Friendship and Faith: Cistercian Men, Women, and Their Stories, 1100-1250
Friendship and Faith: Cistercian Men, Women, and Their Stories, 1100-1250

Author: Brian Patrick McGuire

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-28

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1040242200

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In these articles Professor McGuire explores the riches of the Cistercian exemplum tradition. These texts are made up of brief stories, often with a miraculous content, which provided moral support for novices and monks in Cistercian abbeys all over Europe in the High Middle Ages. The Cistercians have been seen mainly in terms of their great writers like Bernard of Clairvaux and the impressive buildings they left behind. But Cistercian literature also provides us with more humble insights from daily life, shedding light on questions of sexuality, anger, depression, and bonds of friendship, also between monks and nuns. They bring a freshness of insight and immediate experience, and their seeming naivety lets us be aware of monks' commitment to each other in individual and community bonds. In Cistercian storytelling, the Gospel's message meets an historical context and bears witness to a transformation of Christian life and idealism, while at the same time allowing us precious insights into how ordinary men and women, not just monks and nuns, lived and thought.

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.

The Oxford Handbook of Christian Monasticism
The Oxford Handbook of Christian Monasticism

Author: Bernice M. Kaczynski

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-09-30

Total Pages: 736

ISBN-13: 0191003956

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The Handbook takes as its subject the complex phenomenon of Christian monasticism. It addresses, for the first time in one volume, the multiple strands of Christian monastic practice. Forty-four essays consider historical and thematic aspects of the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Protestant, and Anglican traditions, as well as contemporary 'new monasticism'. The essays in the book span a period of nearly two thousand years—from late ancient times, through the medieval and early modern eras, on to the present day. Taken together, they offer, not a narrative survey, but rather a map of the vast terrain. The intention of the Handbook is to provide a balance of some essential historical coverage with a representative sample of current thinking on monasticism. It presents the work of both academic and monastic authors, and the essays are best understood as a series of loosely-linked episodes, forming a long chain of enquiry, and allowing for various points of view. The authors are a diverse and international group, who bring a wide range of critical perspectives to bear on pertinent themes and issues. They indicate developing trends in their areas of specialisation. The individual contributions, and the volume as a whole, set out an agenda for the future direction of monastic studies. In today's world, where there is increasing interest in all world monasticisms, where scholars are adopting more capacious, global approaches to their investigations, and where monks and nuns are casting a fresh eye on their ancient traditions, this publication is especially timely.

Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks
Cistercian Stories for Nuns and Monks

Author: Martha G. Newman

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2020-10-30

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 081229758X

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Around the year 1200, the Cistercian Engelhard of Langheim dedicated a collection of monastic stories to a community of religious women. Martha G. Newman explores how this largely unedited collection of tales about Cistercian monks illuminates the religiosity of Cistercian nuns. As did other Cistercian storytellers, Engelhard recorded the miracles and visions of the order's illustrious figures, but he wrote from Franconia, in modern Germany, rather than the Cistercian heartland. His extant texts reflect his interactions with non-Cistercian monasteries and with Langheim's patrons rather than celebrating Bernard of Clairvaux. Engelhard was conservative, interested in maintaining traditional Cistercian patterns of thought. Nonetheless, by offering to women a collection of narratives that explore the oral qualities of texts, the nature of sight, and the efficacy of sacraments, Engelhard articulated a distinctive response to the social and intellectual changes of his period. In analyzing Engelhard's stories, Newman uncovers an understudied monastic culture that resisted the growing emphasis on the priestly administration of the sacraments and the hardening of gender distinctions. Engelhard assumed that monks and nuns shared similar interests and concerns, and he addressed his audiences as if they occupied a space neither fully sacerdotal nor completely lay, neither scholastic nor unlearned, and neither solely male nor only female. His exemplary narratives depict the sacramental value of everyday objects and behaviors whose efficacy relied more on individual spiritual formation than on sacerdotal action. By encouraging nuns and monks to imagine connections between heaven and earth, Engelhard taught faith as a learned disposition. Newman's study demonstrates that scholastic questions about signs, sacraments, and sight emerged in a narrative form within late twelfth-century monastic communities.

Theologizing Friendship
Theologizing Friendship

Author: Nathan Sumner Lefler

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2014-09-15

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1630874914

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In Theologizing Friendship, the author aims to revitalize Jean Leclercq's defense of monastic theology, while expanding and qualifying some of the central theses expounded in Leclercq's magisterial The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. The current work contributes to a revised and updated status quaestionis concerning the theological relationship between classical monasticism and scholasticism, construed in more systematic and speculative terms than those of Leclercq, rendered here through the lens of friendship as a theological topos. The work shares with Ivan Illich's In the Vineyard of the Text the conviction that the rise of the Schools (Paris, Oxford, etc.) constitutes one of the greatest intellectual watersheds in the history of Western civilization: where Illich's ruminations are largely philosophical and particularly epistemological, the author's are theological and metaphysical. In his novel proposal that within the monastic and scholastic milieux there obtain parallel threefold analogies among friendship, reading, and theology, the author not only offers an original contribution to current scholarship, but gestures towards avenues for institutional self-examination much needed by the contemporary--modern and postmodern--Academy.

Friendship
Friendship

Author: Barbara Caine

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-11

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1317545605

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There has been an increasing interest in the meaning and importance of friendship in recent years, particularly in the West. However, the history of friendship, and the ways in which it has changed over time, have rarely been examined. Friendship: A History traces the development of friendship in Europe from the Hellenistic period to today. The book brings together a range of essays that examine the language of friendship and its significance in terms of ethics, social institutions, religious organizations and political alliances. The essays study the works of classical and contemporary authors to explore the role of friendship in Western philosophy. Ranging from renaissance friendships to Christian and secular friendships and from women’s writing to the role of class and sex in friendships, Friendship: A History will be invaluable to students and scholars of social history.

Creating Cistercian Nuns
Creating Cistercian Nuns

Author: Anne E. Lester

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-11-22

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0801462967

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In Creating Cistercian Nuns, Anne E. Lester addresses a central issue in the history of the medieval church: the role of women in the rise of the religious reform movement of the thirteenth century. Focusing on the county of Champagne in France, Lester reconstructs the history of the women’s religious movement and its institutionalization within the Cistercian order. The common picture of the early Cistercian order is that it was unreceptive to religious women. Male Cistercian leaders often avoided institutional oversight of communities of nuns, preferring instead to cultivate informal relationships of spiritual advice and guidance with religious women. As a result, scholars believed that women who wished to live a life of service and poverty were more likely to join one of the other reforming orders rather than the Cistercians. As Lester shows, however, this picture is deeply flawed. Between 1220 and 1240 the Cistercian order incorporated small independent communities of religious women in unprecedented numbers. Moreover, the order not only accommodated women but also responded to their interpretations of apostolic piety, even as it defined and determined what constituted Cistercian nuns in terms of dress, privileges, and liturgical practice. Lester reconstructs the lived experiences of these women, integrating their ideals and practices into the broader religious and social developments of the thirteenth century—including the crusade movement, penitential piety, the care of lepers, and the reform agenda of the Fourth Lateran Council. The book closes by addressing the reasons for the subsequent decline of Cistercian convents in the fourteenth century. Based on extensive analysis of unpublished archives, Creating Cistercian Nuns will force scholars to revise their understanding of the women’s religious movement as it unfolded during the thirteenth century.

Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages
Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages

Author: Keagan Brewer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-01-29

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1317430352

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Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages explores the response by medieval society to tales of marvels and the supernatural, which ranged from firm belief to outright rejection, and asks why the believers believed, and why the skeptical disbelieved. Despite living in a world whose structures more often than not supported belief, there were still a great many who disbelieved, most notably scholastic philosophers who began a polemical programme against belief in marvels. Keagan Brewer reevaluates the Middle Ages’ reputation as an era of credulity by considering the evidence for incidences of marvels, miracles and the supernatural and demonstrating the reasons people did and did not believe in such things. Using an array of contemporary sources, he shows that medieval responders sought evidence in the commonality of a report, similarity of one event to another, theological explanations and from people with status to show that those who believed in marvels and miracles did so only because the wonders had passed evidentiary testing. In particular, he examines both emotional and rational reactions to wondrous phenomena, and why some were readily accepted and others rejected. This book is an important contribution to the history of emotions and belief in the Middle Ages.

Superior Women
Superior Women

Author: Jennifer C. Edwards

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-07-11

Total Pages: 489

ISBN-13: 0192574981

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Superior Women examines the claims of abbesses of the abbey of Sainte-Croix in medieval Poitiers to authority from the abbey's foundation to its 1520 reform. These women claimed to hold authority over their own community, over dependent chapters of male canons, and over extensive properties in Poitou; male officials such as the king of France and the pope repeatedly supported these claims. To secure this support, the abbesses relied on two strategies that the abbey's founder, the sixth-century Saint Radegund, established: they documented support from a network of allies made up of powerful secular and ecclesiastical officials, and they used artefacts left from Radegund's life to shape her cult and win new patrons and allies. Abbesses across the 900 years of this study routinely turned to these strategies successfully when faced with conflict from dependents, or more local officials such as the bishop of Poitiers. Sainte-Croix's nuns proved adept at tailoring these strategies to shifting historical contexts, turning from Frankish bishops to the kings of Frankia, then to the Pope and finally to the King of France as former allies became unavailable to them. The book demonstrates respectful cooperation between men and monastic women, and more extensive respect for female monastic authority than scholars typically recognize. Chapters focus on the cult's manuscripts, church decoration, procession, jurisdictions between cult institutions, reform, and rebellion.

Separate But Equal
Separate But Equal

Author: James France

Publisher: Liturgical Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0879072466

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The institution of the lay brotherhood was not original to the Cistercians, but they developed it to its fullest extent. Although lay, the conversi were under the same vows as monks and represented a new form of religious life. While monks were bound to the recitation of the Divine Office, the lay brothers were dedicated to a life of toil and acted as the monks' auxiliaries. Their contribution to the spiritual and material life of the Cistercian Order was immense. By consideration of tales from the exemplum literature, evidence from general chapter statutes, and information on the architectural provisions made for the lay brothers in the abbey and on the outlying granges, this book puts flesh on the bare bones of a life directed by their own Usages. The book is richly illustrated with images from manuscripts, stained glass, and architectural sculpture.