Reforms, Semi-Reforms, and the Silencing of Women Religious in the Tenth Century

2018 ◽  
pp. 88-110
Author(s):  
Steven Vanderputten
Keyword(s):  
Women Religious ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Degree Of Freedom ◽  
Communal Life ◽  
Women's Communities ◽  
Female Monasticism ◽  
Spiritual Reform ◽  
Reform Culture

This chapter reviews the evidence for institutional and spiritual reform in women's communities, and makes three key observations. First, that bishops in particular relied on reform as a way of expressing specific claims to religious and political authority, and of rearranging the lordship and patronage of female monasticism to their own benefit and that of their associates. Second, that the installation of, or the ‘return’ to a Benedictine regime by no means heralded a greater degree of freedom from the interventions of clerical and lay rulers. And finally, that these interventions have rendered obscure a ‘pre-reform’ culture of reflection over the purpose and organization of female communal life, and also a great deal of experimentation. Instead of reversing a situation of terminal decline, the reforms marked the beginning of clerical intolerance towards the ‘ambiguous’ observance of women religious, and the end of a state of relative intellectual and spiritual autonomy.

Veiled Threats

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail Firey
Keyword(s):  
Women Religious ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Symbolic Value ◽  
The Veil

It has long been recognized that the veil taken by consecrated women religious draws upon nuptial associations and thus symbolizes the trope that consecrated women are brides of Christ. The history of the veil’s symbolic value in the early Middle Ages can, however, be probed more extensively than it has been. This chapter proposes that prior to the tenth century polyvalent symbolism and intermittent use produced competing understandings of the veil. That competition culminated in efforts in the ninth century to regulate the practice of veiling, and also in discursive shifts in representation of the veil’s significance. By tracing the chronology of the connection of the veil to the concept of the bride of Christ, Firey invites consideration of the possible function of symbolism as a device for parties with opposing views to negotiate contested positions, practices, and meanings.

scholarly journals A Welcome Presence: The Custodial Activities of Third Order Women Religious in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italy

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Liise Lehtsalu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Women Religious ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Third Order ◽  
The Social ◽  
Monastic Communities ◽  
Female Monasticism

Abstract Third order women religious actively participated in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian society. Scholars have argued that the introduction of monastic enclosure for all women religious after the Council of Trent crushed non-enclosed forms of female monasticism in Italy and Europe. The study of third orders reveals, however, that non-enclosed monastic communities survived the Tridentine reforms and met specific social needs in the early modern society. Third order women religious provided education, care, and companionship to women of all ages and socioeconomic ranks. They thus filled a gap left by other monastic and custodial institutions. Ecclesiastical and secular authorities as well as neighbors considered women’s third orders an asset to local communities. Drawing on examples from Bergamo and Bologna, this article examines the social activities of tertiary women and shows activity to be a useful category of analysis for recovering the place of women religious in early modern society.

Approximating power for significance tests with one degree of freedom.

1997 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
William P. Dunlap ◽  
Leann Myers
Keyword(s):  
Degree Of Freedom ◽  
Significance Tests

Brahmi legends on Umayyad Fulus: Interrogating local minting practices and numismatic transculturation in Gandhara (ca. 750 CE)

Afghanistan ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-165
Author(s):  
Waleed Ziad
Keyword(s):  
Base Metal ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Unusual Feature ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Contact Zones ◽  
Confessional Identity ◽  
Derivatives Of

This paper concerns a historically significant find of copper derivatives of Umayyad post-reform fulus from Gandhara, probably minted in the mid-eighth century under Turk Shahi sovereignty (c. 667–875). The coins share an unusual feature: two Brahmi aksharas on an Umayyad AE prototype, inversely oriented to a partially-corrupted Arabic legend. These base metal coins represent perhaps the only known caliphal imitative varieties issued by moneyers beyond the eastern limits of Umayyad and Abbasid sovereignty. They have the potential to inform our understanding of the complex relationship between political authority, confessional identity, and coin typology in late antiquity – particularly within early “Hindu”– “Muslim” contact zones. Moreover, they provide invaluable clues into the circulatory regimes of Umayyad coinage.

Race and Affect: Pleasurable Mixing in Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Carol Mejia Laperle
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Critical Field ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Affective Experience ◽  
Undue Influence ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Racial Impersonation ◽  
Blackface Performance ◽  
Performance Text

The critical field of The Masque of Blackness often annotates Queen Anne and her ladies’ blackface performance with a courtier's eye-witness comment that the “lean cheeked moors” were “loathsome” and “ugly.” Yet Ben Jonson's performance text, when read beside Dudley Carleton's correspondences, resists the undue influence of the aristocrat's anecdotal disparagement. This project refuses to take Carleton's denigration as fact. Instead, it investigates the masque's representation of Niger's daughters to develop the affective experience of pleasurable mixing across racial identities and to show how the opulence, innovation, and beauty afforded by blackface are the means to underwrite arguments of political authority. Rather than a deviation from the performance's magnificent appeal, racial impersonation is constitutive of the masque's demonstration of beauty and invention of pleasure. As such, the allegory of King James I's power hinges on a fiction of idealized incorporation that is ideologically powerful precisely because it is primarily an aestheticized, affective experience. Beyond the ostensible trope of racial transformation, Jonson presents the pleasure of mixing across racial identities as the precondition for Britannia's absorption of migrant bodies. Blackness is a visual reminder of an indelible difference that can be absorbed, incorporated, indeed “salved,” by the monarch's faculties of conversion. The affective experience afforded by blackface is thus an argument for the sovereign's power of unification, underwriting what was a largely unfulfilled and controversial political agenda: the coalition of realms under the aegis of Great Britain.

The Meaning of Children's Poetry: A Cognitive Approach

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Coats
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
The Body ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Holding Environment ◽  
Cognitive Poetics ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Communal Life ◽  
Clear Sense ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Children's Poetry

Critical attention to children's poetry has been hampered by the lack of a clear sense of what a children's poem is and how children's poetry should be valued. Often, it is seen as a lesser genre in comparison to poetry written for adults. This essay explores the premises and contradictions that inform existing critical discourse on children's poetry and asserts that a more effective way of viewing children's poetry can be achieved through cognitive poetics rather than through comparisons with adult poetry. Arguing that children's poetry preserves the rhythms and pleasures of the body in language and facilitates emotional and physical attunement with others, the essay examines the crucial role children's poetry plays in creating a holding environment in language to help children manage their sensory environments, map and regulate their neurological functions, contain their existential anxieties, and participate in communal life.

“The Truth of Reliable Tradition”: Saadya Gaon, Arabic Rhetoric, and the Challenge to Rhetorical Historiography

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-188
Author(s):  
Brandon Katzir
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Medieval Rhetoric ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Latin Language ◽  
Arabic Rhetoric ◽  
Rhetorical Traditions ◽  
The Middle Ages

This article explores the rhetoric of medieval rabbi and philosopher Saadya Gaon, arguing that Saadya typifies what LuMing Mao calls the “interconnectivity” of rhetorical cultures (Mao 46). Suggesting that Saadya makes use of argumentative techniques from Greek-inspired, rationalist Islamic theologians, I show how his rhetoric challenges dominant works of rhetorical historiography by participating in three interconnected cultures: Greek, Jewish, and Islamic. Taking into account recent scholarship on Jewish rhetoric, I argue that Saadya's amalgamation of Jewish rhetorical genres alongside Greco-Islamic genres demonstrates how Jewish and Islamic rhetoric were closely connected in the Middle Ages. Specifically, the article analyzes the rhetorical significance of Saadya's most famous treatise on Jewish philosophy, The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs, which I argue utilizes Greco-Islamic rhetorical strategies in a polemical defense of rabbinical authority. As a tenth-century writer who worked across multiple rhetorical traditions and genres, Saadya challenges the monocultural, Latin-language histories of medieval rhetoric, demonstrating the importance of investigating Arabic-language and Jewish rhetorics of the Middle Ages.

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