Monks, Canons, and the City: A Barren Relationship?

2002 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 667-688 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludo J. R. Milis

A close reading of selected texts that reflect routine life in monasteries during the early and high Middle Ages suggests that monastic culture, centered around stability and obedience, long rejected or ignored the urban communities that emerged in northwestern Europe. This monastic attitude persisted until the late twelfth century, when urban institutions began to wield sufficient authority to maintain order in their areas and thus contribute to the preservation of the status quo. Even so, monks continued to perceive cities in an essentially feudal guise, as fortified spaces.

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 155
Author(s):  
Gilda L. Ochoa

By 10 January 2017, activists in the predominately Latina/o working class city of La Puente, California had lobbied the council to declare the city a sanctuary supporting immigrants, people of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. The same community members urged the school district to declare itself a sanctuary. While community members rejoiced in pushing elected officials to pass these inclusive resolutions, there were multiple roadblocks reducing the potential for more substantive change. Drawing on city council and school board meetings, resolutions and my own involvement in this sanctuary struggle, I focus on a continuum of three overlapping and interlocking manifestations of white supremacist heteronormative patriarchy: neoliberal diversity discourses, institutionalized policies, and a re-emergence of high-profiled white supremacist activities. Together, these dynamics minimized, contained and absorbed community activism and possibilities of change. They reinforced the status quo by maintaining limits on who belongs and sustaining intersecting hierarchies of race, immigration status, gender, and sexuality. This extended case adds to the scant scholarship on the current sanctuary struggles, including among immigration scholars. It also illustrates how the state co-opts and marginalizes movement language, ideas, and people, providing a cautionary tale about the forces that restrict more transformative change.


1968 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wyatt T. Walker

“Then Elisha said to those people who were assembled in the main square, in the midst of a terrible famine, with the Syrian army at the gate: ‘In about twenty-four hours you will be able to buy a measure of fine flour for a shekel and two measures of barley for a shekel.’ And the captain upon whose arm the king leaned looked at him and spoke in derision: ‘Ha! What's God going to do? Open up a hole in the sky and pour out food upon all of these hungry people?’ And Elisha turned to him and said: ‘You have a big mouth. You will see it with your own eyes, but you will not eat thereof.’ And there were four lepers sitting at the entering in of the gate of Samaria, and they held a conversation amongst themselves that had to do with what the future might hold for them. And they said one to another: ‘What good is it for us to sit here until we die? If we go into the city, there is a famine there, and we shall die. If we sit here, if we maintain the status quo, if we hold what we've got, we shall die also. Come on, let us go out to meet the Syrian hosts, let's try something that we never tried before, and perhaps we shall be taken prisoners of war, and, if so, at least we'll survive. And if not, what have we got to lose?’” (II Kings 7: 1–20; the “Walker” translation).


2012 ◽  
Vol 253-255 ◽  
pp. 800-803 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lu Bai

Combining with the status quo of street greening in XuChang, this article pointed out the problems existing in the city road greening construction, and further discussed the improvement measures, in order to beautify the environment, promote traffic safety.


Author(s):  
Amy Sueyoshi

This chapter interrogates San Francisco’s mythical reputation as a town where “anything goes.” Pairings of men of color with white women occurred in the city press without the violent rage that it provoked in nearly every other part of the United States at the time. Homoerotic imagery and writings also proliferated with little to no controversy. While the acceptance of these activities might signal an embrace of the diverse people and lifestyles, it in fact pointed to the opposite. Precisely because of overwhelming and unquestionable dominance of white supremacy and heterosexuality, narratives of interracial mingling and same-sex love that might otherwise challenge the status quo served merely as entertaining anecdotes without any threat to the existing social order.


1977 ◽  
Vol 70 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 257-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Walker Bynum

A number of scholars in this century have noticed the image of God or Jesus as mother in the spiritual writings of the high Middle Ages. The image has in general been seen as part of a “feminine” or “affective” spirituality, and neither of these adjectives is incorrect. The idea of God as mother is part of a widespread use, in twelfth-century spiritual writing, of woman, mother, characteristics agreed to be “feminine,”and the sexual union of male and female as images to express spiritual truths; the most familiar manifestation of this interest in the “female” is the new emphasis on the Virgin in doctrinal discussions and especially spirituality. And the frequency of references to “mother Jesus” is also part of a new tendency in twelfth-century writing to use human relationships (friendship, fatherhood or motherhood, erotic love) in addition to metaphysical or psychological entities to explain doctrinal positions or exhort to spiritual growth.


2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-38
Author(s):  
Mark Chinca ◽  
Christopher Young

AbstractDespite its broad transmission and its influence on vernacular chronicle writing in the German Middle Ages, the Kaiserchronik has not received the attention from historians that it deserves. This article describes some of the ideological, historical, and literary contexts that shaped the original composition of the chronicle in the middle of the twelfth century: Christian salvation history, the revival of interest in the Roman past, the consolidation of a vernacular literature of knowledge, and the emergence of a practice of writing history as “serious entertainment” by authors such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Godfrey of Viterbo. Placed in these multiple contexts, which have a European as well as a specifically German dimension, the Kaiserchronik emerges as an important document of the uses of the past in fostering a sense of German identity among secular and ecclesiastical elites in the high Middle Ages.


2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 273-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Pieniążek

Abstract Presentation of contemporary trends in development of such residential units as peripheral housing estates in large Polish cities, as exemplified by Warsaw, is the objective of the paper. Such units are compared with their counterparts being built in Berlin. Research was carried out in three housing estates in the western part of the Bemowo District of Warsaw, i.e. Lazurowa (developer J.W. Construction), Nad Jeziorem (developer DoR Group) and Villa L’Azur (developer Bouygues Immobilier Polska). The first two were completed at the turn of 2008/2009. The third is in the final stage of construction. All three are located inside immediate city borders. Within framework of research were carried out analysis of developers’ materials, cartographic materials from the City Hall as well as field research. The results were juxtaposed with research made in 2008 in Berlin.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-172
Author(s):  
Dariusz Kaczor

“Wie man sich mit Gottes hülffe vor der vergifftung bewaren”. (No)useful recommendations for protection against plague in the prints of Gdańsk (Danzig) city physicians in the XVIth century The plagues that appeared cyclically and with a relatively high frequency were for the urban communities of the Middle Ages and the early modern era an experience almost permanently inscribed in everyday life. As part of the struggle against epidemics, in addition to administrative measures taken by the authorities, there began to appear from the end of the XVth century anti-epidemic compendia edited by city physicians (thus medical persons with university education) and intended for a wider audience; they became especially popular in the German cultural area during the XVIth century. It was no different in Gdańsk (Danzig), wherea high level of medicine, and the practice of employing as city physicians well-educated medical persons (from German and Protestant universities) by the city authorities, resulted in the publication of numerous prints of this type. In total, in the years 1508−1588 in Gdańsk (Danzig) seven compendiums of this type were published. They contained general recommendations for protection against plague based on Galen’s medical system relating to the so-called six unnatural things (res non naturales); they were part of a trend of popular medical literature containing “rules of health” (regimen sanitatis). The recommendations contained in the prints by Gdańsk (Danzig) city physicians of the XVIth century concerned, therefore, the preservation of unpolluted air in the city, taking sanitary measures, proper diet and physical condition, as well as “surgical” treatments (taking baths in a bathhouse, using laxatives, phlebotomy), and pharmacological care (they were also supervisors of the city pharmacy at that time). These recommendations, however, were not practical advice (contrary to their titles) that could be fully applied in a time of plague; rather, they represented the state of academic medical knowledge of that time and were only a manifestation of its popularization resulting from the medical personnel’s duties. A separate place was found for considerations on a kind of “medical theology”, related to the commonly shared view that the cause of the epidemic was divine anger interpreted as a punishment for sins. This was of particular importance in the confessional order (with a Lutheran dominant) that was taking shape in Gdańsk (Danzig) during the XVIth century.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Colin Fournier

<p>It is significant that the AASA – Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia (<a href="https://aasa.org.au">https://aasa.org.au</a>) conference on <em>“</em>Applied Collaborations<em>”</em> took place in Christchurch in the Fall of 2015, not long after the earthquakes that tragically destroyed a major part of the city. Although the physical devastation was extensive and highly traumatic for the inhabitants, it was encouraging to observe that, after an initial phase of shock and paralysis, came an optimistic period of quasi euphoria, a revolutionary spirit, a sense that the city could be radically reinvented instead of being rebuilt merely as a faithful replication of the past.<br />Rather than aspiring to a reinstatement and perpetuation of the status quo, it was felt that it could emancipate itself from its colonial past, become a better city and, most importantly, that its rebirth could call upon the energy, enthusiasm, self-motivation and generosity of all its inhabitants and truly involve the participation of the community as a whole.<br />The city, while still licking its wounds and clearing up the debris, went through a vibrant period of recovery and utopian dreaming, a phase when it was felt that anything was possible, that not only could the urban fabric and its supporting infrastructure systems be radically changed but that its governing institutions could also be transformed, as well as the fabric of society as a whole. It was felt that this unique opportunity had to be seized before it was too late. The time had come for a major urban and social mutation.</p>


Author(s):  
Jochen Burgtorf

The chapter discusses the two major international military orders of the high Middle Ages, the Templars and the Hospitallers. It outlines their origins in the twelfth-century Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, as well as the factors that contributed to their emergence, such as pilgrimage, the eleventh-century Church reform, knighthood and chivalry, the Crusades, and the role of the papacy. It then considers the comparative historiography of Templars and Hospitallers, including the scholarly debate on the Templars’ suppression and the Hospitallers’ survival. The chapter goes on to address the question of the military orders’ identity by examining the extent of the Templars’ charity and hospitality, the question of the Hospitallers’ militarization, and the genesis of the concept of an ‘order state’. It concludes with suggestions for future research.


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