Religious Life Archive
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Comforting sentences from the warming room at Inchcolm abbey
Posted on February 3, 2014 | No CommentsInchcolm abbey has the best-preserved medieval conventual buildings in Scotland. -
Advocating change: monasteries, territories and justice between East and West Francia, 11th-12th centuries
Posted on February 1, 2014 | No CommentsThis article looks at the question of the formation of territorial principalities in western Europe through the issue of ecclesiastical advocacy. -
Sealed with the cross: protecting the body in Anglo-Saxon England
Posted on January 31, 2014 | No CommentsThis inscription heads a miniature of the crucifixion in Ælfwine’s prayerbook (Fig. 6.1), a small book made somewhere between 1023 and 1031 for Ælfwine, monk and then dean (later abbot) of the New Minster, Winchester. -
What if the Arians had won? A Reformation historian reconsiders the Medieval Western Church
Posted on January 30, 2014 | No CommentsDiarmaid MacCulloch speculates on what Western Christianity would have been like in the perfectly plausible event of an Arian outcome to its emergence from the disappearance of the Western Roman Empire. -
Plague and Persecution: The Black Death and Early Modern Witch Hunts
Posted on January 27, 2014 | No CommentsThe century or so from approximately 1550 to 1650 is a period during which witch-hunts reached unprecedented frequency and intensity. The circumstances that fomented the witch- hunts—persistent warfare, religious conflict, and harvest failures—had occurred before, but witch-hunts had never been so ubiquitous or severe. -
Elisabeth of Schönau: Visions and Female Intellectual Culture of the High Middle Ages
Posted on January 27, 2014 | No CommentsElisabeth of Schönau (1128/29-1164/65) was a Rhineland Benedictine who wrote numerous visionary texts. These works addressed local problems in the cloister and community, reform within the Church, and theological questions. -
Lay Preaching and the Lollards of Norwich Diocese, 1428-1431
Posted on January 25, 2014 | No CommentsThe following case-study of Lollards in Norwich diocese is in two parts. The basis for the study is a collection of records of heresy trials in the diocese of Norwich from 2 1428 to 1431. -
The Orthodox Heresies: ‘Lollardy’ and Medieval Culture
Posted on January 23, 2014 | No CommentsThis is not Margery Kempe’s first run-in with the law. Already, she has been accused multiple times of heresy, of wantonness, and of being a general pest. -
Kings, chieftains and public cult in pre-Christian Scandinavia
Posted on January 22, 2014 | No CommentsThe article addresses the question of the performance of pre-Christian public cult by political leaders in early medieval Scandinavia. -
An abbot between two cultures: Maiolus of Cluny considers the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet
Posted on January 22, 2014 | No CommentsIn July 972, Muslim raiders from the citadel of Fraxinetum (modern La Garde-Freinet) abducted Abbot Maiolus of Cluny and his entourage as they crossed the Great Saint Bernard Pass ( Mons Iovis ) in the western Alps. -
Basan and Bata: The Occupational Surnames of Two Pre-Conquest Monks of Canterbury
Posted on January 22, 2014 | No CommentsAs hereditary surnames were not common in Anglo-Saxon England, men of the same name were differentiated by sobriquets based on their place of origin, a physical characteristic or occupation. This article argues that Eadui Basan and Aelfric Bata, two eleventh-century monks of Christ Church, had sobriquets, in Latin of fashionable obscurity, that reflected their occupations within the monastic community. -
The swaddling-clothes of Christ: a medieval relic on display
Posted on January 18, 2014 | No CommentsIn the Middle Ages, the most revered relics were those believed to have been in closest contact with Christ, especially when they related to the Passion. However, there were also other popular relics connected with Christ's infancy, such as his swaddling clothes. -
Menstruation in Sacred Places. Medieval and Early-Modern Jewish Women in the Synagogue
Posted on January 16, 2014 | No CommentsHow sacred is the Synagogue? Can a woman enter this holy place while menstruating? What is more sacred: the space, or the Holy objects within it? -
Between Official and Private Dispute: The Case of Christian Spain and Provence in the Late Middle Ages
Posted on January 15, 2014 | No CommentsLiterary and historical evidence of religious disputes that took place between Jews and Christians during the Middle Ages exists in a varietyof sources. -
The dissemination of visions of the otherworld in England and northern France c.1150-c.1321
Posted on January 14, 2014 | No CommentsThis thesis examines the dissemination of visions of the otherworld in the long thirteenth century (c.1150-1321) by analysing the work of one enthusiast for such visions, Helinand of Froidmont, and studying the later transmission of three, contrasting accounts: the vision of the monk of Eynsham (c.1196), the vision of St. Fursa (c.656) and the vision of Gunthelm (s.xiiex). -
Looking in the Past for a Discourse of Motherhood: Birgitta of Sweden and Julia Kristeva
Posted on January 12, 2014 | No CommentsThis essay explores two parallel trajectories of mythic retrospection: medieval “myths” of the Biblical past (like Birgitta’s prophetic visions), and modern “myths” of the medieval past (like Kristeva’s survey). -
Transformations of Print into Painting: A Case Study of the Context of Prints in an Illustrated Brigittine Psalter
Posted on January 11, 2014 | No CommentsThis liturgical psalter raises issues of the production and consumption of religious texts in convents in the northern Netherlands. -
Dead virgins: feminine sanctity in medieval Wales
Posted on January 8, 2014 | No CommentsExamines literature on the medieval traditions associated with Welsh holy women. Prerequisites for feminine sanctity; Biographical pattern of the female saints; Implications of the popularity of the Welsh women saints. -
Emotions and Power in Orderic Vitalis
Posted on January 4, 2014 | No CommentsThis essay explores some of the complexities and paradoxes encountered when one thinks about power, particularly as power was expressed by a single author, Orderic Vitalis. -
Charisma, Medieval and Modern
Posted on January 2, 2014 | No CommentsPopularized by the mass media, Max Weber’s sociological concept of charisma now has a demotic meaning far from what Weber had in mind. Weberian charismatic leaders have followers, not fans, although, exceptionally, fans mutate into followers. -
The medieval principle of motion and the modern principle of inertia
Posted on January 1, 2014 | No CommentsAquinas’s First Way of arguing for the existence of God famously rests on the Aristotelian premise that “whatever is in motion is moved by another.” Let us call this the “principle of motion.” Newton’s First Law states that “every body continues in its state of rest or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.” Call this the “principle of inertia. -
![All Things to All Men: Representations of the Apostle Paul in Anglo-Saxon Literature Valerie Susan Heuchan University of Toronto: Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies (2010) Abstract This dissertation […]](http://www.medievalists.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Anglo-Saxon-text-115x115.jpg "All Things to All Men: Representations of the Apostle Paul in Anglo-Saxon Literature")
All Things to All Men: Representations of the Apostle Paul in Anglo-Saxon Literature
Posted on January 1, 2014 | No CommentsAll Things to All Men: Representations of the Apostle Paul in Anglo-Saxon Literature Valerie Susan Heuchan University of Toronto: Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies (2010) Abstract This dissertation […] -
They Hasten toward Perfection: Virginal & Chaste Monks in the High Middle Ages
Posted on January 1, 2014 | No CommentsAs perennial Christian ideals, virginity and chastity were frequent themes in medieval religious discourse. Male religious were frequently virgins and were expected to cultivate chastity; however, women not men were usually the focus of such discussions. But some monastic writers did draw on those models when considering their own spirituality, and it is worth knowing how they were understood and enlisted in those instances. -
Maria Mediatrix: Mediating the Divine in the Devotional Literature of Late Medieval and Early Modern England
Posted on January 1, 2014 | No CommentsIn medieval theology, Mary‘s body, as the physical site of the Incarnation, provided an opportunity for speculation about the relationship between divinity and humanity...An examination of how Marian imagery is used as a rhetorical and meditative device in devotional texts will shed light on the way the relationship between human body and divine spirit was experienced. -
The Voices of the Saints: Speaking Reliquaries
Posted on December 31, 2013 | No CommentsAlthough they have often been considered as mere representational labels identifying the relic contained, body-part reliquaries, or what I would prefer to call shaped reliquaries, participate in a fluid exchange of signs
