Gender and The Christian Traditions

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dyan Elliott
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Social Roles ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Competing Values ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
The Middle Ages

Classical and medieval thinkers had much to say about gendered topics, including proper social roles and relationships for men and women, differing physical and psychological make-ups, and behaviors that might cause blurring between characteristics understood to belong to each sex. The theological arguments and pastoral direction of the Middle Ages relied heavily on precedents drawn from early Christianity, making an understanding of the apostolic and patristic periods essential when examining gender issues. This essay, therefore, addresses debates from both early Christianity and the central Middle Ages, concentrating primarily on discussions about the merits of virginity versus celibacy, but also treating discourse on "virile" women and the effects of the rediscovery of Aristotelian thought on ideas about procreation and the female body. Since these discussions often took place as their authors addressed contemporary crises, they offer an opportunity to examine Christian society's shifting, and often competing, values, especially those pertaining women.

scholarly journals Représentations du corps ivre dans la littérature et la peinture hispaniques

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 17-26
Author(s):  
Juan Ibeas ◽  
Lidia Vazquez
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Alcoholic Beverage ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Pros And Cons ◽  
Divine Origin ◽  
Ideological Transformation ◽  
The Middle Ages

Wine has been linked to Spanish culture since the time of the Romans and early Christianity. In Spain, a land of vines since antiquity, the representation of the drunken body in literature and painting is an omnipresent topos since the Middle Ages. The pros and cons of this are found in medical, philosophical, moral and religious texts, but especially in novels, which warn against excess. This article studies how Spanish painters and writers developed the imaginary of wine in all its forms, be they masculine or feminine, solar or twilight, enthusiastic or drowsy, in their reflections, in their drawings and paintings, in poems or novels, in order to transmit the ideological transformation that was going to occur in Spain around this drink. For only the artist seems to preserve the tradition of the divine origin of wine, reclaiming its thaumaturgical role thanks to the Bacchic nectar. Spanish men and women suffer or benefit from the virtues of wine, the main alcoholic beverage in Spain until the 21st century.

The Middle Ages: Change in Women's Personalities and Social Roles

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Newton ◽  
Abigail J. Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Roles ◽  
The Middle Ages

scholarly journals La moda no es capricho. Mensajes y funciones del vestido en la Edad MediaFashion is not a whim. Messages and functions of clothing in the Middle Ages

2017 ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Juan Vicente García Marsilla
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Urban Population ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Consumption Level ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Privileged Communication ◽  
Positive Stimuli ◽  
The Middle Ages

Los siglos finales de la Edad Media vieron como nuevas modas en el vestir irrumpían en Europa con un ritmo cada vez más acelerado. Eran una de las manifestaciones de una sociedad más dinámica, que utilizaba la vestimenta como un código de comunicación privilegiado del estatus social y la pujanza económica y política. Sin duda, las cortes nobiliarias jugaron un importante papel en esa activación de la moda, pero el fenómeno alcanzó a buena parte de la población urbana y a las capas más acomodadas del campesinado, como lo demuestran las leyes suntuarias y la difusión del mercado de segunda mano. Hombres y mujeres rivalizaban por acceder a las novedades, que viajaban de un país a otro con cierta facilidad, sin que la indumentaria, no obstante, llegara a homogeneizarse del todo en el continente. De esta manera, el cuidado de la apariencia, y la constante adaptación a las novedades en el vestido, se convertirían ya entonces en acicates básicos para un nivel de consumo sostenido, que a la larga alentaría importantes mutaciones del sistema económico.PALABRAS CLAVE: Edad Media, moda, leyes suntuarias, consumo, gusto.ABSTRACTThe Late Middle Ages saw new fashions in clothing appearing in Europe with an increasingly frequent rhythm. These trends were one of the manifestations of a more dynamic society that used clothing as a privileged communication code of social status and economic and political importance. Noble courts no doubt played an important role in this activation of fashion, but the phenomenon reached a large part of the urban population and the more affluent layers of the peasantry, as evidenced by sumptuary laws and the spread of the second-hand market. Men and women competed for access to novelties, which travelled from one country to others quite easily, although clothing never became homogenous across the whole continent. Thus, the care of appearance, and the constant adaptation to new fashion trends, became two basic positive stimuli for a sustained consumption level, which, in the long run, promoted important changes in the economic system.KEY WORDS: Middle Ages, fashion, sumptuary laws, consumption, taste.

From England to France

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Chester Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Corporal Punishment ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Hundred Years War ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
English Law ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Middle Ages

At the height of the Middle Ages, a peculiar system of perpetual exile— or abjuration—flourished in western Europe. It was a judicial form of exile, not political or religious, and it was meted out to felons for crimes deserving of severe corporal punishment or death. This book explores the lives of these men and women who were condemned to abjure the English realm, and draws on their unique experiences to shed light on a medieval legal tradition until now very poorly understood. The book weaves an historical tapestry, examining the judicial and administrative processes that led to the abjuration of more than seventy-five thousand English subjects, and recounting the astonishing journeys of the exiles themselves. Some were innocents caught up in tragic circumstances, but many were hardened criminals. Almost every English exile departed from the port of Dover, many bound for the same French village, a place called Wissant. The book vividly describes what happened when the felons got there, and tells the stories of the few who managed to return to England, either illegally or through pardons. The book provides new insights into a fundamental pillar of medieval English law and shows how it collapsed amid the bloodshed of the Hundred Years' War.

Divinity Manifest in a Female Body

2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-35
Author(s):  
Britt Istoft
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Imitation Of Christ ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Female Divinity ◽  
Gender System ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Second Coming

The article investigates a medieval heretical group, the Guglielmites, who worshipped their founder Guglielma of Milan (d. 1281) as the Holy Spirit incarnate and expected another woman, Maifreda da Pirovano, to become pope, the vicar of the Holy Spirit, at Guglielma's second coming in the year 1300. This event was prevented, however, by Dominican inquisitors, but we know that Maifreda's priestly activities had been going on for years. The article argues that the theology and practice of the Guglielmites developed gradually on a background of mysticism, eschatological expectations, imitation of Christ, and Eucharistic devotion. However, contrary to much female godlanguage in the Middle Ages, which was symbolic, female divinity was seen as taking flesh in a woman, and for that reason also her vicar on earth had to be a woman. The feminizing of the Holy Spirit justified a change in the gender system of the Church.

Gender in the Transition to Merchant Capitalism

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Howell
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Public ◽  
New Class ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Merchant Capitalism ◽  
The Middle Ages

This essay argues that the slow transition from the commercial economy of the later Middle Ages to early modern merchant capitalism produced significant changes in gender roles and gender meanings for women and men from the middle and upper ranks of cities where commerce had found its most secure home. The changes in gender were filtered, however, through a public/private divide that had taken shape in such cities during the centuries closing the Middle Ages, making this a story not just about economy and gender, but also about sociopolitical space. As prosperous men and women in commercial cities of the era came to be newly positioned along the axis dividing the public from the private, both acquired a new class identity presaging much that would characterize bourgeois Europe.

Simon Magus, Nicolas of Antioch, and Muhammad

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-70
Author(s):  
Alberto Ferreiro
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Middle Ages

Scholars of the Middle Ages have established that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there was an intellectual shift in the Christian polemic against Islam. Whereas in earlier centuries heresiologists defined Islam as pagan, in the high Middle Ages the prevailing opinion emerged that it was instead a heresy. Medieval writers, who drew upon a rich theological tradition dating to the patristic era, sustained and expanded this new perspective. Many of the patristic theological refutations against heretics proved once again useful as groups such as the Waldensians, Albigensians, and others made serious challenges against the dominant orthodoxy. Even though Islam had already been a formidable presence in the Mediterranean—especially since the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the early eighth century—in the high Middle Ages the continued expansion of Islam, including its defeat of the Crusaders, was perceived to be an increased threat to Christendom. A corollary development was the greater interest in Islam—mainly to discredit or refute it—by some leading western Christian theologians. One thing is certain: medieval writers were intent on demonstrating the heretical nature of Islamic doctrines and the perversity of Islamic morality. Medieval polemicists, however, resorted to a standard theological weapon to assault Islam, typology. Through typology medieval writers were capable of constructing alleged historical and doctrinal links between Muhammad and two of the most notorious “types” of heresy from early Christianity: Simon Magus and Nicolas of Antioch.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document