The Life of Marie D'Oignies
Author: de Vitry Jacques, ca.
Publisher: Saskatoon : Peregrina Publishing Company
Published: 1987
Total Pages: 196
ISBN-13:
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Mary of Oignies
Author: Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKComprises revised editions of three texts formerly published by Peregrina Publishing, but reedited under the supervision of Barbara Newman and Constant Mews, and with supplementary contextual articles on the life and times of Mary Oignies.
Cities of Ladies
Author: Walter Simons
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2010-08-03
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 0812200128
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSelected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title In the early thirteenth century, semireligious communities of women began to form in the cities and towns of the Low Countries. These beguines, as the women came to be known, led lives of contemplation and prayer and earned their livings as laborers or teachers. In Cities of Ladies, the first history of the beguines to appear in English in fifty years, Walter Simons traces the transformation of informal clusters of single women to large beguinages. These veritable single-sex cities offered lower- and middle-class women an alternative to both marriage and convent life. While the region's expanding urban economies initially valued the communities for their cheap labor supply, severe economic crises by the fourteenth century restricted women's opportunities for work. Church authorities had also grown less tolerant of religious experimentation, hailing as subversive some aspects of beguine mysticism. To Simons, however, such accusations of heresy against the beguines were largely generated from a profound anxiety about their intellectual ambitions and their claims to a chaste life outside the cloister. Under ecclesiastical and economic pressure, beguine communities dwindled in size and influence, surviving only by adopting a posture of restraint and submission to church authorities.
Medieval Disability Sourcebook
Author: Cameron Hunt McNabb
Publisher: punctum books
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 501
ISBN-13: 1950192733
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe field of disability studies significantly contributes to contemporary discussions of the marginalization of and social justice for individuals with disabilities. However, what of disability in the past? The Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe explores what medieval texts have to say about disability, both in their own time and for the present. This interdisciplinary volume on medieval Europe combines historical records, medical texts, and religious accounts of saints' lives and miracles, as well as poetry, prose, drama, and manuscript images to demonstrate the varied and complicated attitudes medieval societies had about disability. Far from recording any monolithic understanding of disability in the Middle Ages, these contributions present a striking range of voices-to, from, and about those with disabilities-and such diversity only confirms how disability permeated (and permeates) every aspect of life. The Medieval Disability Sourcebook is designed for use inside the undergraduate or graduate classroom or by scholars interested in learning more about medieval Europe as it intersects with the field of disability studies. Most texts are presented in modern English, though some are preserved in Middle English and many are given in side-by-side translations for greater study. Each entry is prefaced with an academic introduction to disability within the text as well as a bibliography for further study. This sourcebook is the first in a proposed series focusing on disability in a wide range of premodern cultures, histories, and geographies.
Holy Feast and Holy Fast
Author: Caroline Walker Bynum
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 1988-01-07
Total Pages: 496
ISBN-13: 0520908783
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the period between 1200 and 1500 in western Europe, a number of religious women gained widespread veneration and even canonization as saints for their extraordinary devotion to the Christian eucharist, supernatural multiplications of food and drink, and miracles of bodily manipulation, including stigmata and inedia (living without eating). The occurrence of such phenomena sheds much light on the nature of medieval society and medieval religion. It also forms a chapter in the history of women. Previous scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other and have sometimes applied modern medical or psychological theories to them. Using materials based on saints' lives and the religious and mystical writings of medieval women and men, Caroline Walker Bynum uncovers the pattern lying behind these aspects of women's religiosity and behind the fascination men and women felt for such miracles and devotional practices. She argues that food lies at the heart of much of women's piety. Women renounced ordinary food through fasting in order to prepare for receiving extraordinary food in the eucharist. They also offered themselves as food in miracles of feeding and bodily manipulation. Providing both functionalist and phenomenological explanations, Bynum explores the ways in which food practices enabled women to exert control within the family and to define their religious vocations. She also describes what women meant by seeing their own bodies and God's body as food and what men meant when they too associated women with food and flesh. The author's interpretation of women's piety offers a new view of the nature of medieval asceticism and, drawing upon both anthropology and feminist theory, she illuminates the distinctive features of women's use of symbols. Rejecting presentist interpretations of women as exploited or masochistic, she shows the power and creativity of women's writing and women's lives.
Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Culture
Author: Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13: 184384401X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn exploration of the relations between medical and religious discourse and practice in medieval culture, focussing on how they are affected by gender.
Married Saints and Blesseds
Author: Ferdinand Holbock
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2017-06-21
Total Pages: 516
ISBN-13: 1681497530
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCountless saints have been priests or religious, living out lives of penance and sacrifice for the good of the Church. But many Catholics don't realize that married couples are called to holiness as well. Fr. Holböck's tells the inspiring stories of over 200 married saints and blesseds from the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph to Margaret of Scotland, King Louis of France, Thomas More, and modern examples like Gianna Molla and Louis and Zélie Martin, parents of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. The example of these holy men and women is essential to living a truly Catholic married life. Important Church documents and scripture passages are also included to further guide and enlighten the reader. Many illustrations.
Women, Men, and Spiritual Power
Author: John Wayland Coakley
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 367
ISBN-13: 0231134002
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, John Coakley explores male-authored narratives of the lives of Catherine of Siena, Hildegard of Bingen, Angela of Foligno, and six other female prophets or mystics of the late Middle Ages. His readings reveal the complex personal and literary relationships between these women and the clerics who wrote about them. Coakley's work also undermines simplistic characterizations of male control over women, offering an important contribution to medieval religious history. Coakley shows that these male-female relationships were marked by a fundamental tension between power and fascination: the priests and monks were supposed to hold authority over the women entrusted to their care, but they often switched roles, as the men became captivated with the women's spiritual gifts. In narratives of such women, the male authors reflect directly on the relationship between the women's powers and their own. Coakley argues that they viewed these relationships as gendered partnerships that brought together female mystical power and male ecclesiastical authority without placing one above the other. Women, Men, and Spiritual Power chronicles a wide-ranging experiment in the balance of formal and informal powers, in which it was assumed to be thoroughly imaginable for both sorts of authority, in their distinctly gendered terms, to coexist and build on each other. The men's writings reflect an extended moment in western Christianity when clerics had enough confidence in their authority to actually question its limits. After about 1400, however, clerics underwent a crisis of confidence, and such a questioning of institutional power was no longer considered safe. Instead of seeing women as partners, their revelatory powers began to be viewed as evidence of witchcraft.
The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell
Author: Dyan Elliott
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2011-11-16
Total Pages: 477
ISBN-13: 0812206932
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe early Christian writer Tertullian first applied the epithet "bride of Christ" to the uppity virgins of Carthage as a means of enforcing female obedience. Henceforth, the virgin as Christ's spouse was expected to manifest matronly modesty and due submission, hobbling virginity's ancient capacity to destabilize gender roles. In the early Middle Ages, the focus on virginity and the attendant anxiety over its possible loss reinforced the emphasis on claustration in female religious communities, while also profoundly disparaging the nonvirginal members of a given community. With the rising importance of intentionality in determining a person's spiritual profile in the high Middle Ages, the title of bride could be applied and appropriated to laywomen who were nonvirgins as well. Such instances of democratization coincided with the rise of bridal mysticism and a progressive somatization of female spirituality. These factors helped cultivate an increasingly literal and eroticized discourse: women began to undergo mystical enactments of their union with Christ, including ecstatic consummations and vivid phantom pregnancies. Female mystics also became increasingly intimate with their confessors and other clerical confidants, who were sometimes represented as stand-ins for the celestial bridegroom. The dramatic merging of the spiritual and physical in female expressions of religiosity made church authorities fearful, an anxiety that would coalesce around the figure of the witch and her carnal induction into the Sabbath.
The Book of Margery Kempe
Author: Margery Kempe
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 1985
Total Pages: 449
ISBN-13: 0140432515
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe story of the eventful and controversial life of Margery Kempe - wife, mother, businesswoman, pilgrim and visionary - is the earliest surviving autobiography in English. Here Kempe (c.1373-c.1440) recounts in vivid, unembarrassed detail the madness that followed the birth of the first of her fourteen children, the failure of her brewery business, her dramatic call to the spiritual life, her visions and uncontrollable tears, the struggle to convert her husband to a vow of chastity and her pilgrimages to Europe and the Holy Land. Margery Kempe could not read or write, and dictated her remarkable story late in life. It remains an extraordinary record of human faith and a portrait of a medieval woman of unforgettable character and courage.
