Author : Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 15,37 MB
Release : 2015-05-28
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0812247159
This book examines Ermine de Reim's life in fourteenth-century France, her relationship with her confessor, her ascetic and devotional practices, and her reported encounters with heavenly and hellish beings.--Publisher's description.
Author : Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 18,5 MB
Release : 2015-06-05
Category : History
ISBN : 0812291336
In 1384, a poor and illiterate peasant woman named Ermine moved to the city of Reims with her elderly husband. Her era was troubled by war, plague, and schism within the Catholic Church, and Ermine could easily have slipped unobserved through the cracks of history. After the loss of her husband, however, things took a remarkable but frightening turn. For the last ten months of her life, Ermine was tormented by nightly visions of angels and demons. In her nocturnal terrors, she was attacked by animals, beaten and kidnapped by devils in disguise, and exposed to carnal spectacles; on other nights, she was blessed by saints, even visited by the Virgin Mary. She confessed these strange occurrences to an Augustinian friar known as Jean le Graveur, who recorded them all in vivid detail. Was Ermine a saint in the making, an impostor, an incipient witch, or a madwoman? Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski ponders answers to these questions in the historical and theological context of this troubled woman's experiences. With empathy and acuity, Blumenfeld-Kosinski examines Ermine's life in fourteenth-century Reims, her relationship with her confessor, her ascetic and devotional practices, and her reported encounters with heavenly and hellish beings. Supplemented by translated excerpts from Jean's account, The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims brings to life an episode that helped precipitate one of the major clerical controversies of late medieval Europe, revealing surprising truths about the era's conceptions of piety and possession.
Author : Marian Bleeke
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 40,70 MB
Release : 2017
Category : Motherhood
ISBN : 1783272503
An examination of women as mothers in medieval French sculpture.
Author : Wendy Love Anderson
Publisher : Mohr Siebeck
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 41,28 MB
Release : 2011
Category : Discernment of spirits
ISBN : 9783161516641
[Anderson] succeeds in neatly fitting together selected pieces of the history of discernment of spirits to provide a valuable, readable description of the contours of its evolution in the late Middle Ages. -- Debra L. Stoudt, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, The Medieval Review Late medieval Christians lived in a world of visions, but they knew that not all visions came from God: angels, demons, illness, nature, or passion could also inspire an apparent divine visitation. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the involvement of visionaries in everything from reform movements to military campaigns to papal schisms raised the political and spiritual stakes of determining whether or not a vision was truly from God. In response, a diverse group of medieval thinkers - including men and women, clergy and laity, visionaries and theologians - gradually began to transform the loose patristic readings of Pauline discretio spirituum into a system with the potential to distinguish between true and false visions and between genuine and delusional visionaries. Wendy Love Anderson chronicles the historical, political, and spiritual struggles behind the flowering of late medieval mysticism and what came to be seen as the Christian doctrine of discernment of spirits.
Author : Lynn Wood Mollenauer
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 14,20 MB
Release : 2007-01-01
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 0271029153
The Affair of the Poisons was the greatest court scandal of the seventeenth century. From 1679 to 1682 the French crown investigated more than 400 people&—including Louis XIV&’s official mistress and members of the highest-ranking circles at court&—for sensational crimes. In Strange Revelations, Lynn Mollenauer brings this bizarre story to life, exposing a criminal magical underworld thriving in the heart of the Sun King&’s capital. The macabre details of the Affair of the Poisons read like a gothic novel. In the fall of 1678, Nicolas de la Reynie, head of the Paris police, uncovered a plot to poison Louis XIV. La Reynie&’s subsequent investigation unveiled a loosely knit community of sorceresses, magicians, and renegade priests who offered for sale an array of services and products ranging from abortions to love magic to poisons known as &“inheritance powders.&” It was the inheritance powders (usually made from powdered toads steeped in arsenic) that lent the Affair of the Poisons its name. The purchasers of the powders gave the affair its notoriety, for the scandal extended into the most exalted ranks of the French court. Mollenauer adroitly uses the Affair of the Poisons to uncover the hidden forms of power that men and women of all social classes invoked to achieve their goals. While the exercise of state power during the ancien r&égime was quintessentially visible&—ritually displayed through public ceremonies&—the affair exposes the simultaneous presence of other imagined and real sources of power available to the Sun King&’s subjects: magic, poison, and the manipulation of sexual passions. Highly entertaining yet deeply researched, Strange Revelations will appeal to anyone interested in the history of court society, gender, magic, or crime in early modern Europe.
Author : Alison More
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 39,45 MB
Release : 2018
Category : History
ISBN : 0198807694
Any visitor to Belgium or the Netherlands is immediately struck by the number of convents and beguinages (begijnhoven) in both major cities and small towns. Their number and location in urban centres suggests that the women who inhabited them once held a prominent role. Despite leaving a visible mark on cities in Europe, much of the story of these women - known variously as beguines, tertiaries, klopjes, recluses, and anchoresses--remains to be told. Instead of aspiring to live as traditional religious, they transcended normative assumptions about religion and gender and had a very real impact on their religious and secular worlds. The sources for their tale are often fragmentary and difficult to interpret. However, careful scrutiny allows their voices to be heard. Drawing on an array of sources including religious rules, sermons, hagiographic vitae, and rapiaria, Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities traces the story of pious laywomen between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. It both emphasizes the innovative roles of women who transcended established forms of institutional religious life and reveals the ways in which historiographical habits have obscured the dynamic and fluid nature of their histories. By highlighting the development of irregular and extraregular communities and tracing the threads of monasticisation that wove their way around pious laywomen, this book draws attention to the vibrant and dynamic culture of feminine lay piety that persisted from the later middle ages onwards.
Author : Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 24,25 MB
Release : 2010-11-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780271047553
In Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski looks beyond the political and ecclesiastical storm and finds an outpouring of artistic, literary, and visionary responses to one of the great calamities of the late Middle Ages.
Author : Lawrence E. Burkholder
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 10,47 MB
Release : 2019-09-30
Category : Religion
ISBN : 153264230X
“The Christian church worldwide has been taken prisoner by Satan’s counterfeit healing.” This statement is based on the author’s personal experience, modest exposure to the Toronto Blessing, observation of parachurch healing ministries, and extensive historical reconstructions. Satan’s Counterfeit Healing presents and evaluates Satan’s supernatural healing from the Paleolithic period (ca. 45000 BCE) to the contemporary church. The guiding thesis is that Satan and his demonic surrogates perform miracles which are evident as psi paranormal phenomena. These manifestations include physical and exorcistic supernatural healings. Paleolithic and Neolithic periods produced Great Mother goddess worship and healing, which have persisted ever since. These idolatries, combined with OT nature gods, were a backdrop to Jesus’ true miracles. For two thousand years of church history there’s been a tug-of-war between true and false healing. Mother goddess as Mariological shrine healing joined with natural and demonic magic, and esoteric energy psi. Alongside these the Holy Spirit has raised up genuine healers and their ministries. Modern healing is marked by energy counterfeits and faith healing, the latter especially accompanied by trance, false prophecy, and psi transformations. True divine healing can be recovered when Christians repudiate nature gods, reject false prophecy, and restore proper eschatology.
Author : Amy Huesman
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 27,74 MB
Release : 2023-11-07
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9004537414
Tempting the Tempter considers how far fifteenth-century Italian mystics would go to imitate Christ, even in his encounters with the Devil in the desert. Elena of Udine, Caterina of Bologna, and Colomba of Rieti created their own desert experience through their austere devotional practices, and they suffered and overcame temptations from the Devil. This work explores how these women actively pursued encounters with the Devil, and how these private temptations prepared them for a public ministry of miracles, contributed to their perception as living saints, and allowed their biographers to promote them as true imitators of Christ, worthy of sainthood.
Author : David J. Collins, S. J.
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 29,99 MB
Release : 2019-05-17
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0271084391
Inspired by the work of eminent scholar Richard Kieckhefer, The Sacred and the Sinister explores the ambiguities that made (and make) medieval religion and magic so difficult to differentiate. The essays in this collection investigate how the holy and unholy were distinguished in medieval Europe, where their characteristics diverged, and the implications of that deviation. In the Middle Ages, the natural world was understood as divinely created and infused with mysterious power. This world was accessible to human knowledge and susceptible to human manipulation through three modes of engagement: religion, magic, and science. How these ways of understanding developed in light of modern notions of rationality is an important element of ongoing scholarly conversation. As Kieckhefer has emphasized, ambiguity and ambivalence characterize medieval understandings of the divine and demonic powers at work in the world. The ten chapters in this volume focus on four main aspects of this assertion: the cult of the saints, contested devotional relationships and practices, unsettled judgments between magic and religion, and inconclusive distinctions between magic and science. Freshly insightful, this study of ambiguity between magic and religion will be of special interest to scholars in the fields of medieval studies, religious studies, European history, and the history of science. In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume are Michael D. Bailey, Kristi Woodward Bain, Maeve B. Callan, Elizabeth Casteen, Claire Fanger, Sean L. Field, Anne M. Koenig, Katelyn Mesler, and Sophie Page.
