The Paradox of Holy Matter in the Later Middle Ages

2013 ◽  
Vol 106 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-226
Author(s):  
Francis Oakley
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Middle Ages

Via the focus on food that she had found to be the distinguishing preoccupation in the female piety of the Middle Ages and had addressed so probingly and with such independence of scholarly spirit in her Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Caroline Walker Bynum has moved on over the past two decades, and logically enough, to bring her formidable scholarly intelligence and drive to bear, first, on issues pertaining to the body and then, beyond that, to the intriguing cat's cradle of questions pertaining to late-medieval assumptions about matter and its nature in general. The first impulse came to fruition in her Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336, a book in which celibacy, asceticism, fasting, and renunciation notwithstanding, she pushed back hard against the modern temptation to project onto medieval religiosity some sort of body-hating soul-body dualism. In this she was moved, as she herself has forthrightly acknowledged, by a “determination to let individual voices be individual and to let the past be different,” as well as by the adamant refusal, evinced also in the work under review, to simplify “the intricate and contradictory assumptions and practices” she was exploring. “Paradox remains paradox,” she has bluntly insisted, and “complexity remains complex” (13).

Ghosts and Ghostbusters in the Middle Ages

2009 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 143-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. N. Swanson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Silent Majority ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Middle Ages

The dead are the silent majority in the Church’s history – as they are, indeed, in humanity’s. The life after death is a matter of faith and conjecture more than tried and tested certainty, predicated on a soul which survives the death of the body. That raises issues about the nature and structure of the afterlife, its pains and delights. For the late medieval Church, the afterlife raised particular concerns and anxieties, its complex division into heaven, hell, and purgatory promising a future which had to be planned for. Strategies for eternity were a major force in religious practice, with death as the threshold to something unknown until experienced.

scholarly journals COMING TO TERMS WITH A PAGAN PAST: THE STORY OF ST ERKENWALD

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 71-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Schustereder
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Past ◽  
Scholarly Discussion ◽  
English Identity ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Outstanding Quality ◽  
Additional Reading ◽  
The Middle Ages

ABSTRACT The poem of St Erkenwald and his encounter with the body of a pagan judge preserved in a tomb underneath St Paul's Cathedral has never provoked an intense scholarly discussion. During the past two decades, however, the poem has altogether lost the scarce attention it used to receive. This is surprising in regards to its outstanding quality but also because of a number of peculiar characteristics the text has in comparison with other works written during the Middle Ages. Arguing for the importance of the historical details provided by the poem, my article takes a number of these peculiarities into account and suggests a new reading of the poem. In this approach, I do not dismiss the major topics of the earlier scholarly discussions, mostly focused on the poem's theological and stylistic topics or its presumed sources. My article rather presents an additional reading from the perspective of a literary history, thus arguing that the poem of St Erkenwald can be placed within a discourse tradition to which a number of earlier authors contributed, the most famous among them being the Venerable Bede. While the poem addresses a variety of theological and stylistic topics and is of course influenced by its contemporary religious and social developments, it also contributes to one of the fundamental problems of English identity in the Middle Ages: coming to terms with a pagan origin.

Stubbs, Shakespeare, and Recent Historians of Richard II

1976 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Theilmann
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
The Middle Ages

Richard II, one of the most puzzling kings of late medieval England, has been the subject of controversy ever since his forced abdication in 1399. He often has been portrayed as a tyrant or, at times, as a madman by historians. Recently the trend is toward a reassessment of Richard's reign free from the biased Whig interpretation of the past. R. H. Jones took a first step in that direction in 1968 with the publication of The Royal Policy of Richard II: Absolutism in the Middle Ages. Jones viewed Richard as a king inclined toward absolutism but lacking the taint of rancorousness or despotism ascribed to him by historians since Stubbs. Subsequently two books, a Festschrift, and several articles have appeared, delineating more aspects of the reign. Since May McKisack's volume in the Oxford History of England series appeared in 1959, the number of works concerning the reign has been steadily growing. The recent publication of Anthony Tuck's Richard II and the English Nobility offers an opportunity to reexamine the place of Richard II in history. The divergence of scholarship since 1959 from the traditional interpretations will be seen as the major constitutional problems of the reign are scrutinized. After first examining the influence of William Shakespeare and William Stubbs in shaping the historiography of the reign a chronological discussion of the period from 1377 to 1399 will follow.

Time and the Testator, 1370–1540

2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
Judith Middleton-Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Perception Of Time ◽  
Limited Duration ◽  
At Will

There were many ways in which the late medieval testator could acknowledge time. Behind each testator lay a lifetime of memories and experiences on which he or she drew, recalling the names of those ‘they had fared the better for’, those they wished to remember and by whom they wished to be remembered. Their present time was of limited duration, for at will making they had to assemble their thoughts and their intentions, make decisions and appoint stewards, as they prepared for their time ahead; but as they spent present time arranging the past, so they spent present time laying plans for the future. Some testators had more to bequeath, more time to spare: others had less to leave, less time to plan. Were they aware of time? How did they control the future? In an intriguing essay, A. G. Rigg asserts that ‘one of the greatest revolutions in man’s perception of the world around him was caused by the invention, sometime in the late thirteenth century, of the mechanical weight-driven clock.’ It is the intention of this paper to see how men’s (and women’s) perception of time in the late Middle Ages was reflected in their wills, the most personal papers left by ordinary men and women of the period.

Clothing and Female Reclusion in The Life of Mary of Egypt and The Life of Christina of Markyate

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-31
Author(s):  
Anna McKay
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Holy Women ◽  
Experiences Of Women ◽  
Mary Of Egypt ◽  
The Middle Ages

Over the past two decades, medieval feminist scholarship has increasingly turned to the literary representation of textiles as a means of exploring the oftensilenced experiences of women in the Middle Ages. This article uses fabric as a lens through which to consider the world of the female recluse, exploring the ways in which clothing operates as a tether to patriarchal, secular values in Paul the Deacon’s eighthcentury Life of Mary of Egypt and the twelfth-century Life of Christina of Markyate. In rejecting worldly garb as recluses, these holy women seek out and achieve lives of spiritual autonomy and independence.

scholarly journals Od Lopsike do Svetoga Jurja: 700 godina od prvoga prikaza Sv. Jurja na geografskim kartama

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-202
Author(s):  
Mithad Kozličić
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Mountain Pass ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
First Order ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Coastal Settlement ◽  
The Middle Ages

This paper offers an analysis, based on original cartographic material as a historical source of the first order, of the significance of the settlement situated in the position of today’s Sveti Juraj near Senj as a nexus of overseas and hinterland commerce. It is regarded as a coastal settlement, which entails a port that is a connection between the circulation between merchant goods from the hinterland towards other overseas destinations, as well as goods which arrived by sea traffic in order to be transported to the hinterland market. In that regard it is important that above Senj a mountain pass (Vratnik) is located by which Velebit is traversed. The notorious Bura, however, which shortened the season of navigation, is also a factor. Considering that in antiquity Lopsica was situated there, and that in the Middle Ages Sveti Juraj would mature, it was deemed interesting to consider the shift in the two names of the settlement. For this reason, the problem is examined here up to the Late Medieval era, as later attestations are present on almost all of the available cartographic works of world-famous cartographers. This paper was written in celebration of the 700th anniversary of the affirmation of Sveti Juraj near Senj as a settlement and port in the most important historical cartographic sources.

Democratic Myths in Victorian Medievalism

1980 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 129-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Jann
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Spiritual Health ◽  
The Political ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Central Characteristic ◽  
Liberal Individualism ◽  
The Middle Ages

Critical attention to the dominant tradition of Victorian medievalism has stressed its essentially conservative tendencies. For representative proponents of this tradition – Carlyle, Ruskin, Young England – the imaginative value of the Middle Ages lay in their contrast with the political and social disorder of the present. The antidote to those modern poisons – laissez faire capitalism, Utilitarian ethics, Liberal individualism – lay in a resuscitation of medieval hierarchy, one which called on the Captains of Industry to form a new aristocracy, and the state to assume control over the economy and social welfare. For such thinkers, the spiritual health and organic order of medieval society depended upon its essentially undemocratic structure. The prominence of this analysis has unfortunately overshadowed the importance of two alternative treatments of Victorian medievalism, the Whig and the Socialist. While opposed in fundamental ways to one another, these interpretations are opposed in more significant ways to that dominant conservative tradition in that they created alternative myths of the Middle Ages to justify a more – not less – democratic society in the present and future. Such myths assisted the development of class consciousness by using the authority of history to sanction a social order which drew its moral and political strengths not from the ideals of the aristocracy, but from those of the middle and working classes, respectively. However, the following demonstration of the way similar historical points of departure can lead investigators to radically different conclusions ultimately reinforces the central characteristic of Victorian medievalism: that it represented less an attempt to recapture the past “as it really was” than a projection of current ideals back into time.

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