Up All Night Out of Love for the Prophet: Devotion, Sanctity, and Ritual Innovation in the Ottoman Arab Lands, 1500–1620

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Parkes Allen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Ritual Studies ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Ritual Space ◽  
History Of

Abstract Devotion to the Prophet Muḥammad was a major feature of late medieval and early modern Islamic religious life across much of the Islamic world. The history of this devotion remains understudied in relation to its importance and pervasiveness. This study takes as its locus of analysis a particular instance of early modern devotion: a weekly, public all-night session of ṣalawāt upon the Prophet that would become known as the maḥyā. Developed by the peasant-turned-shaykh Nūr al-Dīn al-Shūnī in late Mamluk Egypt, performance of the maḥyā would spread over the following century throughout the Arab Ottoman world, undergoing changes, provoking controversy, and becoming embedded in the sacred spaces and ritual life of one city after another. I approach the history of the maḥyā as a discrete and legible instance of ritual change in an Islamic context, exploring this instance of communal devotion to the Prophet through such lenses as ritual studies and the spatial turn, examining the intersection of this devotional ritual with practices of subjectivity, the use and contestation of ritual space, and the meaning, regulation, and experience of the night.

scholarly journals Jesuit Sanctity: Hypothesizing the Continuity of a Hagiographic Narrative of the Modern Age

2022 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Franco Motta ◽  
Eleonora Rai
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
History Of

Abstract The introduction to this special issue provides some considerations on early modern sanctity as a historical object. It firstly presents the major shifts in the developing idea of sanctity between the late medieval period and the nineteenth century, passing through the early modern construction of sanctity and its cultural, social, and political implications. Secondly, it provides an overview of the main sources that allow historians to retrace early modern sanctity, especially canonization records and hagiographies. Thirdly, it offers an overview of the ingenious role of the Society of Jesus in the construction of early modern sanctity, by highlighting its ability to employ, create, and play with hagiographical models. The main Jesuit models of sanctity are then presented (i.e., the theologian, the missionary, the martyr, the living saint), and an important reflection is reserved for the specific martyrial character of Jesuit sanctity. The introduction assesses the continuity of the Jesuit hagiographical discourse throughout the long history of the order, from the origins to the suppression and restoration.

Idleness

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kearney
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Human Labor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Thought

This essay examines the role that the specter of idleness played in the ongoing transformation of labor in England during the late medieval and early modern periods. It begins by tracing an historical shift in Christian conceptions of labor through a knotty genealogy of ideas about labor and idleness that extends from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The essay then turns to an early sixteenth-century text that is not often considered in either medieval or early modern histories of Christian thought about labor: Thomas More’sUtopia(1516). The essay contends thatUtopiais fundamentally shaped by More’s meditation on labor and idleness and that that meditation opens the utopian text out toward a vexed history of ideas concerning human work that extends forward from the fourteenth century. With its idiosyncratic but historically resonant meditation on human labor, More’sUtopiarepresents a particularly useful vantage point from which to address the ongoing transformation of Christian conceptions of work in late medieval and early modern England.

Jewels for Gentlewomen: Religious Books as Artefacts in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 123-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Walsham
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Religious Books ◽  
History Of ◽  
Prayer Books

Historians tend to approach books primarily as vehicles for ideas, sources for the thought of the individuals and groups who wrote and read the words on the pages inside. They rarely pause to consider their significance as physical artefacts and items of material culture. This paper brings the format, appearance, and practical function of Bibles, prayer books, and other small devotional works to the very centre of our attention. It suggests that close scrutiny of the diminutive size and artistically crafted covers of some of the copies that survive yields fresh insights into the shape and texture of piety in late medieval and early modern England. The following investigation is heavily indebted to the findings of researchers in the specialized field of the history of bookbinding, a field once light-heartedly described as ‘a humble auxiliary discipline … not entirely useless and undoubtedly innocuous’. Yet, as we shall see, situated against the backdrop of developments in Tudor and Stuart embroidery and jewellery, domestic furnishing and female fashion, decorated bookbindings provide us with a unique and interesting reflection of the values and preoccupations of pre- and post-Reformation society.

CHRONICLING THE MEROVINGIANS IN HEBREW: THE EARLY MEDIEVAL CHAPTERS OF YOSEF HA-KOHEN'S DIVREI HAYAMIM

Traditio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 423-447
Author(s):  
YANIV FOX
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Italian Physician ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Chain

Yosef Ha-Kohen (1496–ca. 1575) was a Jewish Italian physician and intellectual who in 1554 published a chronicle in Hebrew titled Sefer Divrei Hayamim lemalkei Tzarfat ulemalkei Beit Otoman haTogar, or The Book of Histories of the Kings of France and of the Kings of Ottoman Turkey. It was, as its name suggests, a history told from the perspective of two nations, the French and the Turks. Ha-Kohen begins his narrative with a discussion of the legendary origins of the Franks and the history of their first royal dynasty, the Merovingians. This composition is unique among late medieval and early modern Jewish works of historiography for its universal scope, and even more so for its treatment of early medieval history. For this part of the work, Ha-Kohen relied extensively on non-Jewish works, which themselves relied on still earlier chronicles composed throughout the early Middle Ages. Ha-Kohen thus became a unique link in a long chain of chroniclers who worked and adopted Merovingian material to suit their authorial agendas. This article considers how the telling of Merovingian history was transformed in the process, especially as it was adapted for a sixteenth-century Jewish audience.

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