The Sacrament of Penance and Religious Life in Golden Age Spain

The Sacrament of Penance and Religious Life in Golden Age Spain
Author: Patrick J. O'Banion
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2015-06-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0271060476

The Sacrament of Penance and Religious Life in Golden Age Spain explores the practice of sacramental confession in Spain between roughly 1500 and 1700. One of the most significant points of contact between the laity and ecclesiastical hierarchy, confession lay at the heart of attempts to bring religious reformation to bear upon the lives of early modern Spaniards. Rigid episcopal legislation, royal decrees, and a barrage of prescriptive literature lead many scholars to construct the sacrament fundamentally as an instrument of social control foisted upon powerless laypeople. Drawing upon a wide range of early printed and archival materials, this book considers confession as both a top-down and a bottom-up phenomenon. Rather than relying solely upon prescriptive and didactic literature, it considers evidence that describes how the people of early modern Spain experienced confession, offering a rich portrayal of a critical and remarkably popular component of early modern religiosity.

Manual Work and Mental Work

Manual Work and Mental Work
Author: Christoph Strosetzki
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2023-03-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 366266366X

Information Text: In the early modern period, numerous texts deal with professions by presenting the knowledge required in each case, individual fields of activity, purpose, origin and prestige. The course of argumentation is humanistic, insofar as it mostly starts from the human being. The ancient idea of the primacy of mental work over manual work is formative here. The importance of Spain results from the fact that the Spanish king Charles V was both emperor and ruler of the colonies in America, i.e. he ruled a world empire by the standards of the time. After discussing some central categories, overall representations of knowledge, professions, and prominent professional representatives are presented. Here, the hierarchization and its relativization by satire is revealing. The mechanical arts and the artes liberales are then presented on the basis of individual professions selected as characteristic examples, each with its own specific knowledge. The higher faculties of medicine, theology and jurisprudence with their representatives form the conclusion.

The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900

The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900
Author: Kimberly Anne Coles
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2015-01-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137338210

The essays of this collection explore how ideas about 'blood' in science and literature have supported, at various points in history and in various places in the circum-Atlantic world, fantasies of human embodiment and human difference that serve to naturalize existing hierarchies.