Die Kartause Als Text Raum Mittelalterlicher Mystik Rezeption

Die Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Kartäusern und Mystik wird im vorliegenden Band auf der Basis der Überlieferung jener ‚mystischen‘ Bücher behandelt, die in einzelnen Kartausen faktisch vorhanden waren. Was dabei interessiert, ist der Umgang mit diesen Büchern im Kontext der für den Orden bzw. für einzelne Kartausen spezifischen Wissensdiskurse, Schreibpraktiken und Überlieferungskonstellationen. Die Beiträge decken mit theologia mystica, revelationes und meditationes gerade jene Bereiche ab, die auch für die moderne Diskussion um die Definition eines ‚mystischen‘ Textcorpus relevant sind.

Monasticism has a special position in the history of pastoral care. It produced innovations in various aspects of pastoral care despite, or more precisely, because of its isolation in legal or social terms from the secular world. The thirteen papers contained in this volume will reveal that there was a great variety in the ways pastoral care continued to be practised by monasticism, depending on time, space, and the nature of each religious order. Adopting a comparative approach, their historical and geographical range of investigation is not limited to medieval Europe but expands to the Americas and even to Japan in the early Modern Age. This volume bases on a conference held on 1 and 2 March 2019 at Okayama University, Japan, as part of the close collaboration between a Japanese research group on Christian/Buddhist religious movements and the Research Project "Monasteries in the High Middle Ages: Innovation Laboratories for European Life Designs and Regulatory Models" of the Saxon and the Heidelberg Academies of Sciences and Humanities, as well as the Research Center for Comparative History of Religious Orders (FOVOG, Dresden).

The Boke of Gostely Grace is the anonymous Middle English version of the Liber specialis gratiae by the German visionary Mechthild of Hackeborn (1241-1298). The original Liber, compiled at the convent of Helfta in Saxony, presents Mechthild's visions as she experienced them in the liturgy of the Christian year. Her famous visions of the Sacred Heart follow, along with instructions on the religious life in community and her visions of the afterlife. The Middle English version adapts the text to a new fifteenth-century audience, probably a Birgittine community such as the newly founded Syon Abbey on the Thames near London; it emphasises imagery of the dance of the liturgy, the vineyard, and the Sacred Heart in new and vivid terms, while other aspects, such as the bridal imagery, are played down. Within a generation, the English text had become popular among the nobility, and stimulated lay piety and private prayer.While scholars have traced the influence and reception of many continental European women writers, Mechthild's revelations have often escaped their attention, through the lack of suitable editions.This edition of Bodley 22, the manuscript written in the London area, includes introduction, commentary and glossary, and breaks new ground in the study of late medieval vernacular translation and women's literary culture.

The volume explores the hitherto uncharted late medieval religious landscape of Northern Germany, from 13th-century Helfta to the 15th-century Lüneburg convents. The mystical and devotional writing of Northern Germany is contextualised through chapters on the Netherlands, Scandinavia and East Prussia. The seminal influence of the liturgy on these texts and their transmission is revealed in the creative interplay of Latin and Low German. Through the individual chapters and their appendices, which also contain translations into English, the reader can access a wealth of texts produced by communities of religious and lay women who write learnedly in Latin and fervently in Low German. Together, the chapters and appendices reveal a fascinating regional "mystical culture" which also reverberated across Northern Europe. Contributors include: Jürgen Bärsch, Anne Bollmann, Veerle Fraeters, Ulrike Hascher-Burger, Ernst Hellgardt, Tanja Mattern, Balazs Nemes, Sara S. Poor, Eva Schlotheuber, Almut Suerbaum, and Geert Warnar.

English summary: In the Late Middle Ages vernacular literature became immensely important as a means of communicating religious knowledge to the unlearned and semi-learned. Whereas an elitist 'mystical' discourse dominated vernacular religious literature of the 14th century, in the 15th century adherents of the so-called theology of piety initiated a tremendous 'democratization' of religious knowledge, which can also be seen as a reaction to the strongly increasing rate of literacy among the laity and the ability to produce books more cheaply due to the increased use of paper. This new inclusion of the laity in the religious literary culture contributed in an important way to the success of the Reformation. In the articles collected here, Werner Williams examines central aspects of this development and its socio-historical prerequisites. He interprets and contextualizes important works of mystical literature, provides an extensive analysis of the immense importance of the reform movements within the orders in the 15th century for the production, reception and circulation of religious literature, and finally, focuses on the diverse forms in which the lives of the saints, the most beloved medieval narrative genre, appear in vernacular literature. German description: Wahrend im 14. Jahrhundert vor allem der elitare emystische' Diskurs die Literatur pragt, so setzen im 15. Jahrhundert Anhanger der sogenannten Frommigkeitstheologie eine gewaltige eDemokratisierung' des verschriftlichten religiosen Wissens in Gang, die auch als Reaktion auf eine stark ansteigende Alphabetisierung der Laien und die billigere Buchherstellung zu sehen ist. Dies tragt in erheblichem Masse zum spateren Erfolg der Reformation bei. Werner Williams fuhrt in den hier gesammelten Aufsatzen in zentrale Aspekte dieser Entwicklung und ihre sozialgeschichtlichen Voraussetzungen ein. Er interpretiert und kontextualisiert wichtige Werke des mystischen Schrifttums und stellt die grosse Bedeutung der Reformbewegungen der Orden im 15. Jahrhundert fur die Entstehung, Rezeption und Verbreitung von geistlicher Literatur eingehend dar. Schliesslich werden diverse Ausformungen der beliebtesten narrativen Gattung des Mittelalters, der Heiligenlegende, analysiert.

Enemies of the Cross examines how suffering and truth were aligned in the divisive debates of the early Reformation. Vincent Evener explores how Martin Luther, along with his first intra-Reformation critics, offered "true" suffering as a crucible that would allow believers to distinguish the truth or falsehood of doctrine, teachers, and their own experiences. To use suffering in this way, however, reformers also needed to teach Christians to recognize false suffering and the false teachers who hid under its mantle. This book contends that these arguments, which became an enduring part of the Lutheran and radical traditions, were nourished by the reception of a daring late-medieval mystical tradition the post-Eckhartian which depicted annihilation of the self as the way to union with God. The first intra-Reformation dissenters, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer, have frequently been depicted as champions of medieval mystical views over and against the non-mystical Luther. Evener counters this depiction by showing how Luther, Karlstadt, and Müntzer developed their shared mystical tradition in diverse directions, while remaining united in the conviction that sinful self-assertion prevented human beings from receiving truth and living in union with God. He argues that Luther, Karlstadt, and Müntzer each represented a different form of ecclesial-political dissent shaped by a mystical understanding of how Christians were united to God through the destruction of self-assertion. Enemies of the Cross draws on seldom-used sources and proposes new concepts of "revaluation" and "relocation" to describe how Protestants and radicals brought medieval mystical teachings into new frameworks that rejected spiritual hierarchy.

König Rother is the earliest Middle High German epic poem. It consists of 5,204 lines of rhymed couplets. The author is unknown, but was probably a clergyman writing in Bavaria. It was written no earlier than 1152, probably before 1180.