Bearing the Stigmata

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-59
Author(s):  
Carolyn Muessig
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Francis Of Assisi

Chapter 1 traces the patristic and early medieval exegesis of Galatians 6:17. It assesses how language and imagery were appropriated and developed by eleventh- and twelfth-century monastic theologians (especially Peter Damian) into a soteriological system of penance and redemption that focused on Christ’s wounds. Significantly, it looks at examples of stigmatization before Francis of Assisi. These cases vary in their form; they gradually move from stigmata being almost exclusively associated with the sacerdotal order in the early Middle Ages to being linked to the laity by the early thirteenth century as with the cases of Peter the Conversus and Mary of Oignies.

Bastard Feudalism and the Framing of Thirteenth-Century England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Coss
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

In the introduction to his great work of 2005, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Chris Wickham urged not only the necessity of carefully framing our studies at the outset but also the importance of closely defining the words and concepts that we employ, the avoidance ‘cultural sollipsism’ wherever possible and the need to pay particular attention to continuities and discontinuities. Chris has, of course, followed these precepts on a vast scale. My aim in this chapter is a modest one. I aim to review the framing of thirteenth-century England in terms of two only of Chris’s themes: the aristocracy and the state—and even then primarily in terms of the relationship between the two. By the thirteenth century I mean a long thirteenth century stretching from the period of the Angevin reforms of the later twelfth century on the one hand to the early to mid-fourteenth on the other; the reasons for taking this span will, I hope, become clearer during the course of the chapter, but few would doubt that it has a validity.

Early Latin Discussions of the Eternity of the World in the Thirteenth Century

Traditio ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 171-197
Author(s):  
Richard C. Dales
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The World ◽  
Preceding Period

Although the doctrine of the eternity of the world had evoked much concern and opposition among the Fathers of the Christian Church, it ceased to engage the attention of Latin Christian writers during most of the early Middle Ages. When interest in the question revived during the twelfth century, it was nearly always considered in the context of Plato's Timaeus or Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae. By 1270, the issue seemed to be between the supporters and the opponents of Aristotle. Although the story of Latin discussions of the eternity of the world during the 1260s and 1270s has been quite thoroughly investigated, the preceding period from about 1230 to 1260 has been largely ignored. It is the purpose of the present study to elucidate this neglected stage in medieval discussions of the eternity of the world and to show its relationship to the earlier and later periods.

Agnes of Harcourt, Felipa of Porcelet, and Marguerite of Oingt: Women Writing about Women at the End of the Thirteenth Century

2007 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 298-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean L. Field
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Religious Women ◽  
Clemence Of Barking ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Women Writing ◽  
European Women

Three vernacular religious biographies were written by women about other women around the year 1300: Agnes of Harcourt's FrancienVie d'Isabelle de France(ca. 1283), Felipa of Porcelet's ProvençalVida de la benaurada sancta Doucelina(begun ca. 1297), and Marguerite of Oingt's Franco-ProvençalVia seiti Biatrix virgina de Ornaciu(between 1303 and 1310). Although a limited number of similar texts had been composed in Latin dating back to the early Middle Ages, and a few twelfth-century women such as Clemence of Barking had refashioned existing Latin lives of early female martyr-saints into Anglo-Norman verse, the works of Agnes, Felipa, and Marguerite are the first extant vernacular biographies to have been written by European women about other contemporary women. Just as strikingly, after the three examples studied here, few if any analogous works appeared until the later fifteenth century, with most writing by women about other religious women in the intervening period instead being found in “Sister Books” and convent chronicles.

Signs of Salvation: The Evolution of Stigmatic Spirituality Before Francis of Assisi

2013 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-68
Author(s):  
Carolyn Muessig
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
The Face ◽  
Biblical Commentaries ◽  
The Ideal

Francis of Assisi's reported reception of the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224 is widely held to be the first documented account of an individual miraculously and physically receiving the wounds of Christ. The appearance of this miracle, however, in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, is not as unexpected as it first seems. Interpretations of Galatians 6:17—“I bear the marks of the Lord Jesus Christ in my body”—had been circulating in biblical commentaries since the early Middle Ages. These works posited that clerics bore metaphorical and sometimes physical wounds(stigmata)as marks of persecution, while spreading the teaching of Christ in the face of resistance. By the seventh century, the meaning of Galatians 6:17 had been appropriated by bishops and priests as a sign or mark of Christ that they received invisibly at their ordination, and sometimes visibly upon their death. In the eleventh century, Peter Damian articulated a stigmatic spirituality that saw the ideal priest, monk, and nun as bearers of Christ's wounds, a status achieved through the swearing of vows and the practice of severe penance. By the early twelfth century, crusaders were said to bear the marks of the Passion in death and even sometimes as they entered into battle. By the early thirteenth century, “bearing the stigmata” was a pious superlative appropriated by a few devout members of the laity who interpreted Galatian 6:17 in a most literal manner. Thus, this article considers how the conception of “bearing the stigmata” developed in medieval Europe from its treatment in early Latin patristic commentaries to its visceral portrayal by the laity in the thirteenth century.

Children and Confession in the Early Middle Ages

1994 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 53-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rob Meens
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages

The handbooks for confessors known as penitentials are, I shall argue, an important source for our knowledge of early medieval attitudes on the part of churchmen and others towards children. These texts, basically lists of sins with the prescription of an appropriate penance for each iniquity, can be said to reflect widespread practices and ideas. They originated in the Irish and British Churches in the sixth century and spread from there over all of Western Europe, where they remained in use until the twelfth century.

Poet of the Medieval Modern

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Far Right ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
In Parenthesis ◽  
Stone Sculpture

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to reimagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895–1974), and represents the first extended study of the influence of early medieval culture and history from England on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). The Anathemata, the second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), fuses Jones’s visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones’s Library, Poet of the Medieval Modern reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction we make between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in modernist and medieval studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages—including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography—to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. In The Anathemata Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponized in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

Human–Bovine Plagues in the Early Middle Ages

2015 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Newfield
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Molecular Clock ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages

Two independent molecular clock analyses (mcas) reveal that measles (mv) diverged from rinderpest (rpv) c. 1000 c.e. This evidence, when conjoined with written accounts of non-Justinianic plagues in 569–570 and 986–988 and zoo-archaeological discoveries regarding early medieval mass bovine mortalities, suggests that a now-extinct morbillivirus, ancestral to mv and rpv, broke out episodically in the early Middle Ages, causing large mortalities in both species. Tentative diagnoses of an mv–rpv ancestor help to untangle early medieval accounts of human–bovine disease and facilitate an assessment of the consequences of the 569–570 and 986–988 plagues.

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