000 years. But how were these sacred spaces, both public and private, defined? How were they created, used, recognised and transformed? And to what extent did these definitions change over the course of time, and in particular as a result of the changes wrought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Taking a strongly interdisciplinary approach, this volume tackles these questions from the point of view of archaeology, architectural and art history, liturgy, and history to consider the fundamental interaction between the sacred and the profane. Exploring the establishment of sacred space within both the public and domestic spheres, as well as the role of the secular within the sacred sphere, each chapter provides fascinating insights into how these concepts helped shape, and were shaped by, wider society. By highlighting these issues on a European basis from the medieval period through the age of the reformations, these essays demonstrate the significance of continuity as much as change in definitions of sacred space, and thus identify long term trends which have hitherto been absent in more limited studies. As such this volume provides essential reading for anyone with an interest in the ecclesiastical development of western Europe from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

Author : Albrecht Classen
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
ISBN 13 : 3110223899
Total Pages : 769 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age written by Albrecht Classen and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the city as a central entity did not simply disappear with the Fall of the Roman Empire, the development of urban space at least since the twelfth century played a major role in the history of medieval and early modern mentality within a social-economic and religious framework. Whereas some poets projected urban space as a new utopia, others simply reflected the new significance of the urban environment as a stage where their characters operate very successfully. As today, the premodern city was the locus where different social groups and classes got together, sometimes peacefully, sometimes in hostile terms. The historical development of the relationship between Christians and Jews, for instance, was deeply determined by the living conditions within a city. By the late Middle Ages, nobility and bourgeoisie began to intermingle within the urban space, which set the stage for dramatic and far-reaching changes in the social and economic make-up of society. Legal-historical aspects also find as much consideration as practical questions concerning water supply and sewer systems. Moreover, the early modern city within the Ottoman and Middle Eastern world likewise finds consideration. Finally, as some contributors observe, the urban space provided considerable opportunities for women to carve out a niche for themselves in economic terms.