Word and Image. Polish Medieval and Renaissance Religious Writings in the European Context

The article presents the Polish religious writing of the Middle Ages and Renaissance as an expression of correspondence between the word and image. It also demonstrates the impact of European graphics, including Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts, upon Polish religious works of the period (such as the works by Pseudo-Bonaventura in his rendering of Baltazar Opec’s Żywot Pana Jezu Krysta and Jan Sandecki’s Historie biblijne or Rozmyślania dominikańskie. The article also emphasizes that it was Dürer who paved the way for the book illustration, thus turning woodcuts into an art form in their own right. The fifteenth century was a watershed in book culture. As new illustration techniques at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encouraged the growth of illustrated printed books, the codex became obsolete.

The Transformation of Perfection

Chapter 5 argues that the spiritual experiences of late medieval holy women, in particular their doubts about the Eucharist and their own salvation, were in many respects responses to orthodox figurations of sacred embodiment and the pollution fears that were repeatedly projected onto women. In this context, this chapter examines the Scale of Perfection, a work composed by the English writer Walter Hilton (d. 1394) who manages a set of ongoing contests over rival notions of perfection. Following a growing insistence among orthodox writers on Eucharistic devotion, the Scale subsumes the spiritual legitimacy of charismatic women to the sacrament and does so in a way that marginalizes the devotion of such women to their angels. It is also within the Scale and other late medieval religious writing that the prominent and intersecting ideals of perfection, the virtues, and sacred embodiment came to express a deepening suspicion of angelic charisms.

Post-Tridentine Catholic Piety and Forms of Devotional Practices in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Katarzyna Kaczor-Scheitler, PhD — assistant professor at the Department of Old Literature, Editing and Auxiliary Sciences at the University of Lodz. Author of books: Mistycyzm hiszpański w piśmiennictwie polskich karmelitanek XVII i XVIII wieku (Spanish Mysticism in the Literature of 17th and 18th-Century Polish Carmelites) (2005); Marianna Marchocka a św. Teresa z Avila (Marianna Marchocka and St. Theresa of Avila) (2009); Perswazja w wybranych medytacjach siedemnastowiecznych z klasztoru norbertanek na Zwierzyńcu (Persuasion in Selected 17th-Century Meditations from the Norbertine Monastery in Zwierzyniec) (2016). Co-editor of volumes of collected essays: Piśmiennictwo zakonne w dobie staropolskiej (Religious Writing in Old Poland) (2013) and Piotr Skarga — w czterechsetlecie śmierci (Piotr Skarga — on the 400th Anniversary of His Death) (2013). Author of works published in numerous conference proceedings and special volumes. Publishes her articles in Polish and foreign journals: “Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica”, “Analecta Praemonstratensia”, “Communio. Międzynarodowy Przegląd Teologiczny”, “Czytanie Literatury. Łódzkie Studia Literaturoznawcze”, “Pamiętnik Literacki”, “Poznańskie Studia Polonistyczne. Seria Literacka”, “Poznańskie Studia Teologiczne”, “Prace Polonistyczne”, “Przegląd Powszechny”, “Respectus Philologicus”, “Ruch Literacki”, “Studia Monastica”, “Świat i Słowo”, “Świat Tekstów. Rocznik Słupski”, “Tematy i Konteksty”. Main areas of interest: old religious literature, especially occasional, ascetic-mystical and meditative literature.

What Is Bahai Orientalism?

Scrutinizing the literature of a modern religious movement this article argues that postcolonial theory can effectively be brought to the analysis of religions and religious writing. The case study focuses on the way in which colonialism impacted the Bahai faith in a specific and formative way, causing its leadership to present aspects of the faith’s development by employing the codes of Western Orientalism. Drawing on nineteenth and early twentieth-century European orientalist texts composed either about their own faith, or the Islamic society out of which it grew, the article demonstrates how these led Bahais “themselves [to]… adopt [..] an essentially Orientalist vision of their own community and of Iranian society”. Edward Said’s Orientalism throws light on an enduring situation in which mutual othering has crossed from culture and religion into politics, however since the late 1990s critics have demonstrated that Orientalism can function in more varied ways than Said allowed. Finally, the possibility is discussed as to whether there can be such a thing as a postcolonial Bahai scholar.

Futures of Enlightenment Poetry

This book offers a revisionist account of poetry and embodiment from Milton to Romanticism. Scholars have made much of the period's theories of matter, with some studies equating the eighteenth century's modernity with its materialism. Yet the Enlightenment in Britain also brought bold new arguments for the immateriality of spirit and evocative claims about a coming spirit realm. Protestant religious writing was of two minds about futurity, swinging back and forth between patience for the resurrected body and desire for the released soul. This ancient pattern carried over, the book argues, into understandings of poetry as a modern devotional practice. A range of authors agreed that poems can provide a foretaste of the afterlife, but they disagreed about what kind of future state the imagination should seek. The mortalist impulse-exemplified by John Milton and by Romantic poets Anna Letitia Barbauld and William Wordsworth-is to overcome the temptation of disembodiment and to restore spirit to its rightful home in matter. The spiritualist impulse-driving eighteenth-century verse by Mark Akenside, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Edward Young-is to break out of bodily repetition and enjoy the detached soul's freedom in advance. Although the study isolates these two tendencies, each needed the other as a source in the Enlightenment, and their productive opposition didn't end with Romanticism. The final chapter identifies an alternative Romantic vision that keeps open the possibility of a disembodied poetics, and the introduction considers present-day Anglophone writers who continue to put it to work.

The Ontology, Arrangement, and Appearance of Paradise in Castilian Kabbalah in Light of Contemporary Islamic Traditions from al-Andalus

This study is a comparative analysis of the appearances of the lower and upper Paradise, their divisions, and the journeys to and within them, which appear in mystical Jewish and Islamic sources in medieval Iberia. Ibn al-‘Arabī’s vast output on the Gardens of divine reward and their divisions generated a number of instructive comparisons to the eschatological and theosophical writing about the same subject in early Spanish Kabbalah. Although there is no direct historical evidence that kabbalists knew of such Arabic works from the region Catalonia or Andalusia, there are commonalities in fundamental imagery and in ontological and exegetical assumptions that resulted from an internalization of similar patterns of thought. It is quite reasonable to assume that these literary corpora, both products of the thirteenth century, were shaped by common sources from earlier visionary literature. The prevalence of translations of religious writing about ascents on high, produced in Castile in the later thirteenth century, can help explain the sudden appearance of visionary literature on Paradise and its divisions in the writings of Jewish esotericists of the same region. These findings therefore enrich our knowledge of the literary, intellectual, and creative background against which these kabbalists were working when they chose to depict Paradise in the way that they did, at the time that they did.

The Nux attributed to Ovid and its Renaissance readers

This chapter examines Erasmus’ commentary on the Nux against a period of religious writing that put him at the centre of the controversies driving the Reformation. In the poem, the tree presents a case against passers-by who pelt it and steal its fruit: the maxim is ‘not to harm those who help’. Like the poem, Erasmus’ commentary is didactic; it is dedicated to John More (Thomas More’s son). Beyond its amusing conceit (a talking tree), its brevity, style, and rhetorical polish made it an attractive subject for commentary; it was edifying too. Erasmus’ work explicates the tree’s arguments and comments on Latinity. The poem’s subject—an innocent’s self-defence against mistreatment—speaks to Erasmus’ personal circumstances, caught as he was between extremists using his discoveries to make arguments against him. This chapter suggests that, in his commentary, Erasmus not only returns to boyhood games by ‘playing with nuts’, but retreats to that time in his life where he was least encumbered and happiest.

Fosterage in the Medieval Irish Church

Irish religious writers used the language of fosterage to describe relationships saints created within and between monasteries. Fosterage was used because it focused on education and the idea of a family without a biological connection. Fosterage was used to describe oblation and monastic education. Tying the practices of monastic recruitment to such a social pillar within medieval Irish society insulated monasteries, to a certain extent, from the debates on oblation taking place on the Continent. Fosterage was based around education, feeding and care, and as such was readily incorporated into religious writing that described human relationships with a caring and nurturing divinity.

MUSIC, MORALITY AND SYMPATHY IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH SERMON

ABSTRACTWhile the furrows of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious writing on music have been deeply ploughed, eighteenth-century English sermons about music have received relatively slight scholarly attention. This article demonstrates that the ideas of sympathy and sensibility characteristic of so much eighteenth-century thought are vital to understanding these sermons. There is an evolution in this literature of the notion of sympathy and its link to musical morality, a development in the attitude towards music among clergy, with this art of sympathetic vibrations receiving ever higher approbation during the century's middle decades. By the time that Adam Smith was articulating his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and Handel's oratorios stood as a fixture of English musical life, religious thinkers had cast off old concerns about music's sensuality. They came to embrace a philosophy that accepted music as moral simply because it made humankind feel, and in turn accepted feeling as the root of all sociable experience. This understanding places the music sermon of the eighteenth century within the context of some of the most discussed philosophical, social, literary, musical and moral-aesthetic concepts of the time.

Epilogue

I keep getting flashbacks to provincial streets. You’re driving. We’re touring the big civil engineering projects, looking for dead Royals. We found a minor Plantagenet earlier today, crouched in bad cement beneath a Midlands motorway pier for all the world as if he’d been garrotted on the lavatory. Yesterday it was a previously unknown illegitimate Stuart, two meters under the floor of an HS2 station with her two children, some scraps of religious writing and an older man (he’s related, maybe a brother or cousin, molecular biology will sort it out). She’s no longer the fairest of them all....