The first study of Marquard von Lindau, arguably the most widely-read author in German before the Reformation. Active in the second half of the 14th century, in the generation after the Black Death, Marquard made a distinctive and critical contribution to contemporary understanding of Christ's Passion, the Eucharist, and the Virgin Mary.
This is a study of the intellectual history and religious culture of German-speaking Europe in the late Middle Ages. Its focus is the bilingual oeuvre of the Franciscan friar Marquard von Lindau (d. 1392), arguably the most widely-read author in the German language before the Reformation. His most successful works were those in which he considered pragmatic issues of Christian life, aimed at a broad reading public that stretched from monks and nuns living the contemplative life in enclosed convents; to his confreres, novices and students in the mendicant orders; and the literate citizens of the burgeoning mercantile centres. It is three of these pragmatic issues, central to late medieval religious life, around which this book is structured: the Passion of Christ, the sacrament of the Eucharist, and the devotion to the Virgin Mary. The dominant approaches taken towards each of these in the fourteenth-century church represented problematic challenges to Marquard; challenges which he met in a distinctive and influential manner, by no means in accordance with the affectively-charged devotional practices encouraged by many within and without his order, and so often considered normative for late medieval religious culture. The original voice with which Marquard spoke is made clear through the location of his oeuvre within the pan-European context of the debates in which his works participate. The ethos his works projected redetermined the trajectory of intellectual life in Germany into the fifteenth century and beyond.
In The Empire at the End of Time, Frances Courtney Kneupper introduces popular eschatological prophecies of the late medieval Empire. Demonstrating how these prophecies operated to create a vision of the German community as the ordained reformers of Christendom, Kneupper also examines their connection to contemporary discourses on Church reform and political identity.
In 1517, Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses, an act often linked with the start of the Reformation. In this work, Eric Leland Saak argues that the 95 Theses do not signal Luther's break from Roman Catholicism. An obedient Observant Augustinian Hermit, Luther's self-understanding from 1505 until at least 1520 was as Brother Martin Luther, Augustinian, not Reformer, and he continued to wear his habit until October 1524. Saak demonstrates that Luther's provocative act represented the culmination of the late medieval Reformation. It was only the failure of this earlier Reformation that served as a catalyst for the onset of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. Luther's true Reformation discovery had little to do with justification by faith, or with his 95 Theses. Yet his discoveries in February of 1520 were to change everything.
Over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as more and more vernacular commentaries on the Decalogue were produced throughout Europe, the moral system of the Ten Commandments gradually became more prominent. The Ten Commandments proved to be a topic from which numerous proponents of pastoral and lay catechesis drew inspiration. God’s commands were discussed and illustrated in sermons and confessor’s manuals, and they spawned new theological and pastoral treatises both Catholic and Reformed. But the Decalogue also served several authors, including Dante, Petrarch, and Christine de Pizan. Unlike the Seven Deadly Sins, the Ten Commandments supported a more positive image of mankind, one that embraced the human potential for introspection and the conscious choice to follow God’s Law.
This volume explores the indispensability of a transnational perspective for the construction and writing of literary histories of the Low Countries from 1200- 1800. It looks at the role of mediators such as translators, printers, and editors, at characteristics of literary genres and the possibilities they offered for literary boundary crossing and adaptation, and at the role of regions and urban centers as multilingual hubs. This collection demonstrates the centrality of transnational perspectives for elucidating the complex inter-relationship between Netherlandic and European literary history. The Low Countries were a dynamic site for new literary production and transnational exchange that shaped and reshaped the intellectual landscape of premodern Europe. Contributors include: Lia van Gemert, Lucas van der Deijl, Feike Dietz, Paul Wackers, David Napolitano, James A. Parente, Jr., Frank Willaert, Youri Desplenter, Bart Besamusca, Frans R.E. Blom, and Jan Bloemendal.
The Reformation was a seismic event in history, whose consequences are still working themselves out in Europe and across the world. The protests against the marketing of indulgences staged by the German monk Martin Luther in 1517 belonged to a long-standing pattern of calls for internal reform and renewal in the Christian Church. But they rapidly took a radical and unexpected turn, engulfing first Germany and then Europe as a whole in furious arguments about how God's will was to be 'saved'. However, these debates did not remain confined to a narrow sphere of theology. They came to reshape politics and international relations; social, cultural, and artistic developments; relations between the sexes; and the patterns and performances of everyday life. They were also the stimulus for Christianity's transformation into a truly global religion, as agents of the Roman Catholic Church sought to compensate for losses in Europe with new conversions in Asia and the Americas. Covering both Protestant and Catholic reform movements, in Europe and across the wider world, this beautifully illustrated volume tells the story of the Reformation from its immediate, explosive beginnings, through to its profound longer-term consequences and legacy for the modern world. The story is not one of an inevitable triumph of liberty over oppression, enlightenment over ignorance. Rather, it tells how a multitude of rival groups and individuals, with or without the support of political power, strove after visions of 'reform'. And how, in spite of themselves, they laid the foundations for the plural and conflicted world we now inhabit.
Grief binds the worshipers together in an adagio of sorrow as they encounter the sculptural representation of the Entombment of Christ. Located in funerary chapels, parish churches, cemeteries, and hospitals, these works embody the piety of the later Middle Ages. In this book, Donna Sadler examines the sculptural Entombments from Burgundy and Champagne through a variety of lenses, including performance theory, embodied perception, and the invocation of the absent presence of the Holy Sepulcher. The author demonstrates how the action of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus entombing Christ in the presence of the Marys and John operates in a commemorative and collective fashion: the worshiper enters the realm of the holy and becomes a participant in the biblical event.
The Mystical Presence of Christ investigates the connections between exceptional experiences of Christ's presence and ordinary devotion to Christ in the late medieval West. Unsettling the notion that experiences of seeing Christ's figure or hearing Christ speak are simply exceptional events that happen at singular moments, Richard Kieckhefer reveals the entanglements between these experiences and those that occur through the imagery, language, and rituals of ordinary, everyday devotional culture. Kieckhefer begins his book by reconsidering the "who" and the "how" of Christ's mystical presence. He argues that Christ's humanity and divinity were equally important preconditions for encounters, both exceptional and ordinary, which Kieckhefer proposes as existing on a spectrum of experience that moves from presupposition to intuition and finally to perception. Kieckhefer then examines various contexts of Christ manifestations—during prayer, meditation, and liturgy, for example—with attention to gender dynamics and the relationship between saintly individuals and their hagiographers. Through penetrating discussions of a diverse set of texts and figures across the long fourteenth century (Angela of Foligno, the nuns of Helfta, Margery Kempe, Dorothea of Montau, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, and Walter Hilton, among others), Kieckhefer shows that seemingly exceptional manifestations of Christ were also embedded in ordinary religious experience. Wide-ranging in scope and groundbreaking in methodology, The Mystical Presence of Christ is a magisterial work that rethinks the interplay between the exceptional and the ordinary in the workings of late medieval religion.
The volume explores the hitherto uncharted late medieval religious landscape of Northern Germany, from 13th-century Helfta to the 15th-century Lüneburg convents. The mystical and devotional writing of Northern Germany is contextualised through chapters on the Netherlands, Scandinavia and East Prussia. The seminal influence of the liturgy on these texts and their transmission is revealed in the creative interplay of Latin and Low German. Through the individual chapters and their appendices, which also contain translations into English, the reader can access a wealth of texts produced by communities of religious and lay women who write learnedly in Latin and fervently in Low German. Together, the chapters and appendices reveal a fascinating regional "mystical culture" which also reverberated across Northern Europe. Contributors include: Jürgen Bärsch, Anne Bollmann, Veerle Fraeters, Ulrike Hascher-Burger, Ernst Hellgardt, Tanja Mattern, Balazs Nemes, Sara S. Poor, Eva Schlotheuber, Almut Suerbaum, and Geert Warnar.
