Imagining Jesus Christ In Middle English Literature 1275 1475

This book interprets Jesus Christ as a complicated, disunified literary character in Middle English literature, where he appears variously as king, traitor, victorious conqueror, sacrificial lamb, heroic knight, lover, and spouse--often as several contradictory figures in a single work. These tropes derive from Scripture, doctrines about Christ's two natures, and theories of redemption. This book examines the full range of representations in Southern Passion, Northern Passion, Pepysian Gospel Harmony, Stanzaic Life of Christ, Cursor Mundi, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, Sir John Mandeville’s Book, the York Play, and Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love. Although Christ's two natures are well represented in existing scholarship, many traditions have been overlooked, including commonplace treatments of Christ as both a traitor and king, conqueror and sacrificial lamb, hero and lover. As writers call upon audiences to feel compassion for Jesus's suffering, they almost universally express antipathy toward his Jewish torturers, complicating our ideas about affective piety. In these works, the Virgin Mary is less exemplary for her compassion than for her understanding of doctrine. In short, this book offers new perspectives on vernacular Christology between about 1275 and 1475. Theresa Tinkle is a Professor within the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, USA, as well as Director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing. Previous publications include Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality and Hermeneutics in English Poetry (1996) and Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis (Palgrave, 2010). Theresa’s academic training and publications include the study of medieval English and Latin literature, the medieval reception of the Bible, gender and sexuality studies, paleography and manuscript studies, composition and pedagogy, and disability studies.

According to a longstanding interpretation, book religions are agents of textuality and logocentrism. This volume inverts the traditional perspective: its focus is on the strong dependency between scripture and aesthetics, holy books and material artworks, sacred texts and ritual performances. The contributions, written by a group of international specialists in Western, Byzantine, Islamic and Jewish Art, are committed to a comparative and transcultural approach. The authors reflect upon the different strategies of »clothing« sacred texts with precious materials and elaborate forms. They show how the pretypographic cultures of the Middle Ages used book ornaments as media for building a close relation between the divine words and their human audience. By exploring how art shapes the religious practice of books, and how the religious use of books shapes the evolution of artistic practices this book contributes to a new understanding of the deep nexus between sacred scripture and art.

In World History as the History of Foundations, 3000 BCE to 1500 CE, Michael Borgolte investigates the origins and development of foundations from Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. In his survey foundations emerge not as mere legal institutions, but rather as “total social phenomena” which touch upon manifold aspects, including politics, the economy, art and religion of the cultures in which they emerged. Cross-cultural in its approach and the result of decades of research, this work represents by far the most comprehensive account of the history of foundations that has hitherto been published.

Monasticism, in all of its variations, was a feature of almost every landscape in the medieval West. So ubiquitous were religious women and men throughout the Middle Ages that all medievalists encounter monasticism in their intellectual worlds. While there is enormous interest in medieval monasticism among Anglophone scholars, language is often a barrier to accessing some of the most important and groundbreaking research emerging from Europe. The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West offers a comprehensive treatment of medieval monasticism, from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. The essays, specially commissioned for this volume and written by an international team of scholars, with contributors from Australia, Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, cover a range of topics and themes and represent the most up-to-date discoveries on this topic.

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville is the chronicle of the alleged Sir John Mandeville, an explorer. His travels were first published in the late 14th century, and influenced many subsequent explorers such as Christopher Columbus.

Eileen Edna Power's 'Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535' offers a thorough exploration of the social and religious history of English nunneries during the Middle Ages. Power draws from a wide range of sources, including wills, account rolls, and visitation documents, to provide a detailed picture of life inside these cloistered communities. From the motivations of the women who took the veil to the financial difficulties that plagued many nunneries, Power delves into the day-to-day realities of monastic life. She also addresses controversies such as the moral state of nunneries, and the attempts at reform made by external authorities. This book is a fascinating and meticulously researched account of a little-understood aspect of medieval England.

The Book of John Mandeville has tended to be neglected by modern teachers and scholars, yet this intriguing and copious work has much to offer the student of medieval literature, history, and culture. [It] was a contemporary bestseller, providing readers with exotic information about locales from Constantinople to China and about the social and religious practices of peoples such as the Greeks, Muslims, and Brahmins. The Book first appeared in the middle of the fourteenth century and by the next century could be found in an extraordinary range of European languages: not only Latin, French, German, English, and Italian, but also Czech, Danish, and Irish. Its wide readership is also attested by the two hundred fifty to three hundred medieval manuscripts that still survive today. Chaucer borrowed from it, as did the Gawain-poet in the Middle English Cleanness, and its popularity continued long after the Middle Ages.