Pagan Survivals, Superstitions and Popular Cultures in Early Medieval Pastoral Literature PDF Download

Author: Bernadette Filotas
Publisher: PIMS
ISBN: 9780888441515
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
"This comprehensive study examines early medieval popular culture as it appears in ecclesiastical and secular law, sermons, penitentials and other pastoral works - a selective, skewed, but still illuminating record of the beliefs and practices of ordinary Christians. Concentrating on the five centuries from c. 500 to c. 1000, Pagan Survivals, Superstitions and Popular Cultures in Early Medieval Pastoral Literature presents the evidence for folk religious beliefs and piety, attitudes to nature and death, festivals, magic, drinking and alimentary customs. As such it provides a precious glimpse of the mutual adaptation of Christianity and traditional cultures at an important period of cultural and religious transition."--BOOK JACKET

Author: John F. Romano
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317104072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
The liturgy, the public worship of the Catholic Church, was a crucial factor in forging the society of early medieval Rome. As the Roman Empire dissolved, a new world emerged as Christian bishops stepped into the power vacuum left by the dismantling of the Empire. Among these potentates, none was more important than the bishop of Rome, the pope. The documents, archaeology, and architecture that issued forth from papal Rome in the seventh and eighth centuries preserve a precious glimpse into novel societal patterns. The underexploited liturgical sources in particular enrich and complicate our historical understanding of this period. They show how liturgy was the ’social glue’ that held together the Christian society of early medieval Rome - and excluded those who did not belong to it. This study places the liturgy center stage, filling a gap in research on early medieval Rome and demonstrating the utility of investigating how the liturgy functioned in medieval Europe. It includes a detailed analysis of the papal Mass, the central act of liturgy and the most obvious example of the close interaction of liturgy, social relations and power. The first extant Mass liturgy, the First Roman Ordo, is also given a new presentation in Latin here with an English translation and commentary. Other grand liturgical events such as penitential processions are also examined, as well as more mundane acts of worship. Far from a pious business with limited influence, the liturgy established an exchange between humans and the divine that oriented Roman society to God and fostered the dominance of the clergy.

Author: Carine van Rhijn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351368877
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Starting from manuscripts compiled for local priests in the Carolingian period, this book investigates the way in which pastoral care took shape at the local levels of society. They show what illiterate lay people learned about their religion, but also what priests themselves knew. The Carolingian royal dynasty, which ruled over much of Europe in the eighth and ninth century, is well-known for its success in war, patronage of learning and its ambitious style of rulership. A central theme in their plans for the future of their kingdom was to ensure God's everlasting support, and to make sure that all inhabitants – down to the last illiterate farmer – reached eternal life in heaven. This book shows how the ideal of leading everybody to salvation was a central element of Carolingian culture. The grass-roots approach shows how early medieval religion was anything but uniform, how it encompassed all spheres of daily life and how well-educated local priests did not only know how to baptise and preach, but could also advise on matters concerning health, legal procedure and even the future. This volume is of great use to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in the ecclesiastical history of Europe in the Carolingian period.

Author: Yosi Yisraeli
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317160266
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
The Mediterranean and its hinterlands were the scene of intensive and transformative contact between cultures in the Middle Ages. From the seventh to the seventeenth century, the three civilizations into which the region came to be divided geographically – the Islamic Khalifate, the Byzantine Empire, and the Latin West – were busily redefining themselves vis-à-vis one another. Interspersed throughout the region were communities of minorities, such as Christians in Muslim lands, Muslims in Christian lands, heterodoxical sects, pagans, and, of course, Jews. One of the most potent vectors of interaction and influence between these communities in the medieval world was inter-religious conversion: the process whereby groups or individuals formally embraced a new religion. The chapters of this book explore this dynamic: what did it mean to convert to Christianity in seventh-century Ireland? What did it mean to embrace Islam in tenth-century Egypt? Are the two phenomena comparable on a social, cultural, and legal level? The chapters of the book also ask what we are able to learn from our sources, which, at times, provide a very culturally-charged and specific conversion rhetoric. Taken as a whole, the compositions in this volume set out to argue that inter-religious conversion was a process that was recognizable and comparable throughout its geographical and chronological purview.

Author: Brigitte Resl
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350995525
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008 A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age investigates the changing roles of animals in medieval culture, economy and society in the period 1000 to 1400. The period saw significant changes in scientific and philosophical approaches to animals as well as their representation in art. Animals were omnipresent in medieval everyday life. They had enormous importance for medieval agriculture and trade and were also hunted for food and used in popular entertainments. At the same time, animals were kept as pets and used to display their owner's status, whilst medieval religion attributed complex symbolic meanings to animals. A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period and continues with essays on the position of animals in contemporary symbolism, hunting, domestication, sports and entertainment, science, philosophy, and art.

Author: Steven P. Marrone
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137029781
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
A History of Science, Magic and Belief is an exploration of the origins of modern society through the culture of the middle ages and early modern period. By examining the intertwined paths of three different systems for interpreting the world, it seeks to create a narrative which culminates in the birth of modernity. It looks at the tensions and boundaries between science and magic throughout the middle ages and how they were affected by elite efforts to rationalise society, often through religion. The witch-crazes of the sixteenth and seventeenth century are seen as a pivotal point, and the emergence from these into social peace is deemed possible due to the Scientific Revolution and the politics of the early modern state. This book is unique in drawing together the histories of science, magic and religion. It is thus an ideal book for those studying any or all of these topics, and with its broad time frame, it is also suitable for students of the history of Europe or Western civilisation in general.

Author: Linda Kalof
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350995185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
The Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities of medieval Western Europe conceived of the human body in manifold ways. The body was not a fixed or unmalleable mass of flesh but an entity that changed its character depending on its age, its interactions with its environment and its diet. For example, a slave would have been marked by her language, her name, her religion or even by a sign burned onto her skin, not by her color alone. Covering the period from 500 to 1500 and using sources that range across the full spectrum of medieval literary, scientific, medical and artistic production, this volume explores the rich variety of medieval views of both the real and the metaphorical body. A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on the centrality of the human body in birth and death, health and disease, sexuality, beauty and concepts of the ideal, bodies marked by gender, race, class and age, cultural representations and popular beliefs and the self and society.

Author: Nancy Mandeville Caciola
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501703463
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Simultaneously real and unreal, the dead are people, yet they are not. The society of medieval Europe developed a rich set of imaginative traditions about death and the afterlife, using the dead as a point of entry for thinking about the self, regeneration, and loss. These macabre preoccupations are evident in the widespread popularity of stories about the returned dead, who interacted with the living both as disembodied spirits and as living corpses or revenants. In Afterlives, Nancy Mandeville Caciola explores this extraordinary phenomenon of the living's relationship with the dead in Europe during the five hundred years after the year 1000.Caciola considers both Christian and pagan beliefs, showing how certain traditions survived and evolved over time, and how attitudes both diverged and overlapped through different contexts and social strata. As she shows, the intersection of Christian eschatology with various pagan afterlife imaginings—from the classical paganisms of the Mediterranean to the Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and Scandinavian paganisms indigenous to northern Europe—brought new cultural values about the dead into the Christian fold as Christianity spread across Europe. Indeed, the Church proved surprisingly open to these influences, absorbing new images of death and afterlife in unpredictable fashion. Over time, however, the persistence of regional cultures and beliefs would be counterbalanced by the effects of an increasingly centralized Church hierarchy. Through it all, one thing remained constant: the deep desire in medieval people to bring together the living and the dead into a single community enduring across the generations.

Author: Courtney M. Booker
Publisher: Trivent Publishing
ISBN: 6156405674
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
In This Modern Age: Medieval Studies in Honor of Paul Edward Dutton is a collection of fourteen essays by scholars of the Carolingian era specializing in history, art history, and literature. The volume is divided into five sections, which treat early medieval Latin literary and historiographical culture, images and objects, interpretations of natural phenomena, and the subject of nostalgia. Reflecting Dutton's pathbreaking work, the contributions all evince the great impact of his teaching and erudition over the past thirty years since the publication of his seminal books Carolingian Civilization: A Reader (1993), The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire (1994), The Poetry and Paintings of the First Bible of Charles the Bald (with Herbert L. Kessler) (1997), Charlemagne's Courtier: The Complete Einhard (1998), Charlemagne's Mustache: And Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age (2004), together with his many influential articles. This body of highly distinctive, stimulating, and evocative scholarship has fundamentally transformed Carolingian studies, inspiring younger scholars to enter the field and encouraging established scholars to develop it in new directions. The essays in this volume individually pay tribute to Dutton in their illumination of diverse aspects of Carolingian intellectual, textual, and visual culture, with its famously idiosyncratic revival of Christian-Roman learning, aesthetics, and ideas. Gathered together, they offer an expression of gratitude for the risks that he took and the generosity that he has always shown.

Author: Michael D. Bailey
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801467314
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Superstitions are commonplace in the modern world. Mostly, however, they evoke innocuous images of people reading their horoscopes or avoiding black cats. Certain religious practices might also come to mind-praying to St. Christopher or lighting candles for the dead. Benign as they might seem today, such practices were not always perceived that way. In medieval Europe superstitions were considered serious offenses, violations of essential precepts of Christian doctrine or immutable natural laws. But how and why did this come to be? In Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies, Michael D. Bailey explores the thorny concept of superstition as it was understood and debated in the Middle Ages. Bailey begins by tracing Christian thinking about superstition from the patristic period through the early and high Middle Ages. He then turns to the later Middle Ages, a period that witnessed an outpouring of writings devoted to superstition-tracts and treatises with titles such as De superstitionibus and Contra vitia superstitionum. Most were written by theologians and other academics based in Europe's universities and courts, men who were increasingly anxious about the proliferation of suspect beliefs and practices, from elite ritual magic to common healing charms, from astrological divination to the observance of signs and omens. As Bailey shows, however, authorities were far more sophisticated in their reasoning than one might suspect, using accusations of superstition in a calculated way to control the boundaries of legitimate religion and acceptable science. This in turn would lay the conceptual groundwork for future discussions of religion, science, and magic in the early modern world. Indeed, by revealing the extent to which early modern thinkers took up old questions about the operation of natural properties and forces using the vocabulary of science rather than of belief, Bailey exposes the powerful but in many ways false dichotomy between the "superstitious" Middle Ages and "rational" European modernity.