The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion

The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion
Author: Leo Steinberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2014-12-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 022622631X

Originally published in 1983, Leo Steinberg's classic work has changed the viewing habits of a generation. After centuries of repression and censorship, the sexual component in thousands of revered icons of Christ is restored to visibility. Steinberg's evidence resides in the imagery of the overtly sexed Christ, in Infancy and again after death. Steinberg argues that the artists regarded the deliberate exposure of Christ's genitalia as an affirmation of kinship with the human condition. Christ's lifelong virginity, understood as potency under check, and the first offer of blood in the circumcision, both required acknowledgment of the genital organ. More than exercises in realism, these unabashed images underscore the crucial theological import of the Incarnation. This revised and greatly expanded edition not only adduces new visual evidence, but deepens the theological argument and engages the controversy aroused by the book's first publication.

The Religious Sublime

The Religious Sublime
Author: David B. Morris
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2014-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 081316379X

This perceptive, carefully documented study challenges the traditional assumption that the supernatural virtually disappeared from eighteenth-century poetry as a result of the growing rationalistic temper of the late seventeenth century. Mr. Morris shows that the religious poetry of eighteenth-century England, while not equaling the brilliant work of seventeenth-century and Romantic writers, does reveal a vital and serious effort to create a new kind of sacred poetry which would rival the sublimity of Milton and of the Bible itself. Tracing the major varieties of religious poetry written throughout the century—by major figures and by their now vanished contemporaries—the author explains how later poets and critics made significant departures from the established norms. These changes in religious poetry thus become a valuable means of understanding the shift from a neoclassical to a Romantic theory of literature.

The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West

The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West
Author: Alison I. Beach
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1244
Release: 2020-01-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1108770630

Monasticism, in all of its variations, was a feature of almost every landscape in the medieval West. So ubiquitous were religious women and men throughout the Middle Ages that all medievalists encounter monasticism in their intellectual worlds. While there is enormous interest in medieval monasticism among Anglophone scholars, language is often a barrier to accessing some of the most important and groundbreaking research emerging from Europe. The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West offers a comprehensive treatment of medieval monasticism, from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. The essays, specially commissioned for this volume and written by an international team of scholars, with contributors from Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, cover a range of topics and themes and represent the most up-to-date discoveries on this topic.

Mystics of the Christian Tradition

Mystics of the Christian Tradition
Author: Steven Fanning
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2005-06-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1134590989

From divine visions to self-tortures, some strange mystical experiences have shaped the Christian tradition. Full of colourful detail, this book examines the mystical experiences that have determined the history of Christianity.