Mysticism in Early Modern England

Mysticism in Early Modern England PDF

Author: Liam Peter Temple

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1783273933

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Mysticism in Early Modern England traces how mysticism featured in polemical and religious discourse in seventeenth-century England and explores how it came to be viewed as a source of sectarianism, radicalism, and, most significantly, religious enthusiasm.

Supernatural and Secular Power in Early Modern England

Supernatural and Secular Power in Early Modern England PDF

Author: Marcus Harmes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1317048369

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

For the people of early modern England, the dividing line between the natural and supernatural worlds was both negotiable and porous - particularly when it came to issues of authority. Without a precise separation between ’science’ and ’magic’ the realm of the supernatural was a contested one, that could be used both to bolster and challenge various forms of authority and the exercise of power in early modern England. In order to better understand these issues, this volume addresses a range of questions regarding the ways in which ideas, beliefs and constructions of the supernatural threatened and conflicted with authority, as well as how the power of the supernatural could be used by authorities (monarchical, religious, legal or familial) to reinforce established social norms. Drawing upon a range of historical, literary and dramatic texts the collection reveals intersecting early modern anxieties in relation to the supernatural, issues of control and the exercise of power at different levels of society, from the upper echelons of power at court to local and domestic spaces, and in a range of publication contexts - manuscript sources, printed prose texts and the early modern stage. Divided into three sections - ’Magic at Court’, ’Performance, Text and Language’ and ’Witchcraft, the Devil and the Body’ - the volume offers a broad cultural approach to the subject that reflects current research by a range of early modern scholars from the disciplines of history and literature. By bringing scholars into an interdisciplinary dialogue, the case studies presented here generate fresh insights within and between disciplines and different methodologies and approaches, which are mutually illuminating.

Mysticism and Reform, 1400-1750

Mysticism and Reform, 1400-1750 PDF

Author: Sara S. Poor

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780268175115

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Essays explore the complex ways in which early modern contemplative writing draws on its late medieval and patristic inheritance.

Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England PDF

Author: David J. Davis

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-06-02

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0192570862

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Alchemical Belief

Alchemical Belief PDF

Author: Bruce Janacek

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-08-21

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0271078022

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

What did it mean to believe in alchemy in early modern England? In this book, Bruce Janacek considers alchemical beliefs in the context of the writings of Thomas Tymme, Robert Fludd, Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Elias Ashmole. Rather than examine alchemy from a scientific or medical perspective, Janacek presents it as integrated into the broader political, philosophical, and religious upheavals of the first half of the seventeenth century, arguing that the interest of these elite figures in alchemy was part of an understanding that supported their national—and in some cases royalist—loyalty and theological orthodoxy. Janacek investigates how and why individuals who supported or were actually placed at the traditional center of power in England’s church and state believed in the relevance of alchemy at a time when their society, their government, their careers, and, in some cases, their very lives were at stake.

Mystics of the Christian Tradition

Mystics of the Christian Tradition PDF

Author: Steven Fanning

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2005-06-29

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1134590989

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

From divine visions to self-tortures, some strange mystical experiences have shaped the Christian tradition. Full of colourful detail, this book examines the mystical experiences that have determined the history of Christianity.

Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England

Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England PDF

Author: Erica Longfellow

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-09-23

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1139456180

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This study challenges critical assumptions about the role of religion in shaping women's experiences of authorship. Feminist critics have frequently been uncomfortable with the fact that conservative religious beliefs created opportunities for women to write with independent agency. The seventeenth-century Protestant women discussed in this book range across the religio-political and social spectrums and yet all display an affinity with modern feminist theologians. Rather than being victims of a patriarchal gender ideology, Lady Anne Southwell, Anna Trapnel and Lucy Hutchinson, among others, were both active negotiators of gender and active participants in wider theological debates. By placing women's religious writing in a broad theological and socio-political context, Erica Longfellow challenges traditional critical assumptions about the role of gender in shaping religion and politics and the role of women in defining gender and thus influencing religion and politics.

Mysticism in English Literature

Mysticism in English Literature PDF

Author: Caroline Spurgeon

Publisher: Read Books Ltd

Published: 2015-06-04

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1473375207

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"Godfrey Morgan: A Californian Mystery" is an 1882 novel by the seminal French author Jules Verne. It tells the story of the wealthy Godfrey Morgan and his department instructor, Professor T. Artelett, who set off together on an epic adventure around the world. After becoming stranded on an island in the Pacific, they work together with an African slave in order to survive. The chapters of this book include: “Chapter I – In which the Reader has the Opportunity of Buying an Island in the Pacific Ocean”, “Chapter II – How William W. Kolderup, of San Francisco, was at Loggerheads with J. R. Taskiunar, of Stockton”, “ Chapter III – The Conversation of Phina Hollaney and Godfrey Morgan, with a piano accompaniment”, etcetera. Many vintage texts such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this book now, in an affordable, high-quality, modern edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned biography of the author.

Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period

Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period PDF

Author: Michelle D. Brock

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-07-31

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 3319757385

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book explores the manifold ways of knowing—and knowing about— preternatural beings such as demons, angels, fairies, and other spirits that inhabited and were believed to act in early modern European worlds. Its contributors examine how people across the social spectrum assayed the various types of spiritual entities that they believed dwelled invisibly but meaningfully in the spaces just beyond (and occasionally within) the limits of human perception. Collectively, the volume demonstrates that an awareness and understanding of the nature and capabilities of spirits—whether benevolent or malevolent—was fundamental to the knowledge-making practices that characterize the years between ca. 1500 and 1750. This is, therefore, a book about how epistemological and experiential knowledge of spirits persisted and evolved in concert with the wider intellectual changes of the early modern period, such as the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.

The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought

The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought PDF

Author: Kevin Killeen

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2023-06-27

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1503635864

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Early modern thought was haunted by the unknowable character of the fallen world. The sometimes brilliant and sometimes baffling fusion of theological and scientific ideas in the era, as well as some of its greatest literature, responds to this sense that humans encountered only an incomplete reality. Ranging from Paradise Lost to thinkers in and around the Royal Society and commentary on the Book of Job, The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought explores how the era of the scientific revolution was in part paralyzed by and in part energized by the paradox it encountered in thinking about the elusive nature of God and the unfathomable nature of the natural world. Looking at writers with scientific, literary and theological interests, from the shoemaker mystic, Jacob Boehme to John Milton, from Robert Boyle to Margaret Cavendish, and from Thomas Browne to the fiery prophet, Anna Trapnel, Kevin Killeen shows how seventeenth-century writings redeployed the rich resources of the ineffable and the apophatic—what cannot be said, except in negative terms—to think about natural philosophy and the enigmas of the natural world.