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Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Author: David J. Davis

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-06-02

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0192570862

Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England demonstrates that experiences of divine revelation, both biblical and contemporary, were central to late medieval and early modern English religion. The book sheds light on previously under-explored notions about divine revelation and the role these notions played in shaping large portions of English thought and belief. Bringing together a wide variety of source materials, from contemplative works and accounts of revelatory experiences to biblical commentaries, devotionals, and religious imagery, David J. Davis argues that in the period there was a collective representation of divine revelation as a source of human knowledge, which transcended other religious and intellectual divisions. Not only did most people think that divine revelation, through a ravishing encounter with God, was possible, but also divine revelation was understood to be the pinnacle of religious experience and a source of pure understanding. The book highlights a common discourse running through the sources that underpinned this collective representation of how human beings experienced the divine, and it demonstrates a continual effort across large swathes of English religion to prepare an individual's soul for an encounter with the divine, through different spiritual disciplines and devotional practices. Over a period of several centuries this discourse and the larger culture of revelation provided an essential structure and legitimacy both to contemporary claims of divine revelation and the biblical precedents that contemporary experiences were modelled after. This discourse detailed the physical, metaphysical, and epistemological features of how a human being was understood to experience divine revelation, providing a means to delimit and define what happened when an individual was rapture by God. Finally, the book situates the experience of revelation within the wider context of knowledge and identifies the ways that claims to divine revelation were legitimated as well as stigmatized based on this common understanding of the experience of rapture.

Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Author: David J. Davis

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-06-17

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0198834136

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Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England demonstrates that experiences of divine revelation, both biblical and contemporary, were central to late medieval and early modern English religion. The book sheds light on previously under-explored notions about divine revelation andthe role these notions played in shaping large portions of English thought and belief. Bringing together a wide variety of source materials, from contemplative works and accounts of revelatory experiences to biblical commentaries, devotionals, and religious imagery, David J. Davis argues that in theperiod there was a collective representation of divine revelation as a source of human knowledge, which transcended other religious and intellectual divisions. Not only did most people think that divine revelation, through a ravishing encounter with God, was possible, but also divine revelation wasunderstood to be the pinnacle of religious experience and a source of pure understanding. The book highlights a common discourse running through the sources that underpinned this collective representation of how human beings experienced the divine, and it demonstrates a continual effort across largeswathes of English religion to prepare an individual's soul for an encounter with the divine, through different spiritual disciplines and devotional practices. Over a period of several centuries this discourse and the larger culture of revelation provided an essential structure and legitimacy bothto contemporary claims of divine revelation and the biblical precedents that contemporary experiences were modelled after. This discourse detailed the physical, metaphysical, and epistemological features of how a human being was understood to experience divine revelation, providing a means todelimit and define what happened when an individual was rapture by God. Finally, the book situates the experience of revelation within the wider context of knowledge and identifies the ways that claims to divine revelation were legitimated as well as stigmatized based on this common understanding ofthe experience of rapture.

Secretaries of God

Author: Diane Watt

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780859916141

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"The English women prophets and visionaries whose voices are recovered here all lived between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries and claimed, through the medium of trances and eucharistic piety, to speak for God. [...] Through prophecy they were often able to intervene in the religious and political discourse of their times: the role of God's secretary gave them the opportunity to act and speak autonomously and publicly"--Back cover.

Secretaries of God

Author: Diane Watt

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Incorporated

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9780859915243

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Diane Watt sets aside the conventional hiatus between the medieval and early modern periods in her study of women's prophecy, following the female experience from medieval sainthood to radical Protestantism. The English women prophets and visionaries whose voices are recovered here all lived between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries and claimed, through the medium of trances and eucharistic piety, to speak for God. They include Margery Kempe and the medieval visionaries, Elizabeth Barton (the Holy Maid of Kent'), the Reformation martyr Anne Askew and other godly women described in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, and Lady Eleanor Davies as an example of a woman prophet of the Civil War. The uncertainties surrounding their words and their dissemination are analysed, and the strategies women devised to be heard and read are exposed, showing that through prophecy they were often able to intervene in the religious and political discourse of the their times; the role of God's secretary gave them the opportunity to act and speak automonously and publicly.

Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Author: Robin Macdonald

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-05-20

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 131705718X

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This volume traces transformations in attitudes toward, ideas about, and experiences of religion and the senses in the medieval and early modern period. Broad in temporal and geographical scope, it challenges traditional notions of periodisation, highlighting continuities as well as change. Rather than focusing on individual senses, the volume’s organisation emphasises the multisensoriality and embodied nature of religious practices and experiences, refusing easy distinctions between asceticism and excess. The senses were not passive, but rather active and reactive, res-ponding to and initiating change. As the contributions in this collection demonstrate, in the pre-modern era, sensing the sacred was a complex, vexed, and constantly evolving process, shaped by individuals, environment, and religious change. The volume will be essential reading not only for scholars of religion and the senses, but for anyone interested in histories of medieval and early modern bodies, material culture, affects, and affect theory.

The Reproductive Unconscious in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Author: Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-12-16

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 1136720928

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Drawing together social and medical history and literary studies, The Reproductive Unconscious in Late Medieval and Early Modern England studies the social practices and metaphorical representations of childbirth in medieval and early modern texts and argues for the existence of a reproductive unconscious. Discussing midwifery treatises, obstetrical and gynecological manuals, and devotional texts written for or by women, the author illustrates the ways in which medieval and early modern men and women negotiated a conflict between the ideological and material need of the culture for them to procreate, and an ideological injunction that they remain virginal and non-procreative.

Performances of the Sacred in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Author: Susanne Rupp

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 9042018054

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Communities have often shaped themselves around cultural spaces set apart and declared sacred. For this purpose, churches, priests or scholars no less than writers frequently participate in giving sacred figures a local habitation and, sometimes, voice or name. But whatever sites, rites, images or narratives have thus been constructed, they also raise some complex questions: how can the sacred be presented and yet guarded, claimed yet concealed, staged in public and at the same time kept exclusive? Such questions are pursued here in a variety of English texts historically employed to manifest and manage versions of the sacred. But since their performances inhabit social space, this often functions as a theatrical arena which is also used to stage modes of dissent, difference, sacrifice and sacrilege. In this way, all aspects of social life - the family, the nation, the idea of kingship, gender identities, courtly ideals, love making or smoking - may become sacralized and buttress claims for power by recourse to a repertoire of religious symbolic forms. Through critical readings of central texts and authors - such as Sir Gawain, Foxe, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, or Vaughan - as well as less canonical examples - the Croxton play, Buchanan, Lanyer, Wroth, or the tobacco pamphlets - the twelve contributions all engage with the crucial question how, and to what end, performances of the sacred affect, or effect, cultural transformation.

Powers of the Holy

Author: David Aers

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010-11-01

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0271042915

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The Grief of God

Author: Ellen M. Ross

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1997-03-20

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 0195344537

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Graphic portrayals of the suffering Jesus Christ pervade late medieval English art, literature, drama, and theology. These images have been interpreted as signs of a new emphasis on the humanity of Jesus. To others they indicate a fascination with a terrifying God of vengeance and a morbid obsession with death. In The Grief of God, however, Ellen Ross offers a different understanding of the purpose of this imagery and its meaning to the people of the time. Analyzing a wide range of textual and pictorial evidence, the author finds that the bleeding flesh of the wounded Savior manifests divine presence; in the intensified corporeality of the suffering Jesus whose flesh not only condemns, but also nurtures, heals, and feeds, believers meet a trinitarian God of mercy. Ross explores the rhetoric of transformation common to English medieval artistic, literary, and devotional sources. The extravagant depictions of pain and anguish, the author shows, constitute an urgent appeal to respond to Jesus' expression of love. She also explains how the inscribing of Christ's pain on the bodies of believers at times erased the boundaries between human and divine so that holy persons, and in particular, holy women, participated in the transformative power of Christ. In analyzing the dialects of mercy and justice; the construction of sacred space and time; sacraments and ritual celebration, social action, and divine judgment; and the dynamics of women's public religious authority, this study of religion and culture explores the meaning of the late medieval Christian affirmation that God bled and wept and suffered on the cross to draw persons to Godself. This interdisciplinary study of sermon literature, manuscript illuminations and church wall paintings, drama, hagiographic narratives, and spiritual treaties illuminates the religious sensibilities, practices, and beliefs that constellate around the late medieval fascination with the bleeding body of the suffering Jesus Christ.

The Age of Reform, 1250-1550

Author: Steven Ozment

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2020-08-25

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0300256183

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Celebrating the fortieth anniversary of this seminal book, this new edition includes an illuminating foreword by Carlos Eire and Ronald K. Rittges The seeds of the swift and sweeping religious movement that reshaped European thought in the 1500s were sown in the late Middle Ages. In this book, Steven Ozment traces the growth and dissemination of dissenting intellectual trends through three centuries to their explosive burgeoning in the Reformations—both Protestant and Catholic—of the sixteenth century. He elucidates with great clarity the complex philosophical and theological issues that inspired antagonistic schools, traditions, and movements from Aquinas to Calvin. This masterly synthesis of the intellectual and religious history of the period illuminates the impact of late medieval ideas on early modern society. With a new foreword by Carlos Eire and Ronald K. Rittgers, this modern classic is ripe for rediscovery by a new generation of students and scholars.