Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures最新文献

{"title":"The Rood in Medieval Britain and Ireland, c.800–c.1500","authors":"Christopher Bonura, Philippa Turner","doi":"10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0266","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0266","url":null,"abstract":"This is a collection of ten essays, including an introduction by Philippa Turner, ranging from twelfth-century medieval Ireland (Maggie M. Williams) to fifteenth-century angel roofs in East Anglia (Sarah Cassell). In between, the collection covers a range of subjects covering a variety of media and periods. Ostensibly, and as the title states, this is a collection on the specific object known as the rood in medieval art. Anyone looking for the object which we generally and wrongly know as the rood—a crucifix, especially a large one, found at the entrance to a chancel or choir in a medieval church, usually supported by a rood beam or rood screen, will be disappointed! Even though we have been told on countless occasions that the rood is in fact the cross and that the terms are interchangeable, we are now so firmly entrenched in the meaning of the word that it is impossible to see it as other than the elevated cross. This is a book which will make us look with fresh eyes at the specific meaning of the word. In broadest terms the subject of this book is the cross, and, even then, it is a specific examination of the work within the confines of time and space (Western Europe). As we are told on several occasions, the crucifixion can be the result of complex iconography thanks to factors such as date, medium, and location. The term is much broader than commonly understood and includes a selection of works which forces us to look again at these objects. Essays on the rood and the cross join a selection of other works on this subject but not in a comprehensive and far-reaching manner. This book invites the reader to look anew at the cross, but, even then, it is selective in what it looks at and does not aim to be comprehensive. In other cases, it argues that the unusual was the commonplace. The range is very broad and excludes far too many exempla, nevertheless, the essays present us with an interesting perspective in themselves. The essays range geographically from Spain to Ireland to Scotland and England, as well as chronologically from the tenth to the late fifteenth century and try to include many perspectives on this motif. The collection presents a number of ideas that have not been examined in detail before, including Kate Thomas’s study on the mark of the cross in the open air, Sara Carreňos Galician crosses, Lucy Wrapson’s use of color in English rood screens, and Sarah Cassell’s study on the angel roof in East Anglia. Some of the general essays may venture a little too much in the dark and attempt to paint a broad picture with few examples, but, as a collection, the essays present us with some exploratory ideas for future thought.","PeriodicalId":40395,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48014072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Henry Suso's Doormat of Abandonment","authors":"Augustine M. Reisenauer","doi":"10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0195","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article explores how Henry Suso, while advancing along his mystic and mystagogic path, encounters and embraces a doormat that both inspires and inhibits his practice of the abandonment that it betokens. It argues that, by affectively clinging onto this token, rather than giving it away to Elsbeth Stagel to alleviate her suffering, Suso displays how unexemplary he remains in the task of abandoning himself. His unexemplary behavior contrasts not only with Stagel's handcrafting and distributing copies of his carved-out IHS monogram, but also with her advancement, before him and beyond his guidance, into the naked Godhead. The exposure of these deficiencies in his exemplarity accentuates not only how the servant of eternal Wisdom functions as an aspirational figure for Suso, but also how the crucified Christ alone, in his total and unsurpassable abandonment to God and by God, serves as the exemplar of exemplars. In being progressively conformed to the self-emptying and self-emptied Jesus, Suso is summoned to abandon even his self-constructed \"abandoned\" self.","PeriodicalId":40395,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48087368","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Translating Christ in the Middle Ages: Gender, Authorship, and the Visionary Text by Barbara Zimbalist (review)","authors":"Lydia Shahan","doi":"10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0271","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0271","url":null,"abstract":"JMRC_49_2_05_Book_Reviews.indd Page 271 18/08/23 7:39 PM Taken together, the essays that comprise The Rood in Medieval Britain and Ireland bring together a constellation of art historical, textually historical, sociological, and literary arguments that effectively provoke new ways of thinking about cruciform medieval roods in Ireland, Britain, and beyond. The pieces’ individual case studies and argumentative interventions into an array of scholarly conversations make the text an effective resource for any scholar interested in roods, medieval visual culture, or—in particular— interdisciplinary methodological frameworks for examining medieval art objects, or those objects’ present-day absence.","PeriodicalId":40395,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41903663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Sowe ye yt together as ye may\": Textile Images as Meditational Stimuli in Fifteenth-Century English Bridgettine Writings","authors":"Anna-Nadine Pike","doi":"10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0232","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article aligns St. Bridget of Sweden's Liber celestis revelacionum with the genre of gospel meditations popularized in late-medieval England by Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. It considers how descriptions of specific fabrics, with textures that would be known intimately by a fifteenth-century reader, engage and stimulate the devout imagination. The article focuses on the role of textiles and textile imagery within the Bridgettine Syon Abbey, arguing for a particular sensitivity to texture within the Bridgettines' daily experience, which facilitates their embodied relationship with the Virgin Mary. It concludes with a close reading of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C.41, exploring the interrelation between its fifteenth-century Bridgettine treatises, which emphasize the symbolic and spiritual value of textile imagery within late-medieval Marian devotion.","PeriodicalId":40395,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47693215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe","authors":"Einat Klafter","doi":"10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0260","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0260","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40395,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42254146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Medieval Saints and Modern Screens: Divine Visions as Cinematic Experience","authors":"Lauren Cole","doi":"10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0263","url":null,"abstract":"The hagiographical source base has long been dogged by the problem of mediation. Can we know anything about the hagiographical subject, or just what her biographer wanted to say about her? Are we ever engaging with Marie d’Oignies, or only with Jacques de Vitry? Spencer-Hall tackles this issue head-on, leaning into mediation to approach hagiography as a form of media. Specifically, she argues that “medieval mystic episodes are made intelligible to modern audiences through reference to the filmic—the language, form, and lived experience of cinema” (11). Focusing on the Holy Women of Liège as her source base, Spencer-Hall uses modern cinema theory from four areas—photography, film, celebrity, and digital avatars—to generatively engage the Liègeoises.Spencer-Hall’s interdisciplinary approach is a real strength of the book. Her engagement with film, media, visual, and religious studies formulates a convincing way of encountering the Liègeoises as “animated visual objects and active icons . . . who are capable of ‘looking back’” at us (62). Central to this is Spencer-Hall’s “agape-ic encounter” (14). Building on Margaret A. Farley’s feminist approach to agape, Spencer-Hall connects the experience of the medieval visionary and the modern film viewer: “in the cinema, I meet the film’s gaze; in hagiography, a holy woman meets God’s gaze. So doing, we perceive (feel and see) ourselves being seen, and thus we are looked and felt into being” (16). This compelling framework enables Spencer-Hall to encounter medieval holy women beyond Laura Mulvey’s cinematic male gaze, blurring the subject/object distinction as they become objects who reciprocate. It is a little unclear who is looking at whom in this reciprocal spectatorship—is the holy woman looking only at God, or also at us through the hagiographic genre?Spencer-Hall structures her book into four chapters, moving chronologically according to cinematic developments rather than medieval history. This structure reemphasizes the importance of cinema theory to Spencer-Hall’s argument. Theory is not an add-on for Spencer-Hall; it is not something ripped from modernity and pressed onto a medieval past. Modern screens are not shoehorned into medieval saints but rather provide the explicit, structural framework from which Spencer-Hall constructs her argument. In her use of Latour’s polytemporal, helical theory of time, Spencer-Hall convincingly shows the close interface between medieval ecstatic and modern cinematic experiences.Chapter 1 draws a parallel between photographic technologies and hagiographic visions. Spencer-Hall begins by showing how photography and visions both disrupt linear time. When we view a photograph, we are experiencing a past moment that has been “fixed” and “superimposed” onto our present moment (71). Photographs are thus both chronological and atemporal, which help elucidate medieval concepts of time: the linear mode of earthly time, and the atemporal nature of sacred time. Medieval mysti","PeriodicalId":40395,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135761912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Scripture and Love Entangled: Ibn ʿArabī's Reinterpretation of the Qurʾān in Light of Love","authors":"T. Moqbel","doi":"10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0147","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Various works have studied the place of love in Ibn ʿArabī's (560/1165–638/1240) mystical project. This article contributes to the existing literature by focusing on one particular aspect of this project: how Ibn ʿArabī reworks and reinterprets the Qurʾān in his exposition of the doctrine of love. Focusing mainly on the Qurʾānic verses, which, at face value, do not appear to be connected to the notion of love, the article explicates the processes through which these verses are reworked by Ibn ʿArabī in a manner that reveals their bearings on the doctrine of love. Through showcasing how Ibn ʿArabī redirects individual verses to extract their relevance to the idea of love, the article integrates Qurʾānic hermeneutics with Ibn ʿArabī's philosophy of love.","PeriodicalId":40395,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49350142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Body behind the Altar: The Transgression of Space and the Transformation of the Body in the Life and Revelations of Agnes Blannbekin","authors":"G. Byng","doi":"10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0168","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Agnes Blannbekin's description of her mystical experience on Easter morning, 1293, is a rare medieval account not only of the affective consequences of a spatial transgression in a church building but also of its direct implication in a spiritual revelation. According to her Life and Revelations, she heard a command to conceal herself behind an altar in the church of St. Michael, Vienna, where she would feel the pain of the Crucifixion. Her anguish at being so out of place in the church drove her to pray for her revelation to end and to be given the strength to leave. She provides, thus, a rare first-person account of how the gendered regulation of church space, so often in evidence in sources written by men, was manifested in an embodied, affective experience. The incident develops themes that extend across the Life, especially to other Easter-time revelations, and demonstrates the close attention Blannbekin often gave to architectural organization and ornamentation. This article describes how her account drew together associations that stretched across liturgical time, architectural setting, and literary precedent in order to evoke the profundity, and significance, of her bodily identification with the Passion.","PeriodicalId":40395,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48830913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Fifteen Oes and Other Prayers: Edited from the Text Published by William Caxton (1491) ed. by Alexandra Barratt and Susan Powell (review)","authors":"Jennifer N. Brown","doi":"10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0258","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.2.0258","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40395,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42331564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Middle English Manuscripts and Their Legacies: A Volume in Honour of Ian Doyle ed. by Corinne Saunders and Richard Lawrie (review)","authors":"A. Kraebel","doi":"10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.1.0128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.49.1.0128","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40395,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46838729","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}