Albertus, Magnus or Magus? Magic, Natural Philosophy, and Religious Reform in the Late Middle Ages*

2010 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Collins
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Dominican Order ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Albert The Great ◽  
Human Endeavor ◽  
The Witch

AbstractThis article analyzes the fifteenth-century attempt by the Dominican order, especially in Cologne, to win canonization for the thirteenth-century natural philosopher Albert the Great. It shows how Albert's thought on natural philosophy and magic was understood and variously applied, how the Dominicans at Cologne composed his vitae, and how the order's Observant movement participated in these developments. It situates the canonization attempt at the intersection of two significant trends in which the order was a leading participant: first, the late medieval efforts to reform Christian society beginning with the religious life of monks and mendicants; second, the increasing concerns about the practice of learned and demonic magic that laid groundwork for the witch-hunting of the early modern period. The article aims to shed light on intersections of science and religion — their apprehension and negotiation — at a decisive moment in European history for both fields of human endeavor.

scholarly journals Imagining the Witch: A Comparison between Fifteenth-Century Witches within Medieval Christian Thought and the Persecution of Jews and Heretics in the Middle Ages

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lily Climenhaga
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
Christian Society ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Middle Ages

This paper will examine how the prominent image of the witch in Christian thought during the early modern period emerged from earlier images of the non-Christian Other, Jews and heretics for example. To do so the beliefs surrounding the ―rituals‖ and ―practices‖ of witches seen during the witch-craze of the fifteenth century are compared and contrasted with the images of Others within medieval Christian society. To do so a variety of both primary and secondary scholarship on the persecution of witches, heretics, and Jews during the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

Unintended Bigamies: Holy Widowhood, Marriage, andSponsa Christiin Erasmus'sDe Vidua Christiana

2017 ◽  
Vol 110 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-264
Author(s):  
William E. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Medieval Women ◽  
Literal Sense ◽  
Religious Rituals ◽  
Dynamic Forces ◽  
The Witch ◽  
Historical Trajectory

Christ's brides were hell bound by the end of the Middle Ages, when women—in the figure of the witch—were increasingly seen as Satan's spouses. Such is the narrative arc of Dyan Elliott's significant recent study ofsponsa Christi(bride of Christ),The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell. Elliott points toward the incarnational logic of Christianity in general and the type of physically immanent bridal mysticism that flourished among late medieval women in particular to locate some of the dynamic forces that helped make possible the theological ideas about witches that flourished from the fifteenth century onward. Elliott has done much to enrich our understanding of the development of an embodied version of the bride of Christ. Medieval and early modern Christianity held out an option, for women at least, to marry Jesus—to become asponsa Christi—in a literal sense, a form of marriage sustained by such things as legal mechanisms, theological visions, particular emotions, religious rituals, and spiritual practices. But Elliott's argument, stopping as it does right before the tumultuous sixteenth century, lends itself to a reading that the literalizedsponsa Christiwas bound henceforth to the early modern witch craze. Desiderius Erasmus's 1529 treatiseDe vidua christianaprovides us evidence that the literalizedsponsa Christideveloped in alternative ways in the early modern period, including the creation of a distinctive vision of the Christian widow who is, at times, bigamous.De vidua, then, can serve as the basis for expanding upon an alternative historical trajectory for the bride of Christ that Elliott mentions in passing in her study.

A Crooked Mirror for Princes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavlína Rychterová
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
Mirrors For Princes

This chapter examines the growing importance of the vernacular languages during the later Middle Ages in shaping the form, content, and audiences of political discourse. It presents a famously wicked king of the late Middle Ages, Wenceslas IV (1361–1419), as a case study and traces the origins of his bad reputation to a group of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writings. These have often been dismissed as fictions or studied solely as literature, but in fact they represent new modes of articulating good and bad kingship. The chapter shows that, in the context of an increasingly literate bourgeois culture, especially in university cities, these vernacular works transformed Latin theological approaches to monarchy, while rendering mirrors for princes and related literatures accessible to an unprecedented audience.

A new attribution to Brassart?

1994 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43
Author(s):  
Peter Wright
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Middle Ages

A badly trimmed ascription can be more a matter for relish than regret: if enough of the composer's name survives to permit informed speculation, the musicologist's sense of pleasure is likely to outweigh his sense of loss. Most musical manuscripts from the late Middle Ages have visibly suffered at the hands of the binder's knife, but perhaps none more so than the famous ‘Aosta Manuscript’ (I-AO15), one of the central sources of early fifteenth-century sacred polyphony. In his inventory of the manuscript Guillaume de Van reported no fewer than twenty names as surviving in varying states of incompleteness. In fifteen instances he was able to decipher the composer's name or supply it from the manuscript's index or a concordant source, while the other five apparently defeated him. Two of the names have since been deciphered, and a third has been identified from another source, but the remaining two have attracted no further comment.

Die geschriebene Stadt

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Teresa Schröder-Stapper
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The City

The Written City. Inscriptions as Media of Urban Knowledge of Space and Time The article investigates the function of urban inscriptions as media of knowledge about space and time at the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period in the city of Braunschweig. The article starts with the insight that inscriptions in stone or wood on buildings or monuments not only convey knowledge about space and time but at the same time play an essential role in the construction of space and time in the city by the practice of inscribing. The analysis focuses on the steadily deteriorating relationship between the city of Braunschweig and its city lord, the Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, and its material manifestation in building and monument inscriptions. The contribution shows that in the course of the escalating conflict over autonomy, a change in epigraphic habit took placed that aimed at claiming both urban space and its history exclusively on behalf of the city as an expression of its autonomy.

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