The Oxford Handbook of Mary
The Oxford Handbook of Mary

Author: Chris Maunder

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-08-07

Total Pages: 709

ISBN-13: 0192511157

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The Oxford Handbook of Mary offers an interdisciplinary guide to Marian Studies, including chapters on textual, literary, and media analysis; theology; Church history; art history; studies on devotion in a variety of forms; cultural history; folk tradition; gender analysis; apparitions and apocalypticism. Featuring contributions from a distinguished group of international scholars, the Handbook looks at both Eastern and Western perspectives and attempts to correct imbalance in previous books on Mary towards the West. The volume also considers Mary in Islam and pilgrimages shared by Christian, Muslim, and Jewish adherents. While Mary can be a source of theological disagreement, this authoritative collection shows Mary's rich potential for inter-faith and inter-denominational dialogue and shared experience. It covers a diverse number of topics that show how Mary and Mariology are articulated within ecclesiastical contexts but also on their margins in popular devotion. Newly-commissioned essays describe some of the central ideas of Christian Marian thought, while also challenging popularly-held notions. This invaluable reference for students and scholars illustrates the current state of play in Marian Studies as it is done across the world.

The Oldest Vocation
The Oldest Vocation

Author: Clarissa W. Atkinson

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-03-15

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 150174089X

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According to an old story, a woman concealed her sex and ruled as pope for a few years in the ninth century. Pope Joan was not betrayed by a lover or discovered by an enemy; her downfall came when she went into labor during a papal procession through the streets of Rome. From the myth of Joan to the experiences of saints, nuns, and ordinary women, The Oldest Vocation brings to life both the richness and the troubling contradictions of Christian motherhood in medieval Europe. After tracing the roots of medieval ideologies of motherhood in early Christianity, Clarissa W. Atkinson reconstructs the physiological assumptions underlying medieval notions about women's bodies and reproduction; inherited from Greek science and popularized through the practice of midwifery, these assumptions helped shape common beliefs about what mothers were. She then describes the development of "spiritual motherhood" both as a concept emerging out of monastic ideologies in the early Middle Ages and as a reality in the lives of certain remarkable women. Atkinson explores the theological dimensions of medieval motherhood by discussing the cult of the Virgin Mary in twelfth-century art, story, and religious expression. She also offers a fascinating new perspective on the women saints of the later Middle Ages, many of whom were mothers; their lives and cults forged new relationships between maternity and holiness. The Oldest Vocation concludes where most histories of motherhood begin—in early modern Europe, when the family was institutionalized as a center of religious and social organization. Anyone interested in the status of motherhood, or in women's history, the cultural history of the Middle Ages, or the history of religion will want to read this book.

The Lady and the Virgin
The Lady and the Virgin

Author: Penny Schine Gold

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-01-15

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 0226300897

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Penny Schine Gold provides a bold analysis of key literary and artistic images of women in the Middle Ages and the relationship between these images and the actual experience of women. She argues that the complex interactions between men and women as expressed in both image and experience reflect a common pattern of ambivalence and contradiction. Thus, women are seen as both helpful and harmful, powerful and submissive, and the actuality of women's experience encompasses women in control and controlled, autonomous and dependent. Vividly recreating the rich texture of medieval life, Gold effectively and eloquently goes beyond a simple equation of social context and representation. In the process. she challenges equally simple judgments of historical periods as being either "good" or "bad" for women. "[The Lady and the Virgin] presents its findings in a form that should attract students as well as their instructors. The careful and controlled use of so many different kinds of sources . . . offers us a valuable medieval case study in the inner-relationship between the segments of society and its ethos or value system."—Joel T. Rosenthal, The History Teacher "Something of a tour de force in an interdisciplinary approach to history."—Jo Ann McNamara, Speculum "[A] well-written, extremely well-researched book. . . . The Lady and the Virgin is useful, readable, and well informed."—R. Howard Bloch, Modern Philology

The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity
The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity

Author: Jan M. Ziolkowski

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2018-06-11

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 1783744367

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This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life. Jan Ziolkowski tracks the poem from its medieval roots to its rediscovery in late nineteenth-century Paris, before its translation into English in Britain and the United States. The visual influence of the tale on Gothic revivalism and vice versa in America is carefully documented with lavish and inventive illustrations, and Ziolkowski concludes with an examination of the explosion of interest in The Juggler of Notre Dame in the twentieth century and its place in mass culture today. The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity is a rich case study for the reception of the Middle Ages in modernity. Spanning centuries and continents, the medieval period is understood through the lens of its (post)modern reception in Europe and America. Profound connections between the verbal and the visual are illustrated by a rich trove of images, including book illustrations, stained glass, postage stamps, architecture, and Christmas cards. Presented with great clarity and simplicity, Ziolkowski's work is accessible to the general reader, while its many new discoveries will be valuable to academics in such fields and disciplines as medieval studies, medievalism, philology, literary history, art history, folklore, performance studies, and reception studies.

Miraculous Rhymes
Miraculous Rhymes

Author: Tony Hunt

Publisher: DS Brewer

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 9781843841265

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The first published general study of an unduly neglected writer whose stylistic legacy remains unique in the Middle Ages. The well-connected, northern-French monk and musician Gautier de Coinci (1177/8-1236) occupies an unassailable position as one of the most exceptional vernacular writers of the Middle Ages, concerning whom there is nevertheless nofull length study in English. In a meticulously planned and supervised collection of miracles of Our Lady, which survive in a remarkable number of manuscripts, some beautifully illustrated, Gautier deploys his outstanding talentsas a composer of songs, an acerbic satirist, an audacious inventor of rich and equivocal rhymes (of a virtuosity unparalleled before the "Grands Rhetoriqueurs" on the eve of the Renaissance), a confident lexical innovator, an exuberant exponent of rhetorical wordplay, an incisive observer of contemporary society, and a man of profound personal piety. This study of word-patterning in Gautier seeks to compensate for the dearth of stylistic studies ofOld French and to examine in detail the relationship between rhetoric and religion, "courtoisie" and Mariolatry, aristocratic tastes and the way to spiritual renewal. Gautier's writing strategy is shown to be a means to rise beyond secular, aristocratic values by building on them and transcending them rather than opposing and rejecting them. TONY HUNT is a Fellow of St Peter's College, Oxford.