From Courtesan to Saint

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
Juan Luis Burke
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Mary Magdalene ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
Episodic Nature ◽  
Spiritual Conversion ◽  
Religiosity And Spirituality

This essay analyzes the viceregal Mexican artist Juan Correa’s painting The Conversion of St. Mary Magdalene, from the late seventeenth century. A depiction of a woman explicitly displaying traits of her sensuality and sexuality in a Mexican viceregal artwork, the painting visually conveys symbolic embodiments of the feminine condition. These embodiments refer to religious penitence, self-reflection, mysticism, and the vita contemplativa. Moreover, I examine the episodic nature of the painting, associating it with feminine devotional practices. The painting’s pictorial configuration apparently relates to the Jesuit theological tradition, specifically to the spatial and embodied representations expressed in the engravings contained in the Adnotationes et meditationes in evangelia (1595), by Jerónimo Nadal. The essay underscores how Correa represented, spatially, a series of notions related to feminine affections, sensibilities, religiosity, and spirituality. Finally, this investigation puts forward the thesis that the painting, as an artifact, prompted devotional prayer, fostering notions such as penitence and self-reflection, and aiming to help its worshippers achieve reformatio or spiritual conversion.

The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Muessig
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Introductory Overview ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
The Face ◽  
Biblical Commentaries

Francis of Assisi’s reported reception of the stigmata on Mount La Verna in 1224 is often considered to be the first account of an individual receiving the five wounds of Christ. The thirteenth-century appearance of this miracle, however, is not as unexpected as it first seems. Interpretations of Galatians 6:17—I bear the stigmata of the Lord Jesus Christ in my body—had been circulating in biblical commentaries since late antiquity. These works explained stigmata as wounds that martyrs received, like the apostle Paul, in their attempt to spread Christianity in the face of resistance. By the seventh century, stigmata were described as marks of Christ that priests received invisibly at their ordination. In the eleventh century, monks and nuns were perceived as bearing the stigmata in so far as they lived a life of renunciation out of love for Christ. By the later Middle Ages holy women like Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) were more frequently described as having stigmata than their male counterparts. With the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, the way stigmata were defined reflected the diverse perceptions of Christianity held by Catholics and Protestants. This study traces the birth and evolution of religious stigmata as expressed in theological discussions and devotional practices in Western Europe from the early Middle Ages to the early seventeenth century. It also contains an introductory overview of the historiography of religious stigmata beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century to its treatment and assessment in the twenty-first century.

The ‘Deaf Ear’ of Classicism: Searching for the Female Voice in French Tragédie Lyrique

2006 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-128
Author(s):  
SARAH NANCY
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Female Voice ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Artistic Performance

This article considers the paradoxical manifestations of rejection or suspicion concerning the voice and the feminine at the very moment of the creation of tragédie lyrique at the end of the seventeenth century in France. It examines the relationship between these elements and asks what they have in common that may be perceived as threatening. What is at stake is not only the period's capacity to experiment with pleasure through the elaboration of rules, but also, beyond this delimited historical perspective, the appreciation of the element of danger that is inherent in the experience of any artistic performance, and the roles played by the voice and the feminine in such an experience.

Noli Me Tangere and the Reception of Mary Magdalene in Early Modern England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Cefalu
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Mary Magdalene ◽  
Richard Crashaw ◽  
Henry Vaughan ◽  
Anna Trapnel

The second chapter assesses the early modern reception of the noli me tangere and hortulanus sequences of John 20. Early modern writers such as Robert Southwell, Gervase Markham, Thomas Walkington, and Nicholas Breton all reconstruct the pedagogical lessons vouchsafed to Mary throughout John 20. Mary is petitioned to recall to herself the words of Christ that she has already heard and to await patiently her post-resurrection reconciliation with Christ as Word of God. Several of these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts of Mary at the tomb show a keen appreciation of the method of discipleship misunderstanding used by John, even emulating that rhetorical approach in their treatments of Magdalene’s misplaced grief. Final sections of the chapter discuss the glorification of Mary in Hans Holbein’s Noli Me Tangere painting as well as in the poetry and prose of Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, and Anna Trapnel.

Italian Intrigue in the Baltic: Myth, Faith, and Politics in the Age of Baroque

2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-52
Author(s):  
Aušra Baniulytė
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Baltic Region ◽  
Commercial Activity ◽  
Mary Magdalene ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Baroque Era ◽  
The Baltic

Abstract This article examines the role of myth in Italian cultural politics in the Baltic region during the Baroque era. A special focus for this analysis is the legend about a “kinship” between the Florentine Pazzi family and the Lithuanian noble family of the Pacas (Polish: Pac), known in the sources of the seventeenth century as “the Pazzi in Lithuania.” This legend prevailed particularly in the second half of the Baroque period, having developed under the influence of different political, religious, and social aspects of Baroque culture. It played an important part in the Papacy’s interests in Poland-Lithuania during the Counter-Reformation and in the commercial activity of Italian merchants in the Baltic, which coincided with the expansion of the monastic orders in this region and the cult of St. Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, to whom the Pacas family expressed their devotion.

scholarly journals Enquête sur la provenance et les pérégrinations de deux livres d’Heures enluminés du XVe siècle conservés aux Archives des jésuites au Canada

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 19-72
Author(s):  
Johanne Biron
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
New France ◽  
Books Of Hours ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
Edward Jones ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
Xviie Siecle

Les Relations et le Journal des jésuites attestèrent la présence de livres d’Heures en Nouvelle-France au XVIIe siècle. À la même époque, les hospitalières de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Québec réclamaient des livres d’Heures auprès de leurs bienfaiteurs européens, perpétuant certaines pratiques de dévotion héritées du Moyen-Âge et de la Renaissance. Deux livres d’Heures du XVe siècle sont conservés aux Archives des jésuites au Canada. Cette enquête vise à retracer les routes que purent emprunter les deux manuscrits avant d’entrer dans les Archives du Collège Sainte-Marie fondées en 1844 par le père Félix Martin. À la fin du XIXe et au début XXe siècle, les deux livres furent mis en valeur par le père Arthur Edward Jones, dans le cadre d’expositions consacrées aux manuscrits des premiers missionnaires jésuites en Amérique du Nord. Cette enquête vise aussi à prendre la mesure de l’intérêt que ces Heures suscitèrent chez les bibliophiles jésuites et laïcs. The Jesuit Relations and the Journal des jésuites attest to the presence of Books of Hours in New France during the seventeenth century. At the same time, the Hospitallers of the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec were demanding Books of Hours from their European benefactors, thus continuing certain devotional practices inherited from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Two Books of Hours from the fifteenth century are preserved at the Archive of the Jesuits in Canada. This inquiry is aimed at retracing the routes that the two manuscripts had taken before arriving at the Archive of the Collège Sainte-Marie, which was founded in 1844 by Father Felix Martin. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the two books were given pride of place by Father Arthur Edward Jones at the centre of expositions devoted to manuscripts of the first Jesuit missionaries in North America. This investigation is additionally aimed at assessing the interest taken in these Hours among Jesuit bibliophiles and the laity.

scholarly journals “Was bedeutet der Stein?”: Fetishism, Profanation, and Parody in Fontane’s Grete Minde

Konturen ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Erica Weitzman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Status ◽  
Modern Era

This article explores the function of the precarious (non-)significance of the thing in Theodor Fontane’s 1879 novella Grete Minde. On the surface a simple tale of exclusion and revenge in seventeenth-century Brandenburg and a seeming anomaly in Fontane’s oeuvre, the novella also contains a barely visible leitmotif of the agency of things on the cusp of their disempowerment, not to say fall into vulgar parody and obscene joke. This article reads the status of the thing in Grete Minde not only as a key to some of the text’s more curious narrative choices, but also as a mark of the persistence of the ontological and aesthetic questions of the Reformation and as Fontane’s ambivalent self-reflection on the task of the novelist in the modern era.

Reflections on Reading the Bible

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Jasper
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Theoretical Support ◽  
Dream Visions ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Looking Back

Looking back over two decades, the author recalls her appropriation of theoretical tools from the French poststructuralist philosopher, Julia Kristeva: first to read women and the feminine-identified flesh back into biblical texts and to resist older readings that viewed these presences as inferior agents or contaminants. Secondly Kristeva’s idea of female genius gives theoretical support to the case that women continually challenge orthodox biblical readings in inauspicious male-normative circumstances by reading the Bible for themselves. Illustrating the concept of female genius, the chapter returns to Jane Leade, a seventeenth-century visionary. She exemplifies the capacity of women to bring something singular and authentic—such as her descriptions of the biblical figure of Wisdom as female and her dream-visions of bodily restorations—to their readings of the Bible. The author continues to pose the question as to whether or not women (and other genders) can continue to profit from reading the Bible.

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