The Odor of Sanctity

The Odor of Sanctity PDF

Author: Joseph Roccasalvo

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2002-02-07

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1453534016

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A priest, Jewish convert, and practicing psychiatrist, Peter Albright is called to make Final Vows in the Jesuit Order. What happens when he learns his grandfather, murdered at Auschwitz, has left him a fortune in an anonymous, unnumbered Swiss account is the heart of this timely novel. Should Peter pursue his fortune and how? His major clues are the odors of scented stationery. His major complication is the perfume expert, a beautiful woman offering help, then falling in love. Religious commitment and the lure of millions, romantic love and the call to priesthood all play out against the terrible odds of dead ancestors and the Holocaust remembered. The reader is drawn to these conflicts as though to fireworks where explosions displace one another, each more dazzling than the last. How Peter decides makes THE ODOR OF SANCTITY not only a suspenseful page-turner but a study in heroism.

Aroma

Aroma PDF

Author: Constance Classen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-11-01

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1134822391

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Smell is a social phenomenon, given particular meanings and values by different cultures. Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies, and political odours. They can enforce social structures or transgress them, unite people or divide them, empower or disempower. The authors argue that the sociology of smell is repressed in the modern West, and its social history ignored. This book breaks the "olfactory silence" of modernity. It offers the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural role of odours in Western history - from antiquity to the present. It also covers a wide variey of non-Western societies. Its topics range from the medieval concept of the "odour of sanctity", to the aromatherapies of South America, and from olfactory stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in the modern West to the role of smell in postmodernity. Its subject matter will fascinate anyone who likes to nose around in the inner workings of culture.

Wounds of Love

Wounds of Love PDF

Author: Frank Graziano

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2004-01-15

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0198031211

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The Peruvian mystic St. Rose of Lima (Isabel Flores y Oliva, 1586-1617) was canonized in 1671 as the first saint of the New World and remains the object of widespread devotion today. In this engrossing new study, Frank Graziano uses the example of St. Rose to explore the meaning of female mysticism and the way in which saints are products of their cultures. Virginity, austerity, eucharistic devotion, incessant mortification, and mystical marriage to Christ characterized the devotional regimen that structured St. Rose's entire life. Many of her mystical practices echo the symptoms of such modern psychological disorders as masochism, depression, hysteria, and anorexia nervosa. Graziano offers a sophisticated argument not only for the origins and meaning of these behaviors in Rose's case, but also for the reason her culture venerated them as signs of sanctity. In the process he explores a wide range of themes, from the idea of suffering as an expression of love to the assimilation of childhood trauma through religious repetition. Graziano also offers a penetrating analysis of the politics of Rose's canonization. He finds that her mystical union with God--bypassing the institutional channels of sacrament and priestly mediation--was inherently subversive to the bureaucratized Church. Canonization was a cooptation by which Rose's competing claim to Christ was integrated into the Catholic canon. The book concludes with a fascinating exploration of mystical eroticism, with its intense experiences of vision and ecstasy. The eroticized suffering of many mystics is shown to be very human in origin: the mystic's wounded love is projected onto a God conceived to accommodate it. Wounds of Love is based on a decade of research in archives, rare books, and an extraordinary range of secondary sources. Introducing an innovative method that integrates history, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and clinical psychology, this compelling work offers a bold new interpretation of female mysticism.

The Colour of Angels

The Colour of Angels PDF

Author: Constance Classen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-01-04

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1134678193

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The Colour of Angels uncovers the gender politics behind our attitude to the senses. Using a wide variety of examples, ranging from the sensuous religious visions of the middle ages through to nineteenth-century art movements, this book reveals a previously unexplored area of womens history.

Scenting Salvation

Scenting Salvation PDF

Author: Susan Ashbrook Harvey

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2015-08-25

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 0520287568

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This book explores the role of bodily, sensory experience in early Christianity (first – seventh centuries AD) by focusing on the importance of smell in ancient Mediterranean culture. Following its legalization in the fourth century Roman Empire, Christianity cultivated a dramatically flourishing devotional piety, in which the bodily senses were utilized as crucial instruments of human-divine interaction. Rich olfactory practices developed as part of this shift, with lavish uses of incense, holy oils, and other sacred scents. At the same time, Christians showed profound interest in what smells could mean. How could the experience of smell be construed in revelatory terms? What specifically could it convey? How and what could be known through smell? Scenting Salvation argues that ancient Christians used olfactory experience for purposes of a distinctive religious epistemology: formulating knowledge of the divine in order to yield, in turn, a particular human identity. Using a wide array of Pagan, Jewish, and Christian sources, Susan Ashbrook Harvey examines the ancient understanding of smell through religious rituals, liturgical practices, mystagogical commentaries, literary imagery, homiletic conventions; scientific, medical, and cosmological models; ascetic disciplines, theological discourse, and eschatological expectations. In the process, she argues for a richer appreciation of ancient notions of embodiment, and of the roles the body might serve in religion.

The Sense of Smell in the Middle Ages

The Sense of Smell in the Middle Ages PDF

Author: Katelynn Robinson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-09-09

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 042981593X

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Odors, including those of incense, spices, cooking, and refuse, were both ubiquitous and meaningful in central and late medieval Western Europe. The significance of the sense of smell is evident in scholastic Latin texts, most of which are untranslated and unedited by modern scholars. Between the late eleventh and thirteenth century, medieval scholars developed a logical theory of the workings of the sense of smell based on Greek and Arabic learning. In the thirteenth through fifteenth century, medical authors detailed practical applications of smell theory and these were communicated to individuals and governing authorities by the medical profession in the interests of personal and public health. At the same time, religious authors read philosophical and medical texts and gave their information religious meaning. This reinterpretation of scholastic philosophy and medicine led to the development of what can be termed a medically aware theology of smell that was communicated to popular audiences alongside traditional olfactory theory in sermons. Its impact on popular thought is reflected in late medieval mystical texts. While the senses have received increasing scholarly attention in recent decades, this volume presents the first detailed research into the sense of smell in the later European Middle Ages.

An Odor of Sanctity

An Odor of Sanctity PDF

Author: Frank Yerby

Publisher:

Published: 1965

Total Pages: 586

ISBN-13:

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A handsome Visigoth noble, Alaric Teudisson, struggles with the forces of good and evil within him and his fate to be the king as Medieval Spain is torn assunder by religious wars.

Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages

Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages PDF

Author: Andri Vauchez

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-02-17

Total Pages: 720

ISBN-13: 9780521619813

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This is a standard work of reference for the study of the religious history of western Christianity in the later middle ages which, since its original publication in French in 1981, has come to be regarded as one of the great contributions to medieval studies of recent times. Hagiographical texts and reports of the processes of canonisation - a mode of investigation into saints' lives and their miracles implemented by the popes from the end of the twelfth century - are here used for the first time as major source materials. The book illuminates the main features of the medieval religious mind, and highlights the popes' attempts to gain firmer control over the wide variety of expressions of faith towards the saints in order to promote a higher pattern of devotion and moral behaviour among Christians.

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