Religious Life Archive
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Behind the Veil: The rise of female monasticism and the double house
Posted on September 29, 2013 | No CommentsIn this thesis I aim to restore the contemporary views of female monasticism that have been marginalized in current historiography. By evaluating the primary source material on women in monasticism, I intend to recapture the complex links between female religious communities and the wider social, cultural and political world of the Frankish kingdoms. -
Sickness and Sin: Medicine, Epidemics and Heresy in the Middle Ages
Posted on September 28, 2013 | No CommentsDisease was more common, as already unsanitary populations grew more crowded, culminating with the devastating Black Death. With mostly Church chronicles telling the story, and a sense of religion underlying everyday life, comparisons were bound to be drawn between plagues and unruly dissent. On the one hand sickness of the body and the other a corruption of the mind. -
The Role of Christian Spirituality in 13th Century Interpretations of the Fall of Constantinople
Posted on September 28, 2013 | No CommentsSince the focus of the conflict between the crusaders and Constantinople changed from obtaining transportation to Jerusalem to a religious war against the people of Constantinople, it is critical to understand the role of relics in pilgrimage and the concept of how relics were understood to be translated from one owner to another, i.e., furtum sacrum. -
Living like the laity? The negotiation of religious status in the cities of late medieval Italy
Posted on September 24, 2013 | No CommentsFramed by consideration of images of treasurers on the books of the treasury in thirteenth-century Siena, this article uses evidence for the employment of men of religion in city offices in central and northern Italy to show how religious status (treated as a subset of ‘clerical culture’) could become an important object of negotiation between city and churchmen, a tool in the repertoire of power relations. -
Death and Retribution: Medieval Visions of the End of Judas the Traitor
Posted on September 23, 2013 | No CommentsAlthough being described in the Book of Job as "the land of gloom and chaos" ("terra ubi umbra mortis et nullus ordo" Iob 10:22), Hell for Christian tradition was not a region of disorder and chaos, but a realm of well ordered justice. -
Medieval Domestic Devotion
Posted on September 21, 2013 | No CommentsThe following focuses on devotional practices within ordinary secular homes rather than within households associated with amplified religious devotion, such as mystics’ dwellings, beguine communities, and tertiaries at home -
The Storie of Asneth and its literary relations: the Bride of Christ tradition in late Medieval EnglandThe Storie of Asneth and its literary relations: the Bride of Christ tradition in late Medieval England
Posted on September 10, 2013 | No CommentsThis is a study of the fifteenth-century, “Storie of Asneth,” a late-medieval English translation of a Jewish Hellenistic romance about the Patriarch, Joseph, and his Egyptian wife, Asneth (also spelled Aseneth, Asenath). -
Research uncovers how Christianity changed Anglo-Saxon burial practices
Posted on September 3, 2013 | No CommentsDuring the 670s and 680s there was a dramatic change in how people were buried in Anglo-Saxon England, according to a new study released by English Heritage. -
Hildegard of Bingen: A Star Shining in the Dark Ages
Posted on September 2, 2013 | No CommentsHildegard took full advantage of these privileges, coupled with cunning strategy, to ascend beyond the limitations imposed by her society. -
Bernard of Clairvaux’s Writings on Violence and the Sacred
Posted on August 26, 2013 | No CommentsA man sworn to earthly nonviolence, poverty and obedience, he was the product of a knightly family; he envisioned himself and his monastic brethren as spiritual soldiers on the front lines of a cosmic war. Bernard explored themes of spiritual and earthly violence throughout his many compositions... -
The Clerical Wife: Medieval Perceptions of Women During the Eleventh‐ and Twelfth‐Century Church Reforms
Posted on August 25, 2013 | No CommentsTo those who promoted the agendas of the eleventh and twelfth century church reforms the cleric’s wife embodied those things which inhibited the process of man reaching the holy: lust, defilement, worldliness, and temptation. -
Inter-religious Debate at the Court of the Early Tang: An Introduction to Daoxuan’s Ji gujin Fo Dao lunheng
Posted on August 22, 2013 | No CommentsDuring Six dynasties, Daoists as well as Buddhists gained access to the highest levels of society and to the imperial court in the south and in the north of China. -
Church Reunification: Pope Urban II’s Papal Policy Towards the Christian East and Its Demise
Posted on August 18, 2013 | No CommentsWhat separates this brief work from that of previous historians is that it focuses on the formation and changes of papal policy in regards to the Eastern Orthodox Church during the First Crusade, exclusively. -
Fasting and the female body : from the ascetic to the pathological
Posted on August 17, 2013 | No CommentsImportantly, the dietary practices of the early Christians cannot be understood as a single corpus of ideas or practices. It could mean going without food altogether, as in the case of one of the desert fathers, Simeon Stylites, who ate nothing for the whole of lent. -
The Rothwell Charnel Chapel and Ossuary Project
Posted on August 13, 2013 | No CommentsThe Rothwell Charnel Chapel and Ossuary Project has been established between the Department of Archaeology, at the University of Sheffield and Rothwell Holy Trinity Church, Northamptonshire. The church houses one of only two known surviving and in situ medieval ossuaries in England. -
A Revival of Female Spirituality: Adaptations of Nuns’ Rules during the Hiberno-Frankish Monastic Movement
Posted on August 12, 2013 | No CommentsBefore Columbanus, Irish abbots demonstrated little interest in producing monastic rules as we know them from the traditions of Benedict of Nursia and Caesarius of Arles. Preferring instruction by example to any documented tenets, Irish monasticism emphasized the conduct of the founding or ruling abbot or abbess as a model to imitate. -
The Pagans and the Other: Varying Presentations in the Early Middle Ages
Posted on August 6, 2013 | No CommentsThe Pagans and the Other: Varying Presentations in the Early Middle Ages Ian Wood Networks and Neighbours, Volume One, Number One (2013) Abstract This paper discusses the position of the... -
A Fourteenth-Century Augustinian Approach to the Jews in Riccoldo da Monte Croce’s Ad Nationes Orientales
Posted on August 4, 2013 | No CommentsRiccoldo da Monte Croce (d.1320) was an educated Florentine Dominican preacher who traveled as a pilgrim and missionary in the Middle East between the years c.1288 to 1300. -
Worse than buggery? Incest discourses in the 12th and 13th centuries
Posted on August 2, 2013 | No CommentsIn my paper today, I will not attempt the question why it was possible that the law developed in such an extreme way as to exclude such an excessive number of people as potential marriage partners, although my opinions on some recent approaches to this problem may become transparent in the course of this talk. Instead, my interest is focussed on what I call the incest discourses in the twelfth and thirteenth century. -
The Chaste Erotics of Marie d’Oignies and Jacques de Vitry
Posted on August 1, 2013 | No CommentsThe Chaste Erotics of Marie d’Oignies and Jacques de Vitry Jennifer Brown (Marymount Manhattan College) Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 19, No. 1, January (2010) Abstract IN JACQUES... -
The Christianisation of Bohemia and Moravia
Posted on July 27, 2013 | No CommentsThe territory of what is now Czech Republic consists of essentially two lands, Bohemia and Moravia. -
To Take Care of the Monks, Take Care of Christina: Christina of Markyate and the Medieval Spiritual/Material Market
Posted on July 24, 2013 | No CommentsIn this essay I will delineate two of these emphases: (1) Christina’s powerful interaction with boundaries and the spaces they demarcate, and (2) the material/spiritual economy that develops between Christina and Geoffrey, the Abbot of the St. Albans Monastery. I will then argue that these emphases together form a message that might have been aimed at The Life’s monastic (and to some extent aristocratic) audience, perhaps even the abbots who succeeded Geoffrey. -
Holy Meditations and Earthly Curiosities: Understanding Late Medieval Pilgrims to Jerusalem
Posted on July 22, 2013 | No CommentsThere were many worthy sites along the way, destinations in themselves, but Jerusalem in particular was unrivaled. It lured pilgrims to face death just to stand upon Mountjoy, that fabled vantage point overlooking the city. -
Ibn Jubayr: The Rihla
Posted on July 19, 2013 | No CommentsAbu ‘l-Husayn Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Jubayr (1145-1217) was not an exceptional man. As a relatively ordinary, middle-aged Muslim, Ibn Jubayr was neither the first nor the last to leave Al-Andalus to perform the hajj. Admiring kings only from afar, the closest that Ibn Jubayr came to royalty were encounters with imperial tax collectors. Paradoxically though, it is precisely Ibn Jubayr’s lack of distinction that helped earn him repute throughout the Islamic world in his time. It also makes him the ideal subject of the present study. -
Absoluimus uos uice beati petri apostolorum principis. Episcopal authority and the reconciliation of excommunicants in England and Frankia c. 900-c.1050
Posted on July 19, 2013 | No CommentsNo mention is made of any rite being followed by Bishop Wulfstan on this occasion, but services for the reconciliation of excommunication are first recorded in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
