Franciscan Literature of Religious Instruction before the Council of Trent


Book Description

This book provides, for the first time, an exhaustive discussion of the Franciscan production of texts of religious instruction during the later medieval period (c. 1210-c. 1550). In eight chapters, it introduces the reader to the most important Franciscan sermon cycles, the Franciscan guidelines for living the life of evangelical perfection, the many Franciscan novice training manuals, the Franciscan catechisms and confession manuals, the Franciscan output of liturgical handbooks, the large number of Franciscan texts containing more wide-ranging forms of religious edification, and Franciscan prayer guides. This book provides medievalists and Renaissance scholars alike with a new tool to assess the intellectual and religious transformations between the thirteenth and the sixteenth century, and contributes to the current re-interpretation of the late medieval pastoral revolution.




The Formation of Clerical And Confessional Identities in Early Modern Europe


Book Description

This rich volume by an interdisciplinary group of American and European scholars offers an innovative portrait of the complex formation of clerical and confessional identities within the context of the radically changed religious and political situations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.




Religious Orders and Religious Identity Formation, ca. 1420-1620


Book Description

This volume deals with the transformative force of Observant reforms during the long fifteenth century, and with the massive literary output by Observant religious, a token of a profound pastoral professionalization that provided religious and lay people alike with encompassing models of religious perfection, as well as with new tools to shape their religious identity. The essays in this work contend that these models and tools had an ongoing effect far into the sixteenth century (on all sides of the emerging confessional divide). At the same time, the controversies surrounding Observant reforms resulted in new sensibilities with regard to religious practices and religious nomenclature, which would fuel many of the early sixteenth-century controversies. Contributors are Michele Camaioni, Anna Campbell, Fabrizio Conti, Anna Dlabačová, Sylvie Duval, Koen Goudriaan, Emily Michelson, Alison More, Bert Roest, Anne Thayer, Johanneke Uphoff, Alessandro Vanoli, Ludovic Viallet, and Martina Wehrli-Johns.




Franciscan Virtue


Book Description

Providing an in-depth analysis of the virtues of evangelical life according to three major Franciscan authors, this book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of how the virtues functioned as central, organizing elements in early Franciscan literature and instruction.




The English Province of the Franciscans (1224-c.1350)


Book Description

This volume explores the rich diversity of the Franciscan contribution to the life of the order and its ministry throughout England between 1224 and c. 1350. The 21 contributions examine the friars’ impact across the different strata of English society, from the parish churches, the missions, the royal courts and the universities. Friars were ubiquitous in England throughout this period and they participated in various programmes of renewal. Contributors are (in order of appearance) Amanda Power, Philippa M. Hoskin, Jens Röhrkasten, Michael F. Custato, OFM, Michael W. Blastic, OFM, Jean-François Godet-Calogeras, Peter V. Loewen, Lesley Smith, Eleonora Lombardo, Nigel Morgan, Cecilia Panti, Hubert Philipp Weber, Timothy J. Johnson, Mary Beth Ingham, CSJ, Takashi Shogimen, Susan J. Ridyard, Michael J. Haren, Christian Steer, Anna Campbell, and Michael J. P. Robson.




Reading Catechisms, Teaching Religion


Book Description

Reading Catechisms, Teaching Religion makes two broad arguments. First, the sixteenth century witnessed a fundamental transformation in Christians’, Catholic and Evangelical, conceptualization of the nature of knowledge of Christianity and the media through which that knowledge was articulated and communicated. Christians had shared a sense that knowledge might come through visions, images, liturgy; catechisms taught that knowledge of ‘Christianity’ began with texts printed on a page. Second, codicil catechisms sought not simply to dissolve the material distinction between codex and person, but to teach catechumens to see specific words together as texts. The pages of catechisms were visual—they confound precisely that constructed modern bipolarity, word/image, or, conversely, that modern bipolarity obscures what sixteenth-century catechisms sought to do.




Music in Early Franciscan Thought


Book Description

Music in Early Franciscan Thought is an interdisciplinary study exploring the broad relevance of music in Franciscan hagiography, art, theology, philosophy, and preaching between the founding of the Order in 1210 and 1300—a period covering their rapid ascendancy in medieval society as an Order of clerics. The book covers representations of music in visual and literary hagiography, the inspiration of Pope Innocent III, and the formative writings of William of Middleton and David von Augsburg. Later chapters examine the science and practice of music and its relevance to the ministry of preaching through the writings of Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, and Juan Gil de Zamora.




Religious Education in Thirteenth-Century England


Book Description

In Religious Education in Thirteenth-Century England, Andrew Reeves examines how laypeople in a largely illiterate and oral culture learned the basic doctrines of the Christian religion. Although lay religious life is often assumed to have been a tissue of ignorance and superstition, this study shows basic religious training to have been broadly available to laity and clergy alike. Reeves examines the nature, availability and circulation of sermon manuscripts as well as guidebooks to Christian teachings written for both clergy and literate laypeople. He shows that under the direction of a vigorous and reforming episcopate and aided by the preaching of the friars, clergy had a readily available toolkit to instruct their lay flocks.




Franciscan Spirituality and Mission in New Spain, 1524-1599


Book Description

Franciscans in sixteenth-century New Spain were deeply ambivalent about their mission work. Fray Juan de Zumárraga, the first archbishop of Mexico, begged the king to find someone else to do his job so that he could go home. Fray Juan de Ribas, one of the original twelve 'apostles of Mexico' and a founding pillar of the church in New Spain, later fled with eleven other friars into the wilderness to escape the demands of building that church. Fray Jerónimo de Mendieta, having returned from an important preaching tour in New Spain, wrote to his superior that he did not want to enlist again, and that the only way he would return to the mission field was if God dragged him by the hair. This discontent was widespread, grew stronger with time, and carried important consequences for the friars' interactions with indigenous peoples, their Catholic co-laborers, and colonial society at large. This book examines that discontent and seeks to explain why the exhilaration of joining such a 'glorious' enterprise so often gave way to grinding discontent. The core argument is that, despite St. Francis's own longing to do mission work, his followers in New Spain found that effective evangelization in a frontier context was fundamentally incompatible with their core spirituality. Bringing together two streams of historiography that have rarely overlapped - spirituality and missions - this book marks a strong contribution to the history of spirituality in both Latin America and Europe, as well as to the growing fields of transatlantic and world history.




The Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi


Book Description

Looks at the life of Francis of Assisi and explores how his heritage influenced the apostolic activities of his followers.