[PDF] The Symbolism Of Marriage In Early Christianity And The Latin Middle Ages eBook

Author : Line C. Engh
Publisher : Amsterdam University Press
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 14,7 MB
Release : 2019-10-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9048537150

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In the middle ages everyone, it seems, entered into some form of marriage. Nuns - and even some monks - married the bridegroom Christ. Bishops married their sees. The popes, as vicars of Christ, married the universal church. And lay men, high and low, married carnal woman. What unites these marriages was their common reference to the union of Christ and church. Christ's marriage to the church was the paradigmatic symbol in which all the other forms of union participated - in superior or inferior ways. This book grapples with questions of the impact of marriage symbolism on both ideas and practice in the early Christian and medieval period. In what ways did marriage symbolism - with its embedded concepts of gender, reproduction, household, and hierarchy - shape people's thought about other things, such as celibacy, ecclesial and political relations, and devotional relations? How did symbolic thinking, contrariwise, shape marriage regulation and law? And how, if at all, were these two directions of thinking symbolically about marriage related?

Author : Joanne M. Ferraro
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 22,7 MB
Release : 2021-11-18
Category : History
ISBN : 1350179728

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Marriage in Europe became a central pillar of society during the medieval period. Theologians, lawyers, and secular and church leaders agreed on a unique outline of the institution and its legal framework, the essential features of which remained in force until the 1980s. The medieval Western European definition of marriage was unique: before the legal consequences of marriage came into being, the parties had to promise to engage in sexual union only with one partner and to remain in the marriage until one of the parties died. This requirement had profound implications for inheritance rules and for the organization of the family economy; it was explained and justified in a multitude of theological discussions and legal decisions across all faiths on the European continent. Normative texts, built on the foundations of the scriptures of several religious traditions, provided an impressive intellectual framework around marriage. In addition, developments in iconography, including sculpture and painting, projected the dominant model of marriage, while social, demographic and cultural changes encouraged its adoption. This volume traces the medieval discussion of marriage in practice, law, theology and iconography. It provides an examination of the wider political and economic context of marriage and offers an overview of the ebb and flow of society's ideas about how expressions of human sexuality fit within the confines of a clearly defined social structure and ideology. A Cultural History of Marriage in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on Courtship and Ritual; Religion, State and Law; Kinship and Social Networks; the Family Economy; Love and Sex; the Breaking of Vows; and Representations of Marriage.

Author : David d'Avray
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 10,61 MB
Release : 2005-06-16
Category : History
ISBN : 0191518751

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This study shows how marriage symbolism emerged from the world of texts to become a social force affecting ordinary people. It covers the whole medieval period but identifies the decades around 1200 as decisive. New arguments for regarding preaching as a mass medium from the thirteenth century are presented, building on the author's Medieval Marriage Sermons. In marriage preaching symbolism was central. Marriage symbolism also became a social force through law, and lay behind the combination of monogamy and indissolubility which made the medieval Church's marriage system a unique development in world history. Symbolism is not presented as an explanation on its own: it interacted with other causal factors, notably the eleventh-century Gregorian Reform's drive for celibacy, which made the higher clergy like a third gender and less sympathetic to patriarchal polygamous tendencies. Sexual intercourse as a symbol of Christ's union with the Church became central, not just in mysticism but in society as structured by Church law. Symbolism also explains apparently bizarre rules, such as the exemption from capital punishment of clerics in minor orders provided that they married a virgin not a widow. The rules about blessing second marriages are also connected with this nexus of thought. The book is based on a wide range of manuscript sources: sermons, canon law commentaries, Apostolic Penitentiary registers, papal bulls, a gaol delivery roll, and pastoral handbooks. The collection of documents at the end of the book expands the source base for the history of medieval marriage generally as well as underpinning the thesis about symbolism.

Author : Susan R. Holman
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 33,60 MB
Release : 2023-08-04
Category : History
ISBN : 1000922944

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Using contemporary theories drawn from health humanities, this volume analyses the nature and effects of disability, medicine, and health discourse in a variety of early Christian literature. In recent years, the "medical turn" in early Christian studies has developed a robust literature around health, disability, and medicine, and the health humanities have made critical interventions in modern conversations around the aims of health and the nature of healthcare. Considering these developments, it has become clear that early Christian texts and ideas have much to offer modern conversations, and that these texts are illuminated using theoretical lenses drawn from modern medicine and public health. The chapters in this book explore different facets of early Christian engagement with medicine, either in itself or as metaphor and material for theological reflections on human impairment, restoration, and flourishing. Through its focus on late antique religious texts, the book raises questions around the social, rather than biological, aspects of illness and diminishment as a human experience, as well as the strategies by which that experience is navigated. The result is an innovative and timely intervention in the study of health and healthcare that bridges current divides between historical studies and contemporary issues. Taken together, the book offers a prismatic conversation of perspectives on aspects of care at the heart of societal and individual "wellness" today, inviting readers to meet or revisit patristic texts as tracings across a map of embodied identity, dissonance, and corporal care. It is a fascinating resource for anyone working on ancient medicine and health, or the social worlds of early Christianity.

Author : Wolfgang P. Müller
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 23,52 MB
Release : 2021-09-16
Category : History
ISBN : 1108962440

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From the establishment of a coherent doctrine on sacramental marriage to the eve of the Reformation, late medieval church courts were used for marriage cases in a variety of ways. Ranging widely across Western Europe, including the Upper and Lower Rhine regions, England, Italy, Catalonia, and Castile, this study explores the stark discrepancies in practice between the North of Europe and the South. Wolfgang P. Müller draws attention to the existence of public penitential proceedings in the North and their absence in the South, and explains the difference in demand, as well as highlighting variations in how individuals obtained written documentation of their marital status. Integrating legal and theological perspectives on marriage with late medieval social history, Müller addresses critical questions around the relationship between the church and medieval marriage, and what this reveals about both institutions.

Author : Line Cecilie Engh
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 24,79 MB
Release : 2024-09-02
Category : History
ISBN : 3110773716

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We live in a world riven through with standards. To understand more of their deep, rich past is to understand ourselves better. The two volumes, Standardization in the Middle Ages. Volume 1: The North and Standardization in the Middle Ages. Volume 2: Europe, turn to the Middle Ages to give a deeper understanding of the medieval ideas and practices that produced--and were produced by--standards and standardization. At first glance, the Middle Ages might appear an unlikely place to look for standardization. The editors argue that, on the contrary, generating predictability is a precondition for meaningful cultural interaction in any historical period and that we may look to the Middle Ages to learn more about the historical, social, and cognitive processes of standardization. This multidisciplinary venture, which includes medievalists from the fields of history, intellectual history, art history, philology, numismatics, and more, as well as scholars of cognitive science, informatics, and anthropology, interrogates how medieval people and groups envisioned and enforced predictability, uniformity, and order, and how they attempted to obtain and maintain standards across vast distances and heterogeneous social and cultural structures.

Author : Philip Lyndon Reynolds
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 470 pages
File Size : 34,92 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780391041080

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Author Philip Reynolds examines how marriage acquired a specifically Christian identity in the Latin West during the first millennium after Christ. Beginning with Jesus, everything the Christians did, including getting married, began a process of differentiation. Reynolds offers three themes for theological reflection and interpretation: Jesus teaching, Paul s Letter to the Ephesians, and Paul s justification of marriage as a solution to the problem of sexual desire. Reynolds insights into the Christianization of marriage make this a valuable book at both the scholarly and the practical level.

Author : John M.G. Barclay
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 46,10 MB
Release : 2021-08-26
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0567696022

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The contributors to this volume take as their theme the reception of Jewish traditions in early Christianity, and the ways in which the meaning of these traditions changed as they were put to work in new contexts and for new social ends. Special emphasis is placed on the internal variety and malleability of these traditions, which underwent continual processes of change within Judaism, and on reception as an active, strategic, and interested process. All the essays in this volume seek to bring out how acts of reception contribute to the social formation of early Christianity, in its social imagination (its speech and thought about itself) or in its social practices, or both. This volume challenges static notions of tradition and passive ideas of 'reception', stressing creativity and the significance of 'strong' readings of tradition. It thus complicates standard narratives of 'the parting of the ways' between 'Christianity' and 'Judaism', showing how even claims to continuity were bound to make the same different.

Author : Juliana Dresvina
Publisher : University of Wales Press
Page : 342 pages
File Size : 42,96 MB
Release : 2020-11-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1786836769

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This study brings together medieval studies and cognitive methodologies in a study specifically aimed at medievalists. It presents a longer history of certain mental health conditions and locates contemporary debates about the mind in a broader historical framework. It considers both the benefits of incorporating insights from contemporary neuroscientific and cognitive studies into the exploration of the past, and the benefits of employing historical models and case studies in order to reflect on modern methods.

Author : Martha G. Newman
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 45,22 MB
Release : 2020-10-30
Category : History
ISBN : 081229758X

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Around the year 1200, the Cistercian Engelhard of Langheim dedicated a collection of monastic stories to a community of religious women. Martha G. Newman explores how this largely unedited collection of tales about Cistercian monks illuminates the religiosity of Cistercian nuns. As did other Cistercian storytellers, Engelhard recorded the miracles and visions of the order's illustrious figures, but he wrote from Franconia, in modern Germany, rather than the Cistercian heartland. His extant texts reflect his interactions with non-Cistercian monasteries and with Langheim's patrons rather than celebrating Bernard of Clairvaux. Engelhard was conservative, interested in maintaining traditional Cistercian patterns of thought. Nonetheless, by offering to women a collection of narratives that explore the oral qualities of texts, the nature of sight, and the efficacy of sacraments, Engelhard articulated a distinctive response to the social and intellectual changes of his period. In analyzing Engelhard's stories, Newman uncovers an understudied monastic culture that resisted the growing emphasis on the priestly administration of the sacraments and the hardening of gender distinctions. Engelhard assumed that monks and nuns shared similar interests and concerns, and he addressed his audiences as if they occupied a space neither fully sacerdotal nor completely lay, neither scholastic nor unlearned, and neither solely male nor only female. His exemplary narratives depict the sacramental value of everyday objects and behaviors whose efficacy relied more on individual spiritual formation than on sacerdotal action. By encouraging nuns and monks to imagine connections between heaven and earth, Engelhard taught faith as a learned disposition. Newman's study demonstrates that scholastic questions about signs, sacraments, and sight emerged in a narrative form within late twelfth-century monastic communities.