Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
Women And Mystical Experience In The Middle Ages
Download Women And Mystical Experience In The Middle Ages full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online Women And Mystical Experience In The Middle Ages ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis Women and Mystical Experience in the Middle Ages by : Frances Beer
Download or read book Women and Mystical Experience in the Middle Ages written by Frances Beer and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Original and thought-provoking study of three medieval women mystics based on writings and biographical material.
Book Synopsis Body and Soul by : Elizabeth Petroff
Download or read book Body and Soul written by Elizabeth Petroff and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 1994 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opening a window onto a long-neglected world of women's experience, this text features eleven essays that examine the writings of medieval women mystics from England, France, Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries, providing close readings of a number of important texts from the viewpoint ofdifferent literary theories. Surveying various styles of hagiographical writing, the author offers ground-breaking scholarship on a broad range of topics such as how medieval holy women may have appeared to their contemporaries, medieval antifeminism, comparisons between earlier and later Christianmystical writing, the relationship between male confessors and female penitents in the Middle Ages, and the process by which these extraordinary women produced their work. For courses in religious, medieval, or women's studies, this unique text fills a conspicuous gap in an important and fascinatingfield of literature.
Book Synopsis Women Mystics in Medieval Europe by : Emilie Zum Brunn
Download or read book Women Mystics in Medieval Europe written by Emilie Zum Brunn and published by Paragon House Publishers. This book was released on 1989 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text revives the works of five powerful mystics of the Middle Ages and provides a valuable inspirational resource for all spiritual seekers.
Book Synopsis Promised Bodies by : Patricia Dailey
Download or read book Promised Bodies written by Patricia Dailey and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Christian tradition, especially in the works of Paul, Augustine, and the exegetes of the Middle Ages, the body is a twofold entity consisting of inner and outer persons that promises to find its true materiality in a time to come. A potentially transformative vehicle, it is a dynamic mirror that can reflect the work of the divine within and substantially alter its own materiality if receptive to divine grace. The writings of Hadewijch of Brabant, a thirteenth-century beguine, engage with this tradition in sophisticated ways both singular to her mysticism and indicative of the theological milieu of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Crossing linguistic and historical boundaries, Patricia Dailey connects the embodied poetics of Hadewijch's visions, writings, and letters to the work of Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite of Oingt, and other mystics and visionaries. She establishes new criteria to more consistently understand and assess the singularity of women's mystical texts and, by underscoring the similarities between men's and women's writings of the time, collapses traditional conceptions of gender as they relate to differences in style, language, interpretative practices, forms of literacy, and uses of textuality.
Book Synopsis Visions and Longings by : Monica Furlong
Download or read book Visions and Longings written by Monica Furlong and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 1997-04-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The women mystics of medieval Europe represent the very first feminine voices heard in a world where women were nearly silent. As such, they are striking and unusual, strange, powerful and urgent. Monica Furlong uses key selections from among these women's own writings and writings about them by their contemporaries, along with her own assessment of them, to open up their contributions to a wide popular audience. The eleven women represented in this anthology were housewives, visionaries, abbesses, beguines, recluses, and nuns who wrote between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. They include: • Héloïse, the scholar and abbess, whose letters to Abelard are treasure of medieval literature • Hildegard of Bingen, the visionary Rhineland nun • Clare of Assisi, the close friend of Saint Francis and founder of the Poor Clares • Catherine of Siena, an influential spiritual counselor whose book, Dialogue, consists of a debate between herself and God • Julian of Norwich, the English hermitess who spent the greater part of her life meditating on and coming to understand the striking visions she received as a young woman • and many others
Book Synopsis Holy Feast and Holy Fast by : Caroline Walker Bynum
Download or read book Holy Feast and Holy Fast written by Caroline Walker Bynum and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1988-01-07 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the period between 1200 and 1500 in western Europe, a number of religious women gained widespread veneration and even canonization as saints for their extraordinary devotion to the Christian eucharist, supernatural multiplications of food and drink, and miracles of bodily manipulation, including stigmata and inedia (living without eating). The occurrence of such phenomena sheds much light on the nature of medieval society and medieval religion. It also forms a chapter in the history of women. Previous scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other and have sometimes applied modern medical or psychological theories to them. Using materials based on saints' lives and the religious and mystical writings of medieval women and men, Caroline Walker Bynum uncovers the pattern lying behind these aspects of women's religiosity and behind the fascination men and women felt for such miracles and devotional practices. She argues that food lies at the heart of much of women's piety. Women renounced ordinary food through fasting in order to prepare for receiving extraordinary food in the eucharist. They also offered themselves as food in miracles of feeding and bodily manipulation. Providing both functionalist and phenomenological explanations, Bynum explores the ways in which food practices enabled women to exert control within the family and to define their religious vocations. She also describes what women meant by seeing their own bodies and God's body as food and what men meant when they too associated women with food and flesh. The author's interpretation of women's piety offers a new view of the nature of medieval asceticism and, drawing upon both anthropology and feminist theory, she illuminates the distinctive features of women's use of symbols. Rejecting presentist interpretations of women as exploited or masochistic, she shows the power and creativity of women's writing and women's lives.
Book Synopsis The Book of Margery Kempe by : Margery Kempe
Download or read book The Book of Margery Kempe written by Margery Kempe and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 1985 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the eventful and controversial life of Margery Kempe - wife, mother, businesswoman, pilgrim and visionary - is the earliest surviving autobiography in English. Here Kempe (c.1373-c.1440) recounts in vivid, unembarrassed detail the madness that followed the birth of the first of her fourteen children, the failure of her brewery business, her dramatic call to the spiritual life, her visions and uncontrollable tears, the struggle to convert her husband to a vow of chastity and her pilgrimages to Europe and the Holy Land. Margery Kempe could not read or write, and dictated her remarkable story late in life. It remains an extraordinary record of human faith and a portrait of a medieval woman of unforgettable character and courage.
Book Synopsis Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture by : Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa
Download or read book Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture written by Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the relations between medical and religious discourse and practice in medieval culture, focussing on how they are affected by gender.
Book Synopsis Gender and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain by :
Download or read book Gender and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-09-07 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain gathers a series of studies on the interplay between gender, sanctity and exemplarity in regard to literary production in the Iberian peninsula. The first section examines how women were con¬strued as saintly examples through narratives, mostly composed by male writers; the second focuses on the use made of exemplary life-accounts by women writers in order to fashion their own social identity and their role as authors. The volume includes studies on relevant models (Mary Magdalen, Virgin Mary, living saints), means of transmission, sponsorship and agency (reading circles, print, patronage), and female writers (Leonor López de Córdoba, Isabel de Villena, Teresa of Ávila) involved in creating textual exemplars for women. Contributors are: Pablo Acosta-García, Andrew M. Beresford, Jimena Gamba Corradine, Ryan D. Giles, María Morrás, Lesley K. Twomey, Roa Vidal Doval, and Christopher van Ginhoven Rey.
Book Synopsis Saintly Brides and Bridegrooms by : Carolyn Diskant Muir
Download or read book Saintly Brides and Bridegrooms written by Carolyn Diskant Muir and published by Studies in Medieval and Early. This book was released on 2012 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building upon recent scholarly interest in mystics and mysticism in late medieval Europe, this book explores the visual representation of female and male saints depicted as brides or bridegrooms of Christ in northern European art from 1300 to 1550. The mystic marriage imagery of St. Catherine of Alexandria, St. Agnes of Rome, St. John the Evangelist, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and the Blessed Henry Suso is studied through an analysis of a wide range of paintings, illuminated manuscripts, prints, and sculpture. From these case studies, Muir argues that different visual conventions were used in the art of this period to portray the male and female experiences of mystic marriage and suggests possible reasons for these differences. She further considers why comparatively few mystics were visually portrayed in a mystic marriage with Christ, despite the large number recorded as having had that experience. Providing insights into the meanings of the mystical experience when portrayed in visual terms, this book will appeal to art historians as well as to other medievalists with an interest in the intersections of art, religion, and gender.
Download or read book The Thirst of God written by Wendy Farley and published by Presbyterian Publishing Corp. This book was released on 2015-09-04 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "There is a rich tradition of wonderful women and other contemplatives who are great resources for thinking differently about Christianity. They emphasized divine love, human compassion, and the radical possibilities of contemplative practices. They were not afraid to criticize the church and indeed thought of their challenge as crucial to their faith. We do not have to lose faith with the beautiful wisdom of this story of intimate and compassionate love, dwelling among us and within us, if we do not want to." —from the acknowledgments and note to readers To those seeking a more open, progressive approach to Christian faith, the Christian past can sometimes seem like a desert, an empty space devoid of encouragement or example. Yet in the latter years of the Middle Ages a quiet flowering of a more accessible, positive approach to Christian belief took place among a group of female mystics, those who emphasized an immediate, nonhierarchical experience of the divine. In this enlightening volume, Wendy Farley eloquently brings the work of three female mystics—Marguerite Porete, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Julian of Norwich—into creative conversation with contemporary Christian life and thought. From alternatives to the standard, violent understandings of the atonement, to new forms of contemplation and prayer, these figures offer us relevant insights through a theology centered on God's love and compassion. Farley demonstrates how these women can help to refresh and expand our awareness of the depth of divine love that encompasses all creation and dwells in the cavern of every human heart.
Book Synopsis Translating Christ in the Middle Ages by : Barbara Zimbalist
Download or read book Translating Christ in the Middle Ages written by Barbara Zimbalist and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study reveals how women’s visionary texts played a central role within medieval discourses of authorship, reading, and devotion. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, women across northern Europe began committing their visionary conversations with Christ to the written word. Translating Christ in this way required multiple transformations: divine speech into human language, aural event into textual artifact, visionary experience into linguistic record, and individual encounter into communal repetition. This ambitious study shows how women’s visionary texts form an underexamined literary tradition within medieval religious culture. Barbara Zimbalist demonstrates how, within this tradition, female visionaries developed new forms of authorship, reading, and devotion. Through these transformations, the female visionary authorized herself and her text, and performed a rhetorical imitatio Christi that offered models of interpretive practice and spoken devotion to her readers. This literary-historical tradition has not yet been fully recognized on its own terms. By exploring its development in hagiography, visionary texts, and devotional literature, Zimbalist shows how this literary mode came to be not only possible but widespread and influential. She argues that women’s visionary translation reconfigured traditional hierarchies and positions of spiritual power for female authors and readers in ways that reverberated throughout late-medieval literary and religious cultures. In translating their visionary conversations with Christ into vernacular text, medieval women turned themselves into authors and devotional guides, and formed their readers into textual communities shaped by gendered visionary experiences and spoken imitatio Christi. Comparing texts in Latin, Dutch, French, and English, Translating Christ in the Middle Ages explores how women’s visionary translation of Christ’s speech initiated larger transformations of gendered authorship and religious authority within medieval culture. The book will interest scholars in different linguistic and religious traditions in medieval studies, history, religious studies, and women’s and gender studies.
Book Synopsis Medieval Women's Visionary Literature by : Elizabeth Petroff
Download or read book Medieval Women's Visionary Literature written by Elizabeth Petroff and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1986 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These pages capture a thousand years of medieval women's visionary writing, from late antiquity to the 15th century. Written by hermits, recluses, wives, mothers, wandering teachers, founders of religious communities, and reformers, the selections reveal how medieval women felt about their lives, the kind of education they received, how they perceived the religion of their time, and why ascetic life attracted them.
Book Synopsis Revelations of Divine Love by : Julian of Norwich
Download or read book Revelations of Divine Love written by Julian of Norwich and published by Ixia Press. This book was released on 2019-11-13 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fourteenth-century anchorite known as Julian of Norwich offered fervent prayers for a deeper understanding of Christ's passion. The holy woman's petitions were answered with a series of divine revelations that she called "shewings." Her mystic visions revealed Christ's sufferings with extreme intensity, but they also confirmed God's constant love for humanity and infinite capacity for forgiveness. Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love have had a lasting influence on Christian thought. Written in immediate, compelling terms, her experiences remain among the most original and accessible expressions of medieval mysticism. This edition contains both the short text, which is mainly an account of the shewings and Julian's initial analysis of their meaning, and the long text, completed some 20 years later and offering daringly speculative interpretations.
Book Synopsis Fragmentation and Redemption by : Caroline Walker Bynum
Download or read book Fragmentation and Redemption written by Caroline Walker Bynum and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that historians must write in a comic mode, aware of history's artifice, risks, and incompletion, Caroline Walker Bynum here examines diverse medieval texts to show how women were able to appropriate dominant social symbols in ways that allowed for the emergence of their own creative voices. By arguing for the positive importance attributed to the body, these essays give a new interpretation of gender in medieval texts and of the role of asceticism and mysticism in Christianity.
Download or read book Proving Woman written by Dyan Elliott and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the year 1215, female mystics and their sacramental devotion were among orthodoxy's most sophisticated weapons in the fight against heresy. Holy women's claims to be in direct communication with God placed them in positions of unprecedented influence. Yet by the end of the Middle Ages female mystics were frequently mistrusted, derided, and in danger of their lives. The witch hunts were just around the corner. While studies of sanctity and heresy tend to be undertaken separately, Proving Woman brings these two avenues of inquiry together by associating the downward trajectory of holy women with medieval society's progressive reliance on the inquisitional procedure. Inquisition was soon used for resolving most questions of proof. It was employed for distinguishing saints and heretics; it underwrote the new emphasis on confession in both sacramental and judicial spheres; and it heralded the reintroduction of torture as a mechanism for extracting proof through confession. As women were progressively subjected to this screening, they became ensnared in the interlocking web of proofs. No aspect of female spirituality remained untouched. Since inquisition determined the need for tangible proofs, it even may have fostered the kind of excruciating illnesses and extraordinary bodily changes associated with female spirituality. In turn, the physical suffering of holy women became tacit support for all kinds of earthly suffering, even validating temporal mechanisms of justice in their most aggressive forms. The widespread adoption of inquisitional mechanisms for assessing female spirituality eventuated in a growing confusion between the saintly and heretical and the ultimate criminalization of female religious expression.
Book Synopsis Approaching Medieval English Anchoritic and Mystical Texts by : Dee Dyas
Download or read book Approaching Medieval English Anchoritic and Mystical Texts written by Dee Dyas and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2005 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays suggesting new ways of studying the crucial but sometimes difficult range of medieval mystical material. This volume seeks to explore the origins, context and content of the anchoritic and mystical texts produced in England during the Middle Ages and to examine the ways in which these texts may be studied and taught today. It foregrounds issues of context and interaction, seeking both to position medieval spiritual writings against a surprisingly wide range of contemporary contexts and to face the challenge of making these texts accessible to a wider readership. The contributions, by leading scholars in the field, incorporate historical, literary and theological perspectives and offer critical approaches and background material which will inform both research and teaching. The approaches to Middle English anchoritic and mystical texts suggested in this volume are many and varied. In this they reflect the richness and complexity of the contexts from which these writings emerged. These essays are offered aspart of an ongoing exploration of aspects of medieval spirituality which, while posing a considerable challenge to modern readers, also offer invaluable insights into the interaction between medieval culture and belief. Contributors: E.A. Jones, Dee Dyas, Valerie Edden, Santha Bhattachariji, Denis Renevey, A.C. Spearing, Thomas Bestul, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Barry A. Windeatt, Alexandra Barratt, R.S. Allen, Roger Ellis, Ann M. Hutchison, Marion Glasscoe, Catherine Innes-Parker
