Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
Author: David J. Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2022-06-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192570862

Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England demonstrates that experiences of divine revelation, both biblical and contemporary, were central to late medieval and early modern English religion. The book sheds light on previously under-explored notions about divine revelation and the role these notions played in shaping large portions of English thought and belief. Bringing together a wide variety of source materials, from contemplative works and accounts of revelatory experiences to biblical commentaries, devotionals, and religious imagery, David J. Davis argues that in the period there was a collective representation of divine revelation as a source of human knowledge, which transcended other religious and intellectual divisions. Not only did most people think that divine revelation, through a ravishing encounter with God, was possible, but also divine revelation was understood to be the pinnacle of religious experience and a source of pure understanding. The book highlights a common discourse running through the sources that underpinned this collective representation of how human beings experienced the divine, and it demonstrates a continual effort across large swathes of English religion to prepare an individual's soul for an encounter with the divine, through different spiritual disciplines and devotional practices. Over a period of several centuries this discourse and the larger culture of revelation provided an essential structure and legitimacy both to contemporary claims of divine revelation and the biblical precedents that contemporary experiences were modelled after. This discourse detailed the physical, metaphysical, and epistemological features of how a human being was understood to experience divine revelation, providing a means to delimit and define what happened when an individual was rapture by God. Finally, the book situates the experience of revelation within the wider context of knowledge and identifies the ways that claims to divine revelation were legitimated as well as stigmatized based on this common understanding of the experience of rapture.

Secretaries of God

Secretaries of God
Author: Diane Watt
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1997
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780859916141

"The English women prophets and visionaries whose voices are recovered here all lived between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries and claimed, through the medium of trances and eucharistic piety, to speak for God. [...] Through prophecy they were often able to intervene in the religious and political discourse of their times: the role of God's secretary gave them the opportunity to act and speak autonomously and publicly"--Back cover.

Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2005-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9401202079

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.

The Reproductive Unconscious in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

The Reproductive Unconscious in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
Author: Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2013-12-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136720928

Drawing together social and medical history and literary studies, The Reproductive Unconscious in Late Medieval and Early Modern England studies the social practices and metaphorical representations of childbirth in medieval and early modern texts and argues for the existence of a reproductive unconscious. Discussing midwifery treatises, obstetrical and gynecological manuals, and devotional texts written for or by women, the author illustrates the ways in which medieval and early modern men and women negotiated a conflict between the ideological and material need of the culture for them to procreate, and an ideological injunction that they remain virginal and non-procreative.

Women and Experience in Later Medieval Writing

Women and Experience in Later Medieval Writing
Author: A. Mulder-Bakker
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2009-04-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230620736

This volume examines the common medieval notion of life experience as a source of wisdom and traces that theme through different texts and genres to uncover the fabric of experience woven into the writings by, for, and about women.

Performance and Religion in Early Modern England

Performance and Religion in Early Modern England
Author: Matthew J. Smith
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 501
Release: 2018-12-15
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0268104689

In Performance and Religion in Early Modern England, Matthew J. Smith seeks to expand our view of “the theatrical.” By revealing the creative and phenomenal ways that performances reshaped religious material in early modern England, he offers a more inclusive and integrative view of performance culture. Smith argues that early modern theatrical and religious practices are better understood through a comparative study of multiple performance types: not only commercial plays but also ballads, jigs, sermons, pageants, ceremonies, and festivals. Our definition of performance culture is augmented by the ways these events looked, sounded, felt, and even tasted to their audiences. This expanded view illustrates how the post-Reformation period utilized new capabilities brought about by religious change and continuity alike. Smith posits that theatrical practice at this time was acutely aware of its power not just to imitate but to work performatively, and to create spaces where audiences could both imaginatively comprehend and immediately enact their social, festive, ethical, and religious overtures. Each chapter in the book builds on the previous ones to form a cumulative overview of early modern performance culture. This book is unique in bringing this variety of performance types, their archives, venues, and audiences together at the crossroads of religion and theater in early modern England. Scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and those generally interested in the Renaissance will enjoy this book.

A Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Confraternities

A Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Confraternities
Author: Konrad Eisenbichler
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 491
Release: 2019-02-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004392912

After the State and the Church, the most well organized membership system of medieval and early modern Europe was the confraternity. In cities, towns, and villages it would have been difficult for someone not to be a member of a confraternity, the recipient of its charity, or aware of its presence in the community. In A Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Confraternities, Konrad Eisenbichler brings together an international group of scholars to examine confraternities from various perspectives: their origins and development, their devotional practices, their charitable activities, and their contributions to literature, music, and art. The result is a picture of confraternities as important venues for the acquisition of spiritual riches, material wealth, and social capital. Contributors to this volume: Alyssa Abraham, Davide Adamoli, Christopher F. Black, Dominika Burdzy, David D’Andrea, Konrad Eisenbichler, Anna Esposito, Federica Francesconi, Marina Gazzini, Jonathan Glixon, Colm Lennon, William R. Levin, Murdo J. MacLeod, Nerida Newbigin, Dylan Reid, Gervase Rosser, Nicholas Terpstra, Paul Trio, Anne-Laure Van Bruaene, Beata Wojciechowska, and Danilo Zardin.

The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England

The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England
Author: Adam Fox
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 338
Release: 1996-08-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1349248347

This collection is concerned with the articulation, mediation and reception of authority; the preoccupations and aspirations of both governors and governed in early modern England. It explores the nature of authority and the cultural and social experiences of all social groups, especially insubordinates. These essays probe in depth the ways in which young people responded to adults, women to men, workers to masters, and the 'common sort' to their 'betters'. Early modern people were not passive receptacles of principles of authority as communicated in, for example, sermons, statutes and legal process. They actively contributed to the process of government, thereby exposing its strengths, weaknesses and ambiguities. In discussing these issues the contributors provide fresh points of entry to a period of significant cultural and socio-economic change.

Fruit of the Orchard

Fruit of the Orchard
Author: Jennifer N. Brown
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2019-01-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1487504071

Fruit of the Orchard sheds light on how Catherine of Siena served as a visible and widespread representative of English piety becoming a part of the devotional landscape of the period. By analyzing a variety of texts, including monastic and lay, complete and excerpted, shared and private, author Jennifer N. Brown considers how the visionary prophet and author was used to demonstrate orthodoxy, subversion, and heresy. Tracing the book tradition of Catherine of Siena, as well as investigating the circulation of manuscripts, Brown explores how the various perceptions of the Italian saint were reshaped and understood by an English readership. By examining the practice of devotional reading, she reveals how this sacred exercise changed through a period of increased literacy, the rise of the printing press, and religious turmoil.

Spiritual Calculations

Spiritual Calculations
Author: Christine Cooper-Rompato
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2021-12-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0271092033

Medieval English sermons teem with examples of quantitative reasoning, ranging from the arithmetical to the numerological, and regularly engage with numerical concepts. Examining sermons written in Middle English and Latin, this book reveals that popular English-speaking audiences were encouraged to engage in a wide range of numerate operations in their daily religious practices. Medieval sermonists promoted numeracy as a way for audiences to appreciate divine truth. Their sermons educated audiences in a hybrid form of numerate practice—one that relied on individuals’ pragmatic quantitative reasoning, which, when combined with spiritual interpretations of numbers provided by the preacher, created a deep and rich sense in which number was the best way to approach the sacred mysteries of the world as well as to learn how one could best live as a Christian. Analyzing both published and previously unpublished sermons and sermon cycles, Christine Cooper-Rompato explores the use of numbers, arithmetic, and other mathematical operations to better understand how medieval laypeople used math as a means to connect with God. Spiritual Calculations enhances our understanding of medieval sermons and sheds new light on how receptive audiences were to this sophisticated rhetorical form. It will be welcomed by scholars of Middle English literature, medieval sermon studies, religious experience, and the history of mathematics.