Medieval Saints and Their Miraculous Songs: Ritual Singing, Funerary Piety, and the Construction of Female Sanctity in Thirteenth-Century Liège

2020 ◽  
Vol 89 (3) ◽  
pp. 509-530
Author(s):  
Luo Wang
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Religious Rhetoric ◽  
Privileged Access ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Perceived Religiosity ◽  
New Spirituality

AbstractThis article explores the conspicuous role of singing in the hagiographical construction of saintly women in the thirteenth-century Diocese of Liège. The constellation of Lives about Liégeois women occupies a prominent place in the “origin story” of the new spirituality in the later Middle Ages. However, one aspect of these women's perceived religiosity—their musical and vocal talent—though omnipresent in the sources, has received only sparse attention from scholarship. This article focuses on two of the most important Lives in this group, those of Mary of Oignies and Christina of Sint-Truiden, and demonstrates that hagiographers, mobilizing liturgical vocabulary and ritual ideas identifiable to a local audience, consistently represented women's singing as magnificent ritual performance. By doing so, the hagiographers highlighted these women's privileged access to the divine and distinct potency as intercessors for the living and the dead. This article also intends to show the highly sophisticated ways in which Latin liturgy and its vernacular appropriation, popular ideas and scholastic theories about music were negotiated, developed, and together contributed to a distinctive religious rhetoric in the articulation of female sanctity in thirteenth-century Europe.

Buddhist Preaching and Sinhala Religious Rhetoric: Medieval Buddhist Methods to Popularize Theravāda

Numen ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahinda Deegalle
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Religious Rhetoric ◽  
Theravada Buddhism ◽  
Scholarly Literature ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
The Way

AbstractBuddhist preaching is one of the most neglected areas in modern scholarship. In Buddhist societies, though varieties of preaching rituals are found, existing scholarly literature contains only scattered and often inadequate or misleading references to Buddhist preaching. Since both historians of religions and Buddhologists have tended to ignore the role of Buddhist preachers and preaching in Theravāda Buddhism, this paper stresses the importance of paying attention to ‘preaching’ in developing a holistic understanding of Sinhala Buddhism.Focusing on the term ‘bana,’ this paper examines the development of Buddhist preaching in Sri Lanka. It demonstrates the way bana has functioned in the popularization of Theravāda since the thirteenth century. First, through an examination of inscriptions, it establishes the development of the term bana as an important religio-historical category in Sinhala Buddhism. Second, it examines the specific usage of the term bana in the sense of preaching in the thirteenth century Pūjāvaliya. Finally, focusing on the Butsarana, an early thirteenth century Sinhala text which contains extensive references to bana, it examines the way Vidyācakravartī innovated Theravāda Buddhist intellectual framework by employing an unconventional term such as ‘kāma’ (desire) to describe Theravāda religious concepts in order to popularize them. It argues that Buddhist preaching developed and grew in the context of Sinhala banapot, and functions as a rich cultural, educational, and religious resource influencing the attitudes and practices of Sinhala Buddhists.

Learned Discussions of Indulgences for the Dead in the Middle Ages

1992 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 367-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert W. Shaffern
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Holy Places ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Middle Ages

By the thirteenth century, Latin Christians had been dispensing and collecting indulgences for two centuries. Though indulgentia was a relatively late term, and first the favorite of thirteenth-century Dominican theologians, remissions of temporal penalty for sin had been granted since the eleventh century, whether they were known as remissiones or relaxationes, the two most popular terms of eleventh- and twelfth-century ecclesiastics. Bishops granted partial indulgences for visitations of holy places. Partial indulgences remitted a fraction of all penalty incurred through sin. Contributions to pious works, such as church, hospital, or bridge constructions, were also rewarded with indulgences. Other prelates granted indulgences until Lateran IV. The popes granted both partial and plenary indulgences (those which remitted all penalty for having sinned). They granted partial indulgences for much the same reasons as other bishops. Plenary indulgences were almost exclusively granted to crusaders or contributors to crusades.

Jews, Regalian Rights, And The Constitution In Medieval France

AJS Review ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Chester Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Holy Roman Empire ◽  
The West ◽  
Medieval France ◽  
German Nation ◽  
Territorial Division

It is fashionable to imagine a great dichotomy between the feudal monarchies in the West and the brittle, particularistic entity of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. To Voltaire's mean-spirited gibe that the latter was neither holy, Roman, nor an Empire might be added that it was also not really German, since millions of Netherlanders, Italians, and Slavs, as well as Provencals and Savoyards, lived within its territorial limits. France and England, the stereotype goes, had achieved a precocious unity, at least in the thirteenth century. Nothing could be clearer, one might conclude, than the contrast between the great kingdoms of the West and the so-called Empire. The fashionable cliche even affects our understanding of Jewish life in the Middle Ages. Fritz Backhaus put the commonplace this way: “The territorial division (Zersplitterung) of Germany prevented a comprehensive expulsion [of the Jews] as could be carried out in England, France, and Spain.” This neat dichotomy is inadequate. At best it makes sense in a comparison between England and Germany. Only in England, a few exceptions aside, were the claims of a paramount lord, the king, to the control and exploitation of the Jews more or less uncontested by other secular authorities or by ecclesiastics in the role of secular lords.

The King in Parlement: The Problem of theLit De Justicein Sixteenth-Century France

1988 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 507-523 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mack P. Holt
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Legislative Process ◽  
Personal Appearance ◽  
Customary Rights ◽  
Francis I ◽  
The Middle Ages

‘You ask me what aLit de justiceis? I will tell you!’ Thus exclaimed Louis-Adrien Le Paige, an eighteenth-centuryparlementairewho was excoriating the current spectacle of the king's appearance in person in the Grand-Chambre of the Parlement of Paris. Denied their ancient and customary rights of consultation and deliberation in important affairs of state, which in their view meant an active or participatory role in the legislative process, magistrates like Le Paige felt coerced in 1756 into the passive role of registering policies presented to them asfaits accomplis. And thus also opens Professor Sarah Hanley's penetrating and revisionist study of this complex ceremony where monarch and magistrates met together in the legislative arena: thelit de justice. In a tour de force of painstaking scholarship Professor Hanley has convincingly proved that this ceremony, in which the king personally appeared in Parlement and sat on a specially decorated ‘seat of justice’, had evolved out of legend and myth. Thelit de justicedid not, as generations ofparlementaireslike Le Paige had claimed, emerge in the middle ages shortly after the creation of the court itself in the late thirteenth century. As Professor Hanley shows, the first such ceremony did not occur until much later, in the reign of Francis I in 1527. More importantly, she demonstrates that at its inception thelit de justicewas not associated in any way with the adversarial scene depicted by Le Paige in 1756, with the king forcing his will on a recalcitrant court by making a personal appearance in the Grand-Chambre in order to force the registration of unpopular legislation.

Defining issues

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Harding
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Significant Shift ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Current Generation ◽  
Archaeological Data ◽  
Secular Society ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Many ◽  
Archaeological Cultures

The universality of human mortality is the commonest of truisms, but the prospect of mortality evidently has weighed differently on different societies over the course of human history, from the oppressive burden of the later Middle Ages to the more relaxed live-for-the-present-ism of the current generation. The disposal of the dead is at basis a hygienic necessity that is recognized in all but the most socially disrupted circumstances, but the manner of disposal may reveal attitudes of society towards death and the concept of afterlife, or the role of the dead in the continuing life of the community. Even in our contemporary secular society, relatives of the victims of murder or abduction or of death in foreign parts crave the recovery of bodies for due burial, without which they apparently cannot ‘achieve closure’, a condition of grace that might have been considered essential to the dead, but which evidently matters equally to the bereaved. The discipline of archaeology is methodologically disposed to distort the reality of the past in that it seeks to recognize ordered patterns where in reality diversity and apparent irrationality must have been inherent. The keystone of Childe’s approach, the identification of archaeological cultures, was dependent upon recurrence of diagnostic types in association, which would permit the comparison of one cultural assemblage with another in time or space. Even in processual and post-processual approaches the essence is to reduce the ever-burgeoning data-base to some semblance of order, without which it is impossible for interpretation to proceed, other than intuitively, empathically, or experientially, that is, based upon imaginative reconstruction rather than being inferred, however inadequately, from archaeological data. The consequence of this process of classification has been to emphasize certain outstanding classes of data, like long barrows, stone circles, or hillforts, as typical of their period or region, at the expense of a subtler analysis of the many possible variations of settlement or burial sites that are detectable, even from the surviving archaeological record. In recent years there has been a significant shift in archaeological approaches to burial data.

scholarly journals The Role of Fire in the Posthumous Customs of Podlachia on the Border of Poland and Belarus

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Wawrzeniuk
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Basic Element ◽  
Funeral Rites ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Special Respect ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Way ◽  
At Home

In this article, I would like to describe the role of fire in the customs of All Souls’ Day in the Easter period called przewody or radunica. The burning of the fires most commonly took place overnight at home and in cemeteries to illuminate the way for the transmigration of souls so they would not harm the living. The reflection of special respect for fire is known from the funeral rites from the area of Podlachia in the Middle Ages. It also served as a basic element of the ritual related to cyclical visits to the dead, as evidenced by the remains of charcoals or ash. Different kind of sources from the Middle Ages and modern times, from the region of eastern Poland (Podlachia and Belarus, in particular) shall be used to confirm that the rite lasted for many years.

History Through the Prism of V.V. Rozanov’s Views and Myth-Creating

2019 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 40-48
Author(s):  
Galina V. Talina
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Static Image ◽  
State Bureaucracy ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Public Person

The article analyzes V.V. Rozanov’s conceptions of antiquity, Middle Ages and new history. Rozanov singles out three periods of Russian history – Kiev, Vladimir-Moscow and Petersburg ones. The essence of each of those periods the philosopher consecutively correlates with adoption of Christianity, political organization formation and the beginning of individual creative work dominance. While interpreting his contemporary events as a public person and a journalist, Rozanov regards earlier epochs from the position of a myth-creator. The diverse historical process gives way to the literary and static image of the epoch. The author of the article pays special attention to how Rozanov characterizes historical personalities, to his views on the role of religion, state, bureaucracy and parliamentarism.

Witches, Female Weather Makers, and Poisoners in the Carolingian Empire

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-211
Author(s):  
Christoph Galle
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
General Situation ◽  
Carolingian Empire ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
Witch Hunt

<?page nr="201"?>Abstract The question about the role of women within medieval societies associatively makes one think of witches who allegedly were up to mischief by using poison or all kinds of magic to inflict maliciously harm on other people. But this impression results too much from an uncritical reception of such propagandistic conceptions that arose from the later medieval and early modern witch-hunt ideology. This cliché of medieval witches neither does justice to the general situation nor can it be transferred to the entire Middle Ages, as a representative view into the Carolingian empire of the eighth and ninth centuries shows.

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