The Devotion and Promotion of Stigmatics in Europe, C. 1800-1950


Book Description

"In the nineteenth century a new type of mystic emerged in Catholic Europe. While cases of stigmatisation had been reported since the thirteenth century, this era witnessed the development of the 'stigmatic': young women who attracted widespread interest thanks to the appearance of physical stigmata. To understand the popularity of these stigmatics we need to regard them as the 'saints' and religious 'celebrities' of their time. With their 'miraculous' bodies, they fit contemporary popular ideas (if not necessarily those of the Church) of what sanctity was. As knowledge about them spread via modern media and their fame became marketable, they developed into religious 'celebrities'"--




Classical Scholarship


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Essays on Religion, Science, and Society


Book Description

The Body of Writing: An Erotics of Contemporary American Fiction examines four postmodern texts whose authors play with the material conventions of "the book": Joseph McElroy's Plus (1977), Carole Maso's AVA (1993), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's DICTEE (1982), and Steve Tomasula's VAS (2003). By demonstrating how each of these works calls for an affirmative engagement with literature, Flore Chevaillier explores a centrally important issue in the criticism of contemporary fiction. Critics have claimed that experimental literature, in its disruption of conventional story-telling and language uses, resists literary and social customs. While this account is accurate, it stresses what experimental texts respond to more than what they offer. This book proposes a counter-view to this emphasis on the strictly privative character of innovative fictions by examining experimental works' positive ideas and affects, as well as readers' engagement in the formal pleasure of experimentations with image, print, sound, page, orthography, and syntax. Elaborating an erotics of recent innovative literature implies that we engage in the formal pleasure of its experimentations with signifying techniques and with the materiality of their medium. Such engagement provokes a fusion of the reader's senses and the textual material, which invites a redefinition of corporeality as a kind of textual practice.










The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion


Book Description

Providing a genuinely full guide to the theory and methods related to religious studies, this text - written entirely by world-renowned specialists - is the ideal resource for those studying the discipline.




Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World


Book Description

The modern pilgrimage—to sites ranging from Graceland to the veterans’ annual ride to to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to Jim Morrison’s Paris grave—is intertwined with man’s existential uncertainties in the face of a rapidly changing world. In a climate that reproduces the religious quest in seemingly secular places, it’s no longer clear exactly what the term pilgrimage infers—and Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World critiques our notions of the secular and the sacred, while commenting on the modern media’s multiplication of images that renders the modern pilgrimage a quest without an object. Using new ethnographical and theoretical approaches, this volume offers a surprising new vision on the non-secularity of the “secular” pilgrimage. "This book will be sure to stoke our intellectual fire and heat up the discussion over the highly charged topic of secular pilgrimage.”—Simon Bronner, Penn State University




The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000


Book Description

Christendom lasted for over a thousand years in Western Europe, and we are still living in its shadow. For over two centuries this social and religious order has been in decline. Enforced religious unity has given way to increasing pluralism, and since 1960 this process has spectacularly accelerated. In this 2003 book, historians, sociologists and theologians from six countries answer two central questions: what is the religious condition of Western Europe at the start of the twenty-first century, and how and why did Christendom decline? Beginning by overviewing the more recent situation, the authors then go back into the past, tracing the course of events in England, Ireland, France, Germany and the Netherlands, and showing how the fate of Christendom is reflected in changing attitudes to death and to technology, and in the evolution of religious language. They reveal a pattern more complex and ambiguous than many of the conventional narratives will admit.







Women and Faith


Book Description

This study of Italian women and Catholicism from the fourth through the twentieth century reflects this conflict and the tension between the masculine character of divinity in the Catholic church and the potential for equality in the gospels and early writings ("neither male nor female, but one in Jesus")."--BOOK JACKET.