Souls under Siege

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Archambeau
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Hundred Years War ◽  
Southern France ◽  
Market Town ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Historical Moment

This book explores how the inhabitants of southern France made sense of the ravages of successive waves of plague, the depredations of mercenary warfare, and the violence of royal succession during the fourteenth century. Many people, the book finds, understood both plague and war as the symptoms of spiritual sicknesses caused by excessive sin, and they sought cures in confession. The book draws on a rich evidentiary base of sixty-eight narrative testimonials from the canonization inquest for Countess Delphine de Puimichel, which was held in the market town of Apt in 1363. Each witness in the proceedings had lived through the outbreaks of plague in 1348 and 1361, as well as the violence inflicted by mercenaries unemployed during truces in the Hundred Years’ War. Consequently, their testimonies unexpectedly reveal the importance of faith and the role of affect in the healing of body and soul alike. Faced with an unprecedented cascade of crises, the inhabitants of Provence relied on saints and healers, their worldview connecting earthly disease and disaster to the struggle for their eternal souls. The book illustrates how medieval people approached sickness and uncertainty by using a variety of remedies, making clear that “healing” had multiple overlapping meanings in this historical moment.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Barbara Bombi
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Hundred Years War ◽  
Administrative Practices ◽  
Southern France ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

This book is concerned with the modalities, namely the modes and procedures, of Anglo-papal diplomacy in the first half of the fourteenth century, when diplomatic affairs between England and the papacy intensified following the transfer of the papal curia to southern France in 1305 and on account of the on-going Anglo-French hostilities, which resulted in the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War in 1337. On the one hand, the book investigates how diplomatic and administrative practices developed in England and at the papal curia from a comparative perspective, whilst, on the other hand, it questions the legacy and impact of international and domestic conflicts on diplomatic and administrative practices....

Levinas as a Reader of Jewish Texts

2018 ◽  
pp. 442-458
Author(s):  
Ethan Kleinberg
Keyword(s):  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Related Issue ◽  
Written Texts ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
And Training ◽  
Do So

This article attempts to understand Levinas as a reader of Jewish texts, with particular attention paid to his Talmudic commentaries. To do so, the entangled relation between oral and written texts is explored; one must be able to properly “read” but also “write,” and there is the related issue of the methodology and training to be able to do so properly. Levinas offers commentary on each issue. Several interpretations of Talmudic texts and an important discussion of reading Scripture are analyzed in order to elucidate Levinas’s reading strategies, what this tells us about his relation to the larger tradition of Talmudic commentary, and Levinas’s particular historical moment, especially the role of the Holocaust for his approach to reading the Talmud and traditional texts.

Hostility to Hospitality: Authors’ Response

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-152
Author(s):  
Michael J. Balboni
Keyword(s):  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Spiritual Care ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Holistic Care ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Medical Institutions ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Constructive Criticism

AbstractThis article offers a brief response to constructive criticism of the book featured in this edition of Spiritual Care. Hostility to Hospitality argues that the role of spirituality within the care of sick patients, despite clear empirical evidence demonstrating its importance, remains deeply contested because of bias against religious communities. Deeply flawed conceptualizations of the nature of religion and the secular camouflage how a society's commitment to immanence functions like a spirituality. A secular framework weakens how spiritual communities can positively influence medical institutions or socialize professional guilds in caring for the whole patient. The diminishment of communities that champion compassion as a chief end, pave a way for hostile economic, technological, and bureaucratic forces to suppress our ability to fully care for patients in body and soul. Rather than being neutral as purported, the secular structures of medicine manipulate and use pastoral care for its own immanent ends. Hostility to Hospitality argues that unless pluralism is embraced, allowing for a diversity of religious communities to influence the structures of medicine, compassionate and holistic care will increasingly become unlikely as impersonal social forces increase.

scholarly journals Plague and the Fall of Baghdad (1258)

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Nahyan Fancy ◽  
Monica H. Green
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Disease Outbreaks ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Western Asia ◽  
Abbasid Caliphate ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
A Minor

AbstractThe recent suggestion that the late medieval Eurasian plague pandemic, the Black Death, had its origins in the thirteenth century rather than the fourteenth century has brought new scrutiny to texts reporting ‘epidemics’ in the earlier period. Evidence both from Song China and Iran suggests that plague was involved in major sieges laid by the Mongols between the 1210s and the 1250s, including the siege of Baghdad in 1258 which resulted in the fall of the Abbasid caliphate. In fact, re-examination of multiple historical accounts in the two centuries after the siege of Baghdad shows that the role of epidemic disease in the Mongol attacks was commonly known among chroniclers in Syria and Egypt, raising the question why these outbreaks have been overlooked in modern historiography of plague. The present study looks in detail at the evidence in Arabic sources for disease outbreaks after the siege of Baghdad in Iraq and its surrounding regions. We find subtle factors in the documentary record to explain why, even though plague received new scrutiny from physicians in the period, it remained a minor feature in stories about the Mongol invasion of western Asia. In contemporary understandings of the genesis of epidemics, the Mongols were not seen to have brought plague to Baghdad; they caused plague to arise by their rampant destruction. When an even bigger wave of plague struck the Islamic world in the fourteenth century, no association was made with the thirteenth-century episode. Rather, plague was now associated with the Mongol world as a whole.

scholarly journals The Czech Nobility's Use of the Right of Patronage on Behalf of the Hussite Reform Movement

Slavic Review ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Klassen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
European History ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Reform Movements ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Southern France ◽  
The Right ◽  
Instrumental Role

Throughout European history the aristocracy has been involved in reform movements which undermined either ecclesiastical or monarchical power structures. Thus the nobles of southern France in the twelfth century granted protection to the Cathars, and in fourteenth-century England lords and knights offered aid to the Lollards. The support of German princes and knights for Lutheranism is well known, as is the instrumental role played by the French aristocracy in initiating the constitutional reforms which gave birth to that nation's eighteenth-century revolution. The fifteenth-century Hussite reform movement in Bohemia similarly received aid from the noble class. Here, when the Hussites were under attack in 1417 from the authorities, especially the archbishop, sympathetic lords protected Hussite priests on their domains.

LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND POWER IN GUILLEM DE TORROELLA’S LA FAULA

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
JILL ROSS
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
French Language ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cultural Power

This article examines the role of French language and culture in the fourteenth-century Arthurian text, La Faula, by the Mallorcan, Guillem de Torroella. Reading the appropriation of French language and literary models through the lens of earlier thirteenth-century Occitan resistance to French political and cultural hegemony, La Faula’s use of French dialogue becomes significant in light of the political tensions in the third quarter of the fourteenth century that saw the conquest of the Kingdom of Mallorca by that of Catalonia-Aragon and the subsequent imposition of Catalano-Aragonese political and cultural power. La Faula’s clear intertextual debt to French literary models and its simultaneous ambivalence about the authority and reliability of those models makes French language into a space for the exploration of the dynamics of cultural appropriation and political accommodation that were constitutive of late fourteenth-century Mallorca.

scholarly journals Worms, worms, everywhere, and not a one to see: The connotative role of worms in Shakespeare’s canon

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Christine Reid
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Constructs ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
The Individual

The study of animals in Shakespeare’s collected works has expanded over the last 30 years. While a number of different animals have been discussed, the importance of the worm in the larger scope of the canon has largely been ignored. By focusing on the perception and presentation of worms in relation to cultural ideas of death, corruption, and consumption, ideas surrounding the body and soul are brought to the forefront. Worms are integral to our understanding of the Early Modern cultural constructs of the body and soul as the presence of worms reveals the state of the individual or the broader environment. Overall, the depiction of worms in Shakespeare’s works serves as a way to understand the metaphysical processes surrounding death and corruption.

scholarly journals “A Boot Stamping on a Human Face – For Ever”: George Orwell, Language, Literature, and Politics

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 172-188
Author(s):  
Roberta Ferrari
Keyword(s):  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
George Orwell ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Face ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
The One ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Relationship

"Britain experienced the harshness of 20th-century dictatorship and censorship only obliquely, as a reflection of what was happening in several “elsewheres”. Yet, events such as the Spanish Civil War deeply affected a whole generation of young British writers who, after the period of elitist Modernism, were trying to reassert the political import of literature through a redefinition of the role of the artist as politically and socially engagé. George Orwell figures as one of the most disenchanted and lucid witnesses of this particular historical moment. In both his essays and journalistic articles, as well as in his narrative work, he continuously ponders over the relationship between political power and society on the one hand, and language and literature on the other, providing a most interesting analysis of the mechanisms that preside over this interaction."

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