The adolescence of a thirteenth-century visionary nun

1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 745-756 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerome Kroll ◽  
Roger De Ganck

SynopsisAmong the most notable features of the religious revival in western Europe in the early thirteenth century was the development of mysticism among the nuns and religious women of the lowlands. As scholarly attention becomes increasingly focused on this group of remarkable women, the question arises whether a psychiatric viewpoint has something of value to offer to the understanding of such individuals and the culture in which they struggled. The methodological and intellectual problems inherent in examining the life of a thirteenth-century mystic with a twentieth-century empirical frame of reference are illustrated in this study of the adolescence of Beatrice of Nazareth. Beatrice's stormy asceticism, ecstatic states and mood swings lend themselves to potentially competing hypotheses regarding the spiritual and psychopathological significance of her adolescent development and eventual life-course. Common grounds for reconciling these alternative models are discussed.

Author(s):  
Larysa Kovryk-Tokar

Every nation is quite diverse in terms of his historical destiny, spiritual priorities, and cultural heritage. However, voluntary European integration, which is the final aim of political integration that began in the second half of the twentieth century from Western Europe, provided for an availability of large number of characteristics in common in political cultures of their societies. Therefore, Ukraine needs to find some common determinants that can create inextricable relationship between the European Community and Ukraine. Although Ukrainian culture is an intercultural weave of two East macrocivilizations, according to the author, Ukraine tends to Western-style society with its openness, democracy, tolerance, which constitute the basic values of Europeans. Keywords: Identity, collective identity, European values, European integration


Author(s):  
R.W. Sharples

Cicero and Boethius did more than anyone else to transmit the insights of Greek philosophy to the Latin culture of Western Europe, which has played so influential a part in our civilisation to this day. Cicero's treatise On Fate (De Fato), though surviving only in a fragmentary and mutilated state, records contributions to the discussion of a central philosophical issue, that of free will and determinism, which are comparable in importance to those of twentieth-century philosophers and indeed sometimes anticipate them. Study of the treatise has been hindered by the lack of a combined Latin text and English translation based on a clear understanding of the arguments; this edition is intended to meet this need. The last book of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (Philosophiae Consolationis) is linked with Cicero's treatise by its theme, the relation of divine foreknowledge to human freedom. The book presents Latin text with facing-page English translation, introduction and commentary.


2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-427
Author(s):  
Emily McCaffrey

This article describes the recent resurgence of the popular memory of the thirteenth-century Cathar, or Albigensian, heresy and its bloody repression in Languedoc, south-western France. After centuries of having been relegated to the realms of elite historical theological and political writing, today the memory of the Cathars dominates local history, culture, literature and tourism. Indeed, the popular memory of the Cathars has become central to collective identity and its expressions. The article explores how local professional historians have mediated, sometimes awkwardly, between academic history and popular history.


1977 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph V. Turner

The latter part of the twentieth century may not find many of us wishing to pay tribute to bureaucrats, but as Helen Cam reminded us, the civil servant “deserves more credit than he has yet had for building up and maintaining our precious tradition of law and order.” In the late twelfth century and the thirteenth century the process of “bureaucratization” first got underway in England. An early professional civil servant, one specializing in judicial activity, was Simon of Pattishall. His name surfaces in the records in 1190, and it disappears after 1216. His time of activity, then, coincides with an important period for English common law: the years between “Glanvill” and Magna Carta.Simon was one of that group of royal judges who might be termed the first “professionals,” a group that took shape by the middle years of Richard I's reign. By the time of John, about ninety men acted at various times as royal judges, either at the Bench at Westminster, with the court following the king, or as itinerant justices. Many of these had only temporary appointments, making circuits in the counties; but a core of fifteen, who concentrated on the work of the courts, can be regarded as early members of a professional judiciary. Simon of PattishalPs is perhaps the most respected name among the fifteen. He had the longest career on the bench, from 1190 until 1216. He founded a judicial dynasty, for his clerk, Martin of Pattishall, became a judge, as did his clerk, William Raleigh, who had as his clerk Henry of Bracton, author of the great treatise on English law.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-61
Author(s):  
Thomas Blom Hansen

Abstract Theories of sovereignty in the twentieth century are generally based on a teleological “out-of-Europe” narrative where the modern, centralized nation-state form gradually spread across the world to be the foundation of the international order. In this article, the author reflects on how the conceptualization of sovereignty may change if one begins a global account of modern sovereignty not from the heart of Western Europe but from the complex arrangements of “distributed sovereignty” that emerged in the Indian Ocean and other colonized territories from the eighteenth century onward. These arrangements were organized as multiple layers of dependency and provisional domination, captured well by Eric Beverley's term minor sovereignty. Thinking through sovereignty in a minor key allows us to see sovereignty less as a foundation of states and societies and more as a performative category, emerging in a dialectic between promises of order, prosperity, and law, and the realities of violent domination and occupation.


Author(s):  
Richard Sharpe ◽  
Alan Deyermond

This chapter examines the study of Latin language and literature in Great Britain during the twentieth century. It explains that Latin is so pervasive in the literature, philosophy, science, law and historiography of medieval western Europe that most aspects of scholarship on Latin are covered in most medieval studies. It provides background information on Latin language of the earlier middle ages and discusses Latin literature.


Author(s):  
Nathan Cohen

This chapter describes Jewish popular reading in inter-war Poland, looking at shund and the Polish tabloid press. In the first third of the twentieth century, as the Polish press was developing rapidly, sensationalist newspapers began to proliferate. While this type of press had been widespread in the United States and western Europe since the middle of the nineteenth century, it first emerged in Poland only in 1910, with Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny (Illustrated Daily Courier) in Kraków. In Warsaw, the first tabloid newspapers, Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny (Information and Telegraphic Courier) and Ekspres Poranny (Morning Express), appeared in 1922. In 1926, Kurier Informacyjny i Telegraficzny changed its name, now printed in red, to Kurier Czerwony (Red Courier). In time, the colour red became emblematic of sensationalist newspapers in Poland, and they were nicknamed czerwoniaki (Reds), similar to the ‘yellow’ press in the West.


Author(s):  
Stephen J. Spencer

The scant attention anger has received in a crusading context has focused almost exclusively on positive manifestations of that emotion, especially ira per zelum (anger through zeal). It is contended here that the importance of crusading in providing a setting for the legitimate outpouring of anger against non-Latins has been overstated. While zelus and the idea of crusading as vengeance continued to intersect and to be espoused after 1216, the terminus date of Susanna Throop’s 2011 study, zelus proves to be an ambiguous term, and one relatively poorly attested in twelfth- and thirteenth-century narratives of the crusades. Moreover, when the semantic field is broadened to encompass other anger terms, it becomes clear that anger was not an integral component of crusading ideology; and a close reading of accounts of righteous wrath, especially in relation to rulers, suggests that crusading did little to popularize or modify pre-existing attitudes towards anger in western Europe.


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