The authors in this volume analyze spiritual kinship in Europe from the end of the Middle Ages to the Industrial Age. Uniquely comparing Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox views and practices, the chapters look at changes in theological thought over time as well as in social customs related to spiritual kinship, including godparenthood.
The authors in this volume analyze spiritual kinship in Europe from the end of the Middle Ages to the Industrial Age. Uniquely comparing Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox views and practices, the chapters look at changes in theological thought over time as well as in social customs related to spiritual kinship, including godparenthood.
This volume examines the significance of spiritual kinship—or kinship reckoned in relation to the divine—in creating myriad forms of affiliations among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Rather than confining the study of spiritual kinship to Christian godparenthood or presuming its disappearance in light of secularism, the authors investigate how religious practitioners create and contest sacred solidarities through ritual, discursive, and ethical practices across social domains, networks, and transnational collectives. This book’s theoretical conversations and rich case studies hold value for scholars of anthropology, kinship, and religion.
The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe is a comprehensive and ground-breaking survey of the lives of women in early-modern Europe between 1450 and 1750. Covering a period of dramatic political and cultural change, the book challenges the current contours and chronologies of European history by observing them through the lens of female experience. The collaborative research of this book covers four themes: the affective world; practical knowledge for life; politics and religion; arts, science and humanities. These themes are interwoven through the chapters, which encompass all areas of women’s lives: sexuality, emotions, health and wellbeing, educational attainment, litigation and the practical and leisured application of knowledge, skills and artistry from medicine to theology. The intellectual lives of women, through reading and writing, and their spirituality and engagement with the material world, are also explored. So too is the sheer energy of female work, including farming and manufacture, skilled craft and artwork, theatrical work and scientific enquiry. The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe revises the chronological and ideological parameters of early-modern European history by opening the reader’s eyes to an exciting age of female productivity, social engagement and political activism across European and transatlantic boundaries. It is essential reading for students and researchers of early-modern history, the history of women and gender studies.
The Power of Networks describes a typology of network-based research practices in the historical disciplines, ranging from the use of quantitative network analysis in cultural, economic, social or political history or religious studies, to novel approaches in the Digital Humanities. Network data visualisations and calculations have proven to be useful tools for the analysis of mostly textual sources containing relational information, offering new perspectives on complex historical phenomena. Including case studies from antiquity to contemporary history, the book provides a clear demonstration of the opportunities historical network research (HNR) provides for historical studies. The examples presented within the pages of this volume are arranged in a way to highlight three central typological pillars of HNR: (re-)construction and analysis of historical networks; computational extraction of network data and infrastructures for data collection and exploration. The Power of Networks outlines the history and current state of research in HNR and points towards future research frontiers in the wake of new digital technologies. As such, the book should be essential reading for academics, students and practitioners with an interest in digital humanities, history, archaeology and religion.
From the late eighteenth century, more and more men and women wished to marry their cousins or in-laws. This aim was primarily linked to changes in marriage concepts, which were increasingly based on familiarity. Wealthy as well as economically precarious households counted on related marriage partners. Such unions, however, faced centuries-old marriage impediments. Bridal couples had to apply for a papal dispensation. This meant a hurdled, lengthy and also expensive procedure. This book shows that applicants in four dioceses – Brixen, Chur, Salzburg and Trent – took very different paths through the thicket of bureaucracy to achieve their goal. How did they argue their marriage projects? How did they succeed and why did so many fail? Tenacity often proved decisive in the end.
Why do we have children and what do we raise them for? Does the proliferation of depictions of suffering in the media enhance, or endanger, compassion? How do we live and die well in the extended periods of debility which old age now threatens? Why and how should we grieve for the dead? And how should we properly remember other grief and grievances? In addressing such questions, the Christian imagination of human life has been powerfully shaped by the imagination of Christ's life Christs conception, birth, suffering, death, and burial have been subjects of profound attention in Christian thought, just as they are moments of special interest and concern in each and every human life. However, they are also sites of contention and controversy, where what it is to be human is discovered, constructed, and contested. Conception, birth, suffering, burial, and death are occasions, in other words, for profound and continuing questioning regarding the meaning of human life, as controversies to do with IVF, abortion, euthanasia, and the use of bodies and body parts post mortem, indicate. In The Ethics of Everyday Life, Michael Banner argues that moral theology must reconceive its nature and tasks if it is not only to articulate its own account of human being, but also to enter into constructive contention with other accounts. In particular, it must be willing to learn from and engage with social anthropology if it is to offer powerful and plausible portrayals of the moral life and answers to the questions which trouble modernity. Drawing in wide-ranging fashion from social anthropology and from Christian thought and practice from many periods, and influenced especially by his engagement in public policy matters including as a member of the UK's Human Tissue Authority, Banner develops the outlines of an everyday ethics, stretching from before the cradle to after the grave.
This book examines England's plural and protracted Reformations through the novel prism of the generations. Approaching generation as a biological unit and a social cohort, it demonstrates that the tumultuous religious developments that stretched across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not merely transformed the generations but were also forged by them. It provides compelling new insights into how people experienced and navigated the profound challenges that the Reformations posed in everyday life. Alexandra Walsham investigates how age and ancestry were implicated in the theological and cultural upheavals of the era and how these in turn reconfigured the nexus between memory, history, and time. Generations explores the manifold ways in which the Reformations shaped the horizontal relationships that men, women, and children formed with their siblings, kin, and peers, as well as the vertical ones that tied them to their dead ancestors and their future heirs. It highlights the vital part that families bound by blood and by faith played in the making of current events and in recording the past for posterity. Drawing on previously untapped archival evidence, in tandem with a rich array of printed texts, visual images, and material objects, this study offers poignant glimpses of individual lives and casts fascinating light on how families were both torn apart and brought closer together by the English Reformations.