Communities of Discourse: Religious Authority and the Role of Holy Women in the Later Middle Ages

Author(s):  
Carolyn Muessig
2019 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 40-48
Author(s):  
Galina V. Talina

The article analyzes V.V. Rozanov’s conceptions of antiquity, Middle Ages and new history. Rozanov singles out three periods of Russian history – Kiev, Vladimir-Moscow and Petersburg ones. The essence of each of those periods the philosopher consecutively correlates with adoption of Christianity, political organization formation and the beginning of individual creative work dominance. While interpreting his contemporary events as a public person and a journalist, Rozanov regards earlier epochs from the position of a myth-creator. The diverse historical process gives way to the literary and static image of the epoch. The author of the article pays special attention to how Rozanov characterizes historical personalities, to his views on the role of religion, state, bureaucracy and parliamentarism.


Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-211
Author(s):  
Christoph Galle

<?page nr="201"?>Abstract The question about the role of women within medieval societies associatively makes one think of witches who allegedly were up to mischief by using poison or all kinds of magic to inflict maliciously harm on other people. But this impression results too much from an uncritical reception of such propagandistic conceptions that arose from the later medieval and early modern witch-hunt ideology. This cliché of medieval witches neither does justice to the general situation nor can it be transferred to the entire Middle Ages, as a representative view into the Carolingian empire of the eighth and ninth centuries shows.


Author(s):  
Eduardo Manzano Moreno

This chapter addresses a very simple question: is it possible to frame coinage in the Early Middle Ages? The answer will be certainly yes, but will also acknowledge that we lack considerable amounts of relevant data potentially available through state-of-the-art methodologies. One problem is, though, that many times we do not really know the relevant questions we can pose on coins; another is that we still have not figured out the social role of coinage in the aftermath of the Roman Empire. This chapter shows a number of things that could only be known thanks to the analysis of coins. And as its title suggests it will also include some reflections on greed and generosity.


Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov

The concluding chapter highlights how the cultural history of graphic signs of authority in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages encapsulated the profound transformation of political culture in the Mediterranean and Europe from approximately the fourth to ninth centuries. It also reflects on the transcendent sources of authority in these historical periods, and the role of graphic signs in highlighting this connection. Finally, it warns that, despite the apparent dominant role of the sign of the cross and cruciform graphic devices in providing access to transcendent protection and support in ninth-century Western Europe, some people could still employ alternative graphic signs deriving from older occult traditions in their recourse to transcendent powers.


2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 437-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRETT BOWLES

Taking an anthropological approach, this article interprets Pagnol's critically acknowledged classic as a reinvention of a carnivalesque ritual practised in France from the late middle ages through the late 1930s, when ethnographers observed its last vestiges. By linking La Femme du boulanger (The baker's wife, 1938) to contemporaneous debates over gender, national decadence, and the definition of French cultural identity, I argue that the film recycles the charivari's long-standing function as a tool of popular protest against social and political practices regarded as detrimental to the welfare of the nation. In the context of the Popular Front, Pagnol's charivari ridiculed divisive partisan politics pitting Left against Right, symbolically purged class conflict from the social body, and created a new form of folklore that served as a focal point for the communitarian ritual of movie-going among the urban working and middle classes. In so doing, the film promoted the ongoing shift in public support away from the Popular Front in favour of a conservative ‘National Union’ government under Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, who in 1938–9 assumed the role of France's newest political patriarch.


2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-31
Author(s):  
Anna McKay

Over the past two decades, medieval feminist scholarship has increasingly turned to the literary representation of textiles as a means of exploring the oftensilenced experiences of women in the Middle Ages. This article uses fabric as a lens through which to consider the world of the female recluse, exploring the ways in which clothing operates as a tether to patriarchal, secular values in Paul the Deacon’s eighthcentury Life of Mary of Egypt and the twelfth-century Life of Christina of Markyate. In rejecting worldly garb as recluses, these holy women seek out and achieve lives of spiritual autonomy and independence.


2013 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Walker Bynum

Students of comparative religion, cognitive scientists, art historians, and historians sometimes use paradigms from non-western religions to raise questions about the role of material objects in Christianity. Recently, such discussion has focused on images and controversies about them. This article argues that the most important material manifestation of the holy in the western European Middle Ages was the Eucharist and suggests both that understanding it is enhanced by the use of comparative material and that considering it as a case study of divine materiality leads to a more sophisticated formulation of comparative paradigms.


2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-66
Author(s):  
Marcel Bubert

AbstractAlthough the medieval period was not part of Michel Foucault’s seminal study on ‘The Order of Things’, there are good reasons to believe that the learned cultures of the Middle Ages were to a certain degree based on specific epistemic orders, general organizing principles which were unconsciously presupposed in concepts of reality. Nevertheless, the extent as to which these concepts are in fact committed to the assumption of a metaphysically determined measuring of reality, is not altogether clear. This article aims to discuss this question in general, based on recent views of the role of the ‘subject’ in epistemic orders.


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