Desire and the spiritual ascent

2020 ◽  
pp. 62-104
Author(s):  
Sam Hole
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Song Of Songs ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Late Medieval

Chapter 2 explores the distinctiveness of John’s writing, examining the various theological and non-theological traditions by which John’s notion of desire was informed. A brief biography of John, to give the reader entirely unfamiliar with John an initial understanding of his context, is offered. John’s appropriation of Thomas Aquinas’s anthropology is inspected. John’s thought was also rooted in a sixteenth-century reappraisal of the Augustinian tradition that emphasized the spiritual ascent as undergone through the transformation of the interior faculties of the soul. In addition, John was influenced by his reading of late medieval Dionysian traditions, with their heightened sense of the metaphysical rootedness of the soul’s appetites in the desiring quality of divine love. It is, of course, difficult to speak uncomplicatedly of a Dionysian, Augustinian, or Thomist understanding of any given theological topic. Accordingly, the chapter pays particular attention to John’s late medieval intellectual and monastic context, examining how these diverse traditions may have been transmitted to John and received by him. At the end of Chapter 2 the elevated attention that John pays to the potential and limits of language is examined. John’s depiction of the significance of language on the ascent is influenced by Dionysian thought, by non-theological poetic traditions and by traditions of allegorical exegesis of the Song of Songs. John’s thought, in short, draws creatively on a range of theological and non-theological traditions that themselves draw in diverse fashion on biblical, Christian, and Platonic understandings of desire.

Mary in Luther and the Lutheran Reformation

2019 ◽  
pp. 441-453
Author(s):  
Beth Kreitzer
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Term Effect ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Marian Devotion ◽  
Long Term Effect

Mary, the queen of heaven and the most powerful intercessor among all the saints, was the focus of intense piety and devotion at the turn of the sixteenth century. She played a central role in the life of Christians, both in private devotions and in public ritual. But not everyone was pleased with the quantity or quality of Marian devotion. Following earlier critics, Martin Luther rejected much of the medieval cult surrounding Mary and transformed Marian devotion, inspiring a shift in her image from that of a powerful, merciful queen to a humble, obedient housewife. Although he maintained a warm, if transformed, devotion to Mary himself, Luther’s understanding of her role as the Mother of God and foremost of saints was dramatically different from the late medieval understanding. His influence on Protestant areas had the long-term effect of reducing Mary’s importance in Christian life and her visibility to Christians.

scholarly journals The Concept of Heresy and the Debates on Descartes’s Philosophy

2020 ◽  
Vol 100 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 172-186
Author(s):  
Aza Goudriaan
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Francisco Suarez ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Complex Term ◽  
The Church

Abstract This article explores connotations of ‘heresy’ in theological traditions before and during Descartes’s life. Lutheran and Reformed Protestants, themselves considered heretics by the Church of Rome, adopted the patristic heresiology while designating sixteenth-century antitrinitarian and Anabaptist teachings as heresies. Francisco Suárez and Gisbertus Voetius knew the late medieval conceptuality (e.g., Council of Konstanz, 1418). Voetius possibly thought of Descartes when describing certain philosophical views as “smacking of heresy.” This was not, however, an outright charge of heresy. In fact, Descartes’s readiness to be corrected contradicted the traditional heretical quality of “stubbornness.” Plempius’s expression “Cartesian heresy” seems to have been rare. For anti-Cartesians, the rich vocabulary of error made the complex term ‘heresy’ easily avoidable.

‘Do you think you're at the Gresham?’: Accepting Imperfection in ‘The Dead’

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randi Saloman
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Secondary Quality ◽  
The Dead

Dublin's Gresham Hotel, where Gabriel and Gretta Conroy end their evening in Joyce's most famous short story, has a fascinating history. It was founded in 1817 by Thomas Gresham, who began life as a foundling rescued from the steps of London's Royal Exchange and was thereby given the name of the Renaissance statesman who built that exchange. This sixteenth-century Thomas Gresham was even better known, however, for his eponymous ‘Gresham's Law’. Both Gresham's Law and the hotel setting and history enter into and help to shape ‘The Dead’. Questions of value and valuing suggested by Gresham's Law are shown to be more complicated than they initially appear, as they intersect with the various forms of hospitality traced in the story. The ‘secondary’ quality of the famous Dublin hotel (built by the second, unknown Thomas Gresham) underscores – and ultimately redeems – the theme of secondariness that runs through ‘The Dead’.

Lutherans and the Suffering of Christ

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bridget Heal
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Devotional Literature ◽  
Physical Pain ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Mining Region

Chapter 5 focuses on one particular type of Lutheran devotional image: the crucifix. It examines transformations in Lutheran Passion piety from the early Reformation to the era of Paul Gerhardt (1607–76), using this to illustrate the increasing significance accorded to images. Luther himself had condemned the excesses of late-medieval Passion piety, with its emphasis on compassion for Christ and the Virgin Mary, on physical pain and on tears. From the later sixteenth century onwards, however, Lutheran sermons, devotional literature, prayers and poetry described Christ’s suffering in increasingly graphic terms. Alongside this, late-medieval images of the Passion were restored and new images were produced. Drawing on case studies from the Erzgebirge, a prosperous mining region in southern Saxony, and Upper Lusatia, the chapter investigates the ways in which images of the Passion were used in Lutheran communities during the seventeenth century.

Schools of Empiricism

2021 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 261-289
Author(s):  
Andreas Friedolin Lingg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Mining District ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Scientific Observation ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Mining Town ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

Abstract Recent research emphasizes that empiricist approaches already emerged long before the seventeenth and eighteenth century. While many of these contributions focus on specific professions, it is the aim of this article to supplement this discourse by describing certain social spaces that fostered empiricist attitudes. A particularly interesting example in this respect is the mining region of the Erzgebirge (Saxony) in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. The following article will use this mining district as a kind of historical laboratory, as a space not only for scientific observation but also as a structure within which specific forms of knowledge were socially tested, to show how the economic transformation of this region supported the rise of characteristic elements of empiricist thinking. It is common practice to link the appraisal of useful knowledge, (personal) experience and the distrust towards (scholastic) authorities in those days with only small minorities. By addressing not only the struggles of the commercial elites but also the challenges faced by the average resident of a mining town, this paper tries to add to this view by demonstrating how entire masses of people inhabiting the late medieval Erzgebirge were affected by and schooled to think in empiricist ways.

St Symeon the New Theologian (969-1022): Byzantine spiritual renewal in search of a precedent

1997 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 75-90
Author(s):  
John Anthony McGuckin
Keyword(s):  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Spiritual Renewal ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
The West ◽  
Conference Theme ◽  
Autobiographical Accounts ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Church

St Symeon the New Theologian is, without question, one of the most original and intriguing writers of medieval Byzantium. Indeed, although still largely unknown in the West, he is surely one of the greatest of all Christian mystical writers; not only for the remarkable autobiographical accounts he gives of several visions of the divine light, but also for the passionate quality of his exquisite Hymns of Divine Love, the remarkable intensity of his pneumatological doctrine, and the corresponding fire he brings to his preaching of reform in the internal and external life of the Church. He was a highly controversial figure in his own day. His disciples venerated him as a saint who had returned to the roots of the Christian tradition and personified its repristinization. His opponents, who secured his deposition and exile, regarded him as a dangerously unbalanced incompetent who, by overstressing the value of personal religious fervour, had endangered the stability of that tradition. The Vita which we possess was composed in 1054, in an attempt to rehabilitate Symeon’s memory and prepare for the return of his relics to the capital from which he had been expelled when alive. This paper will investigate how he himself understood and appropriated aspects of the earlier tradition (particularly monastic spirituality), hoping to elucidate why he felt himself inspired to reformist zeal, and why many of his contemporaries (not simply his ‘worldly opponents’ as his hagiographer would have us believe) regarded him as unbalanced. It will end by attempting some reflection on what the controversy reveals on the larger front about how the Church ‘selectively looks back on itself, so to paraphrase our president’s description of the conference theme, and whether the model of tradition and its reception exemplified in this Byzantine writer can offer anything to the dialogue between history and theology which the doctrine of Tradition (Paradosis) inevitably initiates.

Public and Private: The Late Medieval Wall Paintings of Haddon Hall Chapel, Derbyshire

2006 ◽  
Vol 86 ◽  
pp. 179-205
Author(s):  
Mellie Naydenova
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Wall Paintings ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Public Statement ◽  
The Public ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Public Persona ◽  
Private Devotion

This paper focuses on the mural scheme executed in Haddon Hall Chapel shortly after 1427 for Sir Richard Vernon. It argues that at that time the chapel was also being used as a parish church, and that the paintings were therefore both an expression of private devotion and a public statement. This is reflected in their subject matter, which combines themes associated with popular beliefs, the public persona of the Hall's owner and the Vernon family's personal devotions. The remarkable inventiveness and complexity of the iconography is matched by the exceptionally sophisticated style of the paintings. Attention is also given to part of the decoration previously thought to be contemporary with this fifteenth-century scheme but for which an early sixteenth-century date is now proposed on the basis of stylistic and other evidence.

scholarly journals technical level of small-town shoemaking in Gdańsk Pomerania in the 14th century

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karolina Blusiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Mechanical Treatment ◽  
Professional Knowledge ◽  
The Other ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Animal Origin ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
14Th Century ◽  
Purposeful Selection ◽  
Selection Of

Based on the late medieval leather artefacts from Puck, Gniew, Lębork and Chojnice, an attempt was made to assess the level of shoemaking production at that time. Microscopic analyses of leather goods and production waste proved that in the field of tanning the activities related to the mechanical treatment of leather were carefully performed, although with insufficient professional knowledge concerning the process. The results of the identification of the animal origin of the leather confirmed the purposeful selection of raw material with different properties for individual footwear elements and the ability to properly cut it. The quality of the shoemaking products was highly rated in terms of technology and style. However, in the analysed collections a clearly perceptible difference in craftsmanship and assortment of products from Gniew and the other three towns was noticed.

Savoring God

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gloria Maité Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Divine Love ◽  
Central Moments ◽  
Presence Of God ◽  
The Cross ◽  
John Of The Cross ◽  
The Relationship

This book compares two mystical works central to the Christian Discalced Carmelite and the Hindu Bhakti traditions: the sixteenth-century Spanish Cántico espiritual (Spiritual Canticle), by John of the Cross, and the Sanskrit Rāsa Līlā, originated in the oral tradition. These texts are examined alongside theological commentaries: for the Cántico, the Comentarios written by John of the Cross on his own poem; for Rāsa Līlā, the foundational commentary by Srīdhara Swāmi along with commentaries by the sixteenth-century theologian Jīva Goswāmī, from the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava school, and other Gauḍīya theologians. The phrase “savoring God” in the title conveys the Spanish gustar a Dios (to savor God) and the Sanskrit madhura bhakti rasa (the sweet savor of divine love). While “savoring” does not mean exactly the same thing for these theologians, they use the term to define a theopoetics at work in their respective traditions. The book’s methodology transposes their notions of “savoring” to advance a comparative theopoetics grounded in the interaction of poetry and theology. The first chapter explains in detail how theopoetics is regarded considering each text and how they are compared. The comparison is then laid out across Chapters 2, 3, and 4, each of which examines one of the three central moments of the theopoetic experience of savoring that is represented in the Cántico and Rāsa Līlā: the absence and presence of God, the relationship between embodiment and savoring, and the fulfillment of the encounter between the divine and the lovers.

Surfaces for Reflection: Nanban Lacquer in the Iberian World

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 152-190
Author(s):  
Samuel Luterbacher
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Unique Type ◽  
Japanese Archipelago ◽  
The Japanese Archipelago ◽  
European Export

Abstract In response to the arrival of Iberian traders and missionaries on the Japanese archipelago in the sixteenth century, local craftsmen developed a unique type of lacquer, called today Nanban, for European export. They adapted traditional techniques to produce chests, writing desks, reliquaries and oratories for this new peripatetic clientele. This paper will explore the assimilation of East Asian lacquered objects within the Iberian world, treating the physical and ontological transformations that occurred as they travelled throughout the vast Iberian mercantile empire in the Indo-Pacific. The very portability of such lacquered objects engendered new realms of artistic experimentation. Like the layered quality of lacquer itself, these mobile works served as vehicles of material assemblage and hermeneutic accumulation, gathering new receptions and identities as they traveled through these Pacific networks and beyond.

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