“I Am Wholly Your Own”: Liturgical Piety and Community among the Nuns of Helfta

2009 ◽  
Vol 78 (3) ◽  
pp. 549-583 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
William James ◽  
Spiritual Exercises ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Odoriferous Substances ◽  
As If

When William James long ago characterized the God of the thirteenth-century Cistercian cloister of Helfta, in Saxony, as “full of partiality for his individual favorites,” he might have illustrated his claim with any number of passages from three of the surviving works composed by the nuns of Helfta, the Book of Special Grace, associated with Mechtild of Hackeborn (1241–ca. 1298/99), the Herald of Divine Love, associated with Gertrude of Helfta (1256–ca. 1301/02), and the Spiritual Exercises, written by Gertrude. James drew his readers' attention to the following account from the Herald: Suffering from a headache, she [Gertrude] sought, for the glory of God, to relieve herself by holding certain odoriferous substances in her mouth, when the Lord appeared to her to lean over towards her lovingly, and to find comfort himself in these odors. After having gently breathed them in, He arose, and said with a gratified air to the Saints, as if contented with what he had done: “See the new present which my betrothed has given Me!”

Representative Emersons: Versions of American Identity

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-180
Author(s):  
David L. Smith
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Musical Note ◽  
As If

In 1903, William James began his address to the Emerson centenary gathering at Concord with a meditation on death and memory:The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing…. It is as if the whole of a man's significance had now shrunk into a mere musical note or phrase, suggestive of his singularity—happy are those whose singularity gives a note so clear as to be victorious over the inevitable pity of such a diminution and abridgment.While James's abridgment of Emerson in the address that followed was unusually apt, Emerson has not been as well served by most who have attempted to call his tune.

The papal scandal (presidential address)

1976 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 141-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald M. Nicol
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The Many ◽  
As If ◽  
The Way

The Greek word skandalon means a stumbling-block, an offence. As such it is used frequently in the Septuagint and the new testament. In Byzantine texts at least from the eleventh century the word is employed as a collective noun to denote the many obstacles that stood in the way of union between the Greek and Latin churches. In the thirteenth century, however, it is often qualified by the phrase ‘relating to or concerning the pope’—τò κατά τòν πάπαν σκάνδαλον. It was as if the pope or the papacy had come to be identified as the cause or agent of the stumbling-block that lay in the path of understanding. This is the ‘papal scandal’ that I have in mind.

Al‐Mustansir, Charles of Anjou, and the Struggle for the Central Mediterranean

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lower
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Central Mediterranean ◽  
Zero Sum ◽  
As If ◽  
The Middle Ages

Tunis and Sicily had entangled histories in the Middle Ages. This chapter explores how two powerful Mediterranean dynasts—Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily, and al‐Mustansir, emir of Tunis—struggled to assert themselves in the Sicilian Straits in the mid‐thirteenth century. While al‐Mustansir wanted Sicilian grain to feed his people, Charles needed African gold to pay for the debts he had accumulated in conquering Sicily in 1266. The question remained how that strategic interdependence would work itself out: would Charles and al‐Mustansir be partners, or would they wage a zero‐sum struggle to control the central Mediterranean? When al‐Mustansir sponsored an expeditionary force that landed on the coast of Sicily in the fall of 1267, it looked as if conflict would prevail. As it turned out, the landing was really the opening salvo in a negotiation that would extend throughout the course of the Tunis Crusade.

scholarly journals Hallucinations and Illusions by Edmund Parish: the unlikely genesis and curious fate of a forgotten masterpiece

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-420
Author(s):  
Jan Dirk Blom
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
English Edition ◽  
Classic Work ◽  
German Scholar ◽  
As If

In 1894, the German scholar Edmund Parish published his classic work Über die Trugwahrnehmung, with an expanded English edition called Hallucinations and Illusions appearing in 1897. Both versions won critical acclaim from celebrities such as Joseph Jastrow and William James, although, curiously, few others seemed to have noticed the book. After two more publications, Parish inexplicably stopped publishing. During the century that followed, it seemed as if neither he nor his work had ever existed. Now that scholars have finally started to appreciate the book, the present paper seeks to answer the questions of how it came into being, why it disappeared for so long, and who its mysterious author was.

scholarly journals Poets of Divine Love. Franciscan Mystical Poetry of the Thirteenth Century

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-189
Author(s):  
Alessandro Vettori (book author) ◽  
Sarah Melanie Rolfe (review author)
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Divine Love

William James and the Modernist Esthetics of Religion

2014 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
pp. 154-162
Author(s):  
Amanda Porterfield
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
William James ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Intellectual Biography ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Annie Dillard ◽  
The Universe ◽  
As If

In his intellectual biography, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Robert Richardson never defines modernism, and never addresses the reasons for its turbulence in America. But he does present the maelstrom through his subject, showing how James helped drive the modernist sensibility he inhabited—a whirlwind of creativity and intellectual passion “whose leading ideas,” to quote Richardson, “are still so fresh and challenging that they are not yet fully assimilated by the modern world they helped to bring about.” Presenting James as an intellectual activity, Richardson focuses on bringing the emotional background of that activity into view, chronicling James's intellectual history as splashes from a turbulent stream of consciousness. The book's dedication to Annie Dillard next to the book's epigraph from James reveals Richardson's respect for the volatility both writers represented. The dedication is: “For Annie, who wrote, ‘we have less time than we knew and that time buoyant, and cloven, lucent, missile, and wild,’” followed by the epigraph from James testifying that, “[life] feels like a real fight—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.”

Unraveling the Myth of the Subsistence Economy: Textile Production in Nineteenth-Century Northern Thailand

1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-823 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine A. Bowie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Textile Production ◽  
Subsistence Economy ◽  
Northern Thailand ◽  
The Past ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
History Of ◽  
As If

For decades, scholarship on the Thai peasantry has proceeded as if the history of the peasantry were known. Scholars have luxuriated in tourist-brochure images of primeval abundance, reiterating unchallenged the famous adage from the thirteenth-century stele of King Ramkhamhaeng, “There is fish in the water and rice in the fields.” Little hyperbole exists in Thadeus Flood's statement, “For the past century much Western imperialist scholarship and Thai royalist scholarship has sought to perpetuate the image of benign Thai royalty ruling over a happy, carefree, and subservient populace dwelling in a land of sunshine and smiles” (1975:55). For observers of modern Thai society, demonstrations by discontented peasants and assassinations of their leaders have destroyed the myth of a rustic paradise. Nonetheless, the theme of self-sufficiency continues to dominate the literature on Thai history.

Philosophy in Germany

Philosophy ◽  
1938 ◽  
Vol 13 (49) ◽  
pp. 87-92
Author(s):  
F. H. Heinemann
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Moral Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Product ◽  
As If

One of the fundamental differences between English and German civilisation which leads to different philosophical problems is their attitude to the reality of history. The English “live” history as if it were nature. They found at least by the thirteenth century their own form of life, of government, constitution, and state, which have lasted ever since through all changes so that a rich system of traditions has developed. Germany did not find a lasting unity as early as that, but, being divided into many autonomous parts, religions, and tribes, it did not reach a strong social or moral tradition. Consequently the “rise of the historical consciousness“ and even the wish to awaken the nation as a whole to it is in Germany an intellectual product. But what has been a disadvantage in the sphere of politics has been an advantage to science and philosophy. The German even believes it to be one of their chief contributions to the History of Thought that they have developed a scientific history and all the sciences which analyse its field, and above that the “Historism,“ a historical Weltanschauung or the task of interpreting the whole world from the point of view of history.

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