Visions of the Divine Feminine in Medieval Europe

Visions of the Divine Feminine in Medieval Europe

Author: John Leonard Noyce

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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"...Considers visions in the literature of medieval Europe with particular reference to visions that can be considered to be of the Divine Feminine in a variety of forms including Wisdom (Sapientia), Philosophia and Natura amongst others..." -- page 4.


Visions and Longings

Visions and Longings

Author: Monica Furlong

Publisher: Shambhala Publications

Published: 1997-04-15

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0834829304

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The women mystics of medieval Europe represent the very first feminine voices heard in a world where women were nearly silent. As such, they are striking and unusual, strange, powerful and urgent. Monica Furlong uses key selections from among these women's own writings and writings about them by their contemporaries, along with her own assessment of them, to open up their contributions to a wide popular audience. The eleven women represented in this anthology were housewives, visionaries, abbesses, beguines, recluses, and nuns who wrote between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. They include: • Héloïse, the scholar and abbess, whose letters to Abelard are treasure of medieval literature • Hildegard of Bingen, the visionary Rhineland nun • Clare of Assisi, the close friend of Saint Francis and founder of the Poor Clares • Catherine of Siena, an influential spiritual counselor whose book, Dialogue, consists of a debate between herself and God • Julian of Norwich, the English hermitess who spent the greater part of her life meditating on and coming to understand the striking visions she received as a young woman • and many others


Visions & Longings

Visions & Longings

Author: Monica Furlong

Publisher: Burns & Oates

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9780264673851

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An anthology of women's writings drawn from the 12th century to the 14th century, this collection includes letters, hymns, practical advice, rules for nuns, accounts of visions and revelations, prayers, dialogues and autobiographical writings. Each woman mystic is introduced separately, and the diverse material shows both the intelligence, originality and profound devotion of the women authors, and how their position as women affected their work.


Equally in God's Image

Equally in God's Image

Author: Julia Bolton Holloway

Publisher: Julia Bolton Holloway

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9780820415178

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Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages is a volume of essays presenting the argument that with the coming of the universities women were excluded, in an apartheid of gender, from education and power. It discusses the resulting paradigm shift from Romanesque to Gothic, describing the images which women had of themselves and which the dominant male society had of them. We meet, in the pages of this book, medieval women in their roles as writers, pilgrims, wives, anchoresses and nuns, at court, on pilgrimage, in households and convents. The volume, as a «Distant Mirror» for ourselves today, seeks to present ways in which women then fulfilled the roles society expected of them and the ways in which they also subverted - through entering into textuality - the expectations of the dominating culture in order to quest identity and equality.


God and the Goddesses

God and the Goddesses

Author: Barbara Newman

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2016-01-14

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9780812202915

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Contrary to popular belief, the medieval religious imagination did not restrict itself to masculine images of God but envisaged the divine in multiple forms. In fact, the God of medieval Christendom was the Father of only one Son but many daughters—including Lady Philosophy, Lady Love, Dame Nature, and Eternal Wisdom. God and the Goddesses is a study in medieval imaginative theology, examining the numerous daughters of God who appear in allegorical poems, theological fictions, and the visions of holy women. We have tended to understand these deities as mere personifications and poetic figures, but that, Barbara Newman contends, is a mistake. These goddesses are neither pagan survivals nor versions of the Great Goddess constructed in archetypal psychology, but distinctive creations of the Christian imagination. As emanations of the Divine, mediators between God and the cosmos, embodied universals, and ravishing objects of identification and desire, medieval goddesses transformed and deepened Christendom's concept of God, introducing religious possibilities beyond the ambit of scholastic theology and bringing them to vibrant imaginative life. Building a bridge between secular and religious conceptions of allegorized female power, Newman advances such questions as whether medieval writers believed in their goddesses and, if so, in what manner. She investigates whether the personifications encountered in poetic fictions can be distinguished from those that appear in religious visions and questions how medieval writers reconcile their statements about the multiple daughters of God with orthodox devotion to the Son of God. Furthermore, she examines why forms of feminine God-talk that strike many Christians today as subversive or heretical did not threaten medieval churchmen. Weaving together such disparate texts as the writings of Latin and vernacular poets, medieval schoolmen, liturgists, and male and female mystics and visionaries, God and the Goddesses is a direct challenge to modern theologians to reconsider the role of goddesses in the Christian tradition.


God's Words, Women's Voices

God's Words, Women's Voices

Author: Rosalynn Voaden

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9780952973423

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An examination of awareness of the ecclesiastical doctrine of discretio spirituum, the means of testing whether visions were truly of divine origin, in the works of medieval women visionaries from Bridget of Sweden to Joan of Arc.


Goddesses and the Divine Feminine

Goddesses and the Divine Feminine

Author: Rosemary Ruether

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2006-11-20

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780520250055

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"The scholarship in this book is superior, revealing a depth of insight and a scope of knowledge possible only from a scholar who has lived with the concerns of feminist theology for decades. Ruether is a gifted storyteller, and lucidly translates complex ideas and debates. This work is of the highest importance, and Ruether asks the right questions at the right time. The text is groundbreaking."—Nancy Pineda-Madrid, Saint Mary's College of California "Ruether has provided a valuable introduction to an important feminist topic: what can we know about sacred female imagery in Western culture? She guides us through contemporary feminist scholarship, providing engaging narrative, and venturing her own interpretations. Ruether calls for feminists to move beyond divisions created by our different interpretations of prehistory and work together towards our common project of a more peaceful, just, and ecological world."—Carol Hepokoski, Meadville Lombard Theological School


Medieval Women in Their Communities

Medieval Women in Their Communities

Author: Diane Watt

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780802081223

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Ten interdisciplinary essays provide detailed, small-scale studies of a variety of medieval female communities from Germany to Wales between 1200 and 1500, examining a range of social, economic, and cultural groups, both religious and secular.


Representations of the Feminine in the Middle Ages

Representations of the Feminine in the Middle Ages

Author: Bonnie Wheeler

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780851156507

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For the most part, the women portrayed have speak to us through intermediaries. Hildegard of Bingen, Christine de Pisan, and Ann Hutchinson's 'recusant nuns' may present themselves in their own words - though even here there are veils of concealment, dissimulation, assumption and presumption to be removed - but Chaucer's women, Chretien's patrons, Milton's Eve, the conflation of saints which comprises Wilgefortis, Ste Foy, and the imperious Theodora are presented in the words, works and social milieux of men. Where they are, ostensibly, given their own voices it is by male authors.