Religious Life Archive
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Converso Identities in Late Medieval Spain: Intermediacy and Indeterminacy
Posted on May 21, 2013 | No CommentsIn late medieval Spain, Christian leaders and missionaries developed conversion campaigns to bring Jews into Christianity. Some converts appear to have fully assimilated with their new religion. Those who did not effectively assimilate are known as conversos, members of a group whose beliefs and actions grew increasingly suspect. Historians disagree about conversos. Did conversos want to become Christian despite continued Jewish practices, or were they 'secret Jews' who knowingly engaged in the practice of their former religion? -
Mental Disability and Intellectual Impairment in the Middle Ages: Some Preliminary Research Findings
Posted on May 19, 2013 | No CommentsThis interesting paper was one of the four given in the Mental Health in Non-medical Terms session at KZOO. It looked at philosophy, iconography and the way mental disability was viewed in the Middle Ages. -
Infant Burials and Christianization: The View from East Central Europe
Posted on May 19, 2013 | No CommentsThis was the second paper in the Early Medieval Europe I series given at KZOO and another fabulous archaeology paper. It contrasted infant grave sites in early converted medieval Poland and Anglo Saxon England. -
Feasting with Early Medieval Chiefs: Locating Political Action through Environmental Archaeology
Posted on May 18, 2013 | No CommentsThis excellent paper was the first given in the session on Early Medieval Europe. It looked at various archaeological excavations in Iceland and Denmark and the political role feasting played in pre-Christian Viking societies. -
Reincarnation among the Norse: Sifting through the Evidence
Posted on May 17, 2013 | No CommentsThis short article looks at the possibilty of reincarnation as a common alternative concept of life after death among Germanic heathens and then as a possible non-standard alternative belief. -
Louis the Pious and the Conversion of the Danes
Posted on May 17, 2013 | No CommentsThis paper was part of a very interesting session on the Early Middle Ages. The papers covered Eastern European Infant Burial, the archaeology of medieval feasting and conversion. This paper contrasted the conversion policies of Charlemagne versus those of Louis the Pious. -
Student Violence at the University of Oxford
Posted on May 9, 2013 | No CommentsMy first foray of KZOO 2013 couldn't have been off to a better start with, “I just don’t want to die without a few scars”: Medieval Fight Clubs, Masculine Identity, and Public (Dis)order. There were only two papers in this session and both were riveting. I felt like I couldn't type fast enough to get it all in! The first paper was given by Professor Andrew Larsen of Marquette University. Professor Larsen published a book on high and late medieval student violence and the Saint Scholastica's Day Riot at Oxford university. -
Networking Scribes
Posted on May 5, 2013 | No CommentsThis was the keynote paper given at the Celtic Studies Association of North America Annual Conference at the University of Toronto April 18 - 21, 2013. -
The Erotic Paternoster
Posted on May 4, 2013 | No CommentsThe word paternoster has been applied in a variety of senses. In the Middle ages paternoster became a synonym for lovemaking. -
Charity in the Middle Ages
Posted on May 3, 2013 | No CommentsLecture by Valerie L. Garver, given at Northern Illinois University on April 3, 2013 -
Magic in English Thirteenth-Century Miracle Collections
Posted on April 29, 2013 | No CommentsThis contribution focuses on miracle collections as a source for medieval magic for three reasons. The first is the very closeness of magic and miracles, for both seek to procure results which transcend nature, and to do this through the medium of a human practitioner. -
The Seven Deadly Sins: Some Problems of Research
Posted on April 28, 2013 | No CommentsIn the following pages, I should like to point out a number of aspects or areas which my own study of acedia has convinced me must and can be fruitfully explored.The account does not aim at comprehensiveness; certainly, other students of mediaeval thought and literature will be able to point out other desiderata. If it merely revives some interest in its subject, it will have fulfilled its purpose. -
The Eucharistic Man of Sorrows in Late Medieval Art
Posted on April 28, 2013 | No CommentsEucharistic devotion also found it's ways of visual expression in the art of the period. Numerous new iconographical types were created in late medieval art for the purpose of visualizing the mystery of the Eucharist. -
Unusual Life, Unusual Death and the Fate of the Corpse: A Case Study from Dynastic Europe
Posted on April 23, 2013 | No CommentsThis article explores how deviant behaviour in life, deviant circumstances of death, and young age at death affected mortuary treatment among historically documented individuals from Medieval and Post-Medieval European dynasties. -
The Anecdotal Way to Santiago de Compostela
Posted on April 22, 2013 | No CommentsVideo of the Keynote Lecture by David L. Simon from the 34th Annual Plymouth State University Medieval and Renaissance Forum -
Penance and Peter Abelard’s Move Within
Posted on April 21, 2013 | No CommentsOf the many individuals in the twelfth century whose fame in their own time has reached down to ours, figures like Thomas Becket, Frederick Barbarossa and Bernard of Clairvaux, there is no one whose fame surpassed that of Master Peter Abelard and no figure more public. Indeed, fame was something Abelard coveted, something he consciously built. -
Reconstructing a Late Medieval Irish Library
Posted on April 20, 2013 | No Comments'It is a tricky thing to discuss a library that has not existed for 350 years.' -
Conflict in the Parish: Antagonistic Relations Between Clerics and Parishioners
Posted on April 19, 2013 | No CommentsParishioners repeatedly complained about suffering under the rule of a petty tyrant who held grudges and exploited his power to administer the sacraments, or about the surly, combative temperament of their priest who was prone to fighting and creating discord within the parish. -
“Becoming Mary of the Gael”
Posted on April 19, 2013 | No CommentsThis paper focused on the comparison of St. Brigit and the Virgin Mary in early Irish texts. -
Rune Stones and Magnate Farms: The Viking Age in Vadsbo Hundred
Posted on April 16, 2013 | No CommentsWhat is the relationship between the Viking Age magnate farms and local place names? What of the numerous Rune stones, burial mounds, surface finds, and ancient monuments? Are they also tied to subsequent names? Can they help us place farms and other sites? -
Teaching the Creed and Articles of Faith in England: Lateran IV to Ignorantia sacerdotum
Posted on April 14, 2013 | No CommentsThe broad conclusion of this thesis is that the available evidence shows that the basic principles of Christian doctrine were available both to the lower clergy who would preach and teach the Creed and Articles of Faith and also to the laity who would receive this preaching and instruction. -
Julian of Norwich’s “Christ as Mother” and Medieval Constructions of Gender
Posted on April 13, 2013 | No CommentsRecent Christian feminists have revived an interest in women mystics and feminine religious imagery. In light of what most people generalize about medieval misogyny and about the veneration of the Virgin as a surrogate for a female divinity, Julian of Norwich's trope of Christ as Mother seems even more remarkable. -
Christian reactions to Muslim conquests (1st-3rd centuries AH; 7th-9th centuries AD)
Posted on April 7, 2013 | No CommentsWe in fact find a great diversity of reactions to Muslim expansion from Christian authors, depending on their particular circumstances and point of view -
Corpus Christi Plays and the Stations of the Cross: Medieval York and Modern Sydney
Posted on April 1, 2013 | No CommentsThe earliest surviving reference to the Corpus Christi festival in York is dated 1322, when Archbishop William Melton commended it as „the glorious feast of the most precious sacrament of the flesh and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ‟. In 1408 the York Guild of Corpus Christi was established „as a confraternity of chaplains and lay persons, with the encouragement of the city government, probably to form the focus of the civic Corpus Christi Day procession‟. -
Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice: From Oriental Bazar to English Cloister in Anglo-French
Posted on April 1, 2013 | No CommentsUntil recently, such limited interest as late Anglo-French was able to arouse amongst scholars specializing in medieval French has been confined, with only a very few exceptions, to the efforts made in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries to teach what was by now a language unknown to most of the inhabitants of a country moving inexorably towards the unchallenged dominance of English as the national language.
