The Care of Nuns

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Primary Control ◽  
Treasure Trove ◽  
Liturgical Texts ◽  
Women's Communities

This book recovers the liturgical and pastoral ministries performed by Benedictine nuns in England from 900 to 1225. Three ministries are examined in detail—liturgically reading the gospel, hearing confessions, and offering intercessory prayers for others—but they are prefaced by profiles of the monastic officers most often charged with their performances—cantors, sacristans, prioresses, and abbesses. This book challenges past scholarly accounts of these ministries that either locate them exclusively in the so-called Golden Age of double monasteries headed by abbesses in the seventh and eighth centuries, or read the monastic and ecclesiastical reforms of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries as effectively relegating nuns to complete dependency on priests’ sacramental care. This book shows instead that, throughout the central Middle Ages, many nuns in England continued to exercise primary control over the cura animarum of their consorors and others who sought their aid. Most innovative and essential to this study are the close paleographical, codicological, and textual analyses of the surviving liturgical books from women’s communities. When identified and then excavated to unearth the liturgical scripts and scribal productions they preserve, these books hold a treasure trove of unexamined evidence for understanding the lives of nuns in England during the central Middle Ages. These books serve as the foundational documents of practice for this study because they offer witnesses not only to the liturgical and pastoral ministries that nuns performed, but also to the productions of female scribes as copyists, correctors, and even creators of liturgical texts.

scholarly journals The problem of Millenarism

1975 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 31-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Af Edholm
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Mass Movements ◽  
Hindu Tradition ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Near Future

The myth of the recurrence of the golden age after a period of accelerating miseries ("messianic woes") in the near future is of course not peculiar to the chiliasm of the European later middle ages. On the contrary, it belongs to the basic eschatological themes of millenarism in general. These themes are found also in Hindu tradition. To determine those general characteristics of traditional Hindu society which can contribute to an explanation of the relative unimportance of peasant rebellions and the lack of chiliastic mass movements, is not a problem to be solved within the field of the history of religions.  For example, the egalitarian message of the bhakti saints, disputing the hierarchy, did not preclude that the salvationist sects did adapt to the caste system. The religious movements contributed to and gave ideological form to adjustments within the existing social structure. Obviously there was little need for millenarism in this process.  

Cinderella! Cinderella!: A closer look into Dutch seventeenth-century gender roles and genre paintings

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 123-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Downs
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Second Commandment

This article highlights a time when Northern artists were no longer allowed to paint or carve holy images as they had done during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The Catholic Church banned this art form due to the interpretation of the second commandment: ‘Thou shalt make no graven image of thy God’. Genre paintings were the outcome of this banishment and a way to represent and depict an everyday life scene in a Dutch seventeenth-century household. The paintings would show the best of a situation and also its worst counterpart in almost a mocking comical way. By exploring these paintings, we come to understand how women were fed propaganda into becoming a better housewife, mother and bearing the weight of physical nourisher to all. Although amusing, the images have been celebrated and considered legendary during the Golden Age of the Netherlands. While taking a closer look at genre paintings and the everyday practices of the Dutch household, we can connect patterns to how these paintings affected women and influenced their domestic duties in the Golden Age.

Intercessors

2019 ◽  
pp. 225-290
Author(s):  
Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Women's Communities ◽  
Prayer Books

Chapter 5 spotlights Benedictine nuns as intercessors, focusing especially on how they served those who were not members of their communities through offering prayers. This role—both in its idealized forms and in its lived realities—is reconstructed through the conventual and personal seals, charters, letters, mortuary rolls, prayer books, and psalters that women’s communities received, produced, and used. This chapter challenges the persistent scholarly assumption that nuns’ intercessory prayers depreciated in value over the central Middle Ages because, unlike their male counterparts, they could not offer the individualized forms of commemoration increasingly desired by prospective patrons—namely Masses—without the assistance of resident chaplains or visiting priests. Comparative analysis of the extant documentary sources from religious communities in Oxfordshire reveals that the nuns of Godstow Abbey rivaled neighboring monks, canons, and Templars in attracting lay donations in return for certain spiritual benefits, particularly prayers for the remission of sins and salvation.

Mediaeval grammatical theories

1963 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. L. Bursill-Hall
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Second Order ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Compulsory Subject ◽  
Grammatical Theories ◽  
The Middle Ages

SummaryThis article is an essay by a modern linguist in one aspect of the history of grammar. Grammar was a compulsory subject in the curriculum of the mediaeval university, and the golden age of scholasticism produced a number of interesting theories of grammar; this article is concerned with the theory of one group in particular, i.e. the Modistae, speculative grammarians who were active in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Modistae wrote their treatises in Latin and drew upon Latin to illustrate their theories. In addition they made of Latin an idealized language, a kind of “second-order-” or metalanguage, and it was from the standpoint of this idealized language that all grammatical speculation and pedagogy were to be carried out. This is an attitude which has persisted up to the present day and one which has considerably influenced the teaching of grammar and foreign languages since the Middle Ages.

scholarly journals Lingua letteraria e lingua di corte: diglossia e insegnamento tradizionale in Etiopia fra Tardo Antico e Medio Evo

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 274-284
Author(s):  
Gianfrancesco Lusini
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
Verbal Communication ◽  
Traditional Teaching ◽  
Written Discourse ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Liturgical Texts ◽  
Ethiopian Orthodox

Abstract The Ethiopian literary tradition extends over a time frame beginning even before the christianization of the Country (first half of the 4th cent.) up to modern times. In this long period we frequently register phenomena of interference both among different languages (Greek, Gǝ‘ǝz, Arabic, Amharic, agaw languages and so on) and between various registers of the same language, produced or conditioned by specific cultural or religious contexts. Particularly, in the Middle Ages the differentiation between Gǝ‘ǝz as the language of the clergy and the written discourse, and Amharic as the language of the court and the verbal communication, had momentous reflexes on the traditional teaching, related to Gǝ‘ǝz liturgical texts, but orally transmitted in Amharic. This development proved to be crucial for the start of the literarization process of Amharic, to be dated back to the second half of the 16th cent., as an effect of the missionary propaganda of the Portuguese Jesuits and of their polemics against the Ethiopian Orthodox clergy.

scholarly journals Between Acculturation and Conversion in Islamic Spain The case of the Banū Ḥasday

2016 ◽  
pp. 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah STROUMSA
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Static Picture ◽  
Social Pressures ◽  
High Middle Ages

The High Middle Ages in Islamic Spain (al-Andalus) is often described as a golden age in which Jews, Christians and Muslims lived in harmony. The attested dynamics of conversions to Islam disturb this idyllic, static picture, revealing the religious and social pressures exerted on the religious minorities. The different reactions of the Jewish and Christian communities of al-Andalus to these pressures allow us to refine our understanding of conversion in the Medieval Islamic world. A close examination of the Jewish family of Banū Ḥasday shows more nuances and ambivalence than ‘conversion’ normally suggests.

Hiberno-Latin Literature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles D. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
High Point ◽  
Latin Language ◽  
Liturgical Texts ◽  
Marginal Status ◽  
Biblical Commentaries

“Hiberno-Latin literature” refers to Latin writings by native speakers of Irish, whether or not they were written in Ireland, and whether or not they differ linguistically from other medieval Latin texts. (An exception must be made for St. Patrick, a Briton by birth who spent most of his adult life in Ireland and wrote his surviving works there.) Hiberno-Latin literature in the earlier Middle Ages is virtually all of monastic or clerical authorship and predominantly on religious subjects. The tradition begins with the writings of the missionary Patrick in the 5th century and of the expatriate Columbanus in the late 5th to early 6th century; reaches a high point in the 7th century with some remarkably original but mostly anonymous or pseudonymous theological writings and poetry; shifts mainly to the Continent in the 8th and 9th centuries with the Irish peregrini, such as the poet-scholars Sedulius Scottus and Iohannes Scottus Eriugena; and declines over the course of the 10th through 12th centuries, though with a final flourish in the influential Visio Tnugdali by Marcus of Regensburg. In addition to texts of known Irish authorship, there are also those (especially in the category of biblical commentaries) for which Irish authorship has been postulated but also disputed, and others that occupy a marginal status as putatively “Insular” (or “Irish-influenced”). A further marginal category comprises Irish versions or revisions of non-Irish texts (for example, many liturgical texts). This entry will focus on Reference Works, General Overviews, Journals, Major Named Authors, Major Genres, Thematic Studies, Historical and Cultural Contexts, and Hiberno-Latin Language.

The Use of Sarum and Other Liturgical Uses in Later Medieval Britain

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Local Area ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Divine Office ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Ritual Action ◽  
Single Reading ◽  
Liturgical Texts ◽  
Local Traditions

If the late medieval liturgy could be characterized by anything, it was diversity of practice from one place of worship to another, not only in the texts and music used in the services, but also in other areas, including the observance of saints’ days and of special practices with local traditions as well as in the patterns of ritual action that accompanied them. Each pattern of text, music, and ritual is most frequently called a liturgical “use” (from Lat. usus, i.e., “custom”). In medieval England, the most famous of these uses were “Sarum” or Salisbury Use, so called from its emanation from Salisbury Cathedral, and the Use of York, which derived from the practices of York Minster. Both came to be used, on an increasing basis, in their local area and were then adopted on a large scale in the southern and northern ecclesiastical provinces, respectively. These so-called secular Uses (as distinct from the liturgical patterns of monastic or conventual institutions) all stood within the Latin Rite, but they could be distinguished from one another by particular details of ritual and, more noticeably in their written witnesses, by the choice and order of the texts and chants of the Mass and Divine Office. By the turn of the 16th century, the uses of Sarum and York held a near monopoly on the secular English liturgy; by contrast, nearly every diocese on the Continent had its own Use, while other institutions adopted the Use of the Roman Curia. This article includes some of the historical scholarly efforts that have laid the groundwork for further research. Some of these are included for historiographical interest, especially to reflect on the long-held belief in the textual and musical fixity of English liturgical books, which has inevitably led to misconceptions about the ways that modern resources can be used. Catalogues and secondary sources tend, for instance, to use unrepresentative modern editions of liturgical texts and music (often really transcriptions of a single source) with the result that a single reading becomes normative. More recent investigations suggest a more complex textual and musical picture than philology can readily reveal. This bibliography is replete with references that seek to explore the variation in written witnesses, and other witnesses to practice, in order to illustrate the diversity of practice in worship and the richness of liturgical influence on the rest of intellectual activity in the Middle Ages.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document