From its earliest centuries, one of the most notable features of Christianity has been the veneration of the saints--the holy dead. This sweepingly ambitious history from one of the world's leading ...medieval historians tells the fascinating story of the cult of the saints from its origins in the second-century days of the Christian martyrs to the Protestant Reformation. Drawing on sources from around the Christian world, Robert Bartlett examines all of the most important aspects of the saints--including miracles, relics, pilgrimages, shrines, and the saints' role in the calendar, literature, and art.
As this engaging narrative shows, a wide variety of figures have been venerated as saints: men and women, kings and servant girls, legendary virgins and highly political bishops--and one dog. The book explores the central role played by the bodies and body parts of saints, and the special treatment these relics received: how they were treasured and enshrined, used in war and peace, and faked and traded. The shrines of the saints drew pilgrims, sometimes from hundreds of miles, and the book describes the routes, dangers, and rewards of pilgrimage, including the thousands of reported miracles. The book surveys the rich literature and images that proliferated around the saints, as well as the saints' impact on everyday life--from the naming of people and places to the shaping of the calendar. Finally, the book considers how the Christian cult of saints compares with apparently similar aspects of other religions.
At once deeply informative and entertaining, this is an unmatched account of an immensely important and intriguing part of the religious life of the past--as well as the present.
Relics were everywhere in medieval society. Saintly morsels such as bones, hair, teeth, blood, milk, and clothes, and items like the Crown of Thorns, coveted by Louis IX of France, were thought to ...bring the believer closer to the saint, who might intercede with God on his or her behalf. In the first comprehensive history in English of the rise of relic cults, Charles Freeman takes readers on a vivid, fast-paced journey from Constantinople to the northern Isles of Scotland over the course of a millennium.
InHoly Bones, Holy Dust, Freeman illustrates that the pervasiveness and variety of relics answered very specific needs of ordinary people across a darkened Europe under threat of political upheavals, disease, and hellfire. But relics were not only venerated-they were traded, collected, lost, stolen, duplicated, and destroyed. They were bargaining chips, good business and good propaganda, politically appropriated across Europe, and even used to wield military power. Freeman examines an expansive array of relics, showing how the mania for these objects deepens our understanding of the medieval world and why these relics continue to capture our imagination.
The golden legend de Voragine, Jacobus
2012., 20120422, 2012, 2012-04-22
eBook
Depicting the lives of the saints in an array of factual and fictional stories,The Golden Legendwas perhaps the most widely read book, after the Bible, during the late Middle Ages. It was compiled ...around 1260 by Jacobus de Voragine, a scholarly friar and later archbishop of Genoa, whose purpose was to captivate, encourage, and edify the faithful, while preserving a vast store of information pertaining to the legends and traditions of the church. In this translation, the first in English of the complete text, William Granger Ryan captures the immediacy of this rich work, which offers an important guide for readers interested in medieval art and literature and, more generally, in popular religious culture.
Arranged according to the order of saints' feast days, these fascinating stories are now combined into one volume. This edition also features an introduction by Eamon Duffy contextualizing the work.
The life and many afterlives of one of the most enduring mystical testaments ever written
The Life of Saint Teresa of Avilais among the most remarkable accounts ever written of the human encounter ...with the divine. TheLifeis not really an autobiography at all, but rather a confession written for inquisitors by a nun whose raptures and mystical claims had aroused suspicion. Despite its troubled origins, the book has had a profound impact on Christian spirituality for five centuries, attracting admiration from readers as diverse as mystics, philosophers, artists, psychoanalysts, and neurologists. How did a manuscript once kept under lock and key by the Spanish Inquisition become one of the most inspiring religious books of all time?
National Book Award winner Carlos Eire tells the story of this incomparable spiritual masterpiece, examining its composition and reception in the sixteenth century, the various ways its mystical teachings have been interpreted and reinterpreted across time, and its enduring influence in our own secular age. TheLifebecame an iconic text of the Counter-Reformation, was revered in Franco's Spain, and has gone on to be read as a feminist manifesto, a literary work, and even as a secular text. But as Eire demonstrates in this vibrant and evocative book, Teresa's confession is a cry from the heart to God and an audacious portrayal of mystical theology as a search for love.
Here is the essential companion to theLife, one woman's testimony to the reality of mystical experience and a timeless affirmation of the ultimate triumph of good over evil.
Saints' cults, with their focus on miraculous healings and pilgrimages, were not only a distinctive feature of Christian religion in fifth-and sixth-century Gaul but also a vital force in political ...and social life. Here Raymond Van Dam uses accounts of miracles performed by SS. Martin, Julian, and Hilary to provide a vivid and comprehensive depiction of some of the most influential saints' cults. Viewed within the context of ongoing tensions between paganism and Christianity and between Frankish kings and bishops, these cults tell much about the struggle for authority, the forming of communities, and the concept of sin and redemption in late Roman Gaul.
Van Dam begins by describing the origins of the three cults, and discusses the career of Bishop Gregory of Tours, who benefited from the support of various patron saints and in turn promoted their cults. He then treats the political and religious dimensions of healing miracles--including their relation to Catholic theology and their use by bishops to challenge royal authority--and of pilgrimages to saints' shrines. The miracle stories, collected mainly by Gregory of Tours, appear in their first complete English translations.
Una de las primeras hagiografías de la periferia del imperio español en América del Sur, este libro es una mirada a la compleja relación entre los discursos religiosos y protonacionalistas que ...tuvieron lugar a principios del siglo XVIII en Quito. One of the first hagiographies from the periphery of the Spanish empire in South America, this book paints a fuller picture of the complex interweaving of religious and proto-nationalist discourses that emerged in early eighteenth-century Quito.
Since the Arab Spring in 2011 and ISIS's rise in 2014, Egypt's Copts have attracted attention worldwide as the collateral damage of revolution and as victims of sectarian strife. Countering the din ...of persecution rhetoric and Islamophobia,The Political Lives of Saintsjourneys into the quieter corners of divine intercession to consider what martyrs, miracles, and mysteries have to do with the routine challenges faced by Christians and Muslims living together under the modern nation-state.Drawing on years of extensive fieldwork, Angie Heo argues for understanding popular saints as material media that organize social relations between Christians and Muslims in Egypt toward varying political ends. With an ethnographer's eye for traces of antiquity, she deciphers how long-cherished imaginaries of holiness broker bonds of revolutionary sacrifice, reconfigure national sites of sacred territory, and pose sectarian threats to security and order. A study of tradition and nationhood at their limits,The Political Lives of Saintsshows that Coptic Orthodoxy is a core domain of minoritarian regulation and authoritarian rule, powerfully reversing the recurrent thesis of its impending extinction in the Arab Muslim world.
Basil of Caesarea is thought of most often as an opponent of heresy and a pioneer of monastic life in the eastern church. In this new biographical study, however, controversy is no longer seen as the ...central preoccupation of his life nor are his ascetic initiatives viewed as separable from his pastoral concern for all Christians. Basil's letters, sermons, and theological treatises, together with the testimonies of his relatives and friends, reveal a man beset by doubt. He demanded loyalty, but gave it also, and made it a central feature of his church. In Rousseau's portrait, Basil's understanding of human nature emerges as his major legacy.
Change is an essential part of life. How we meet that change is where it can get interesting. When a person goes through a conversion experience, there is an automatic assumption that they have it ...all figured out immediately, and they know exactly what God wants them to do. This is not the case. We only have to look at St. Paul. While his conversion was dramatic, Paul tells us in his letters that he had to spend considerable time in the wilderness pondering what had happened to him, and figuring out what exactly God wanted him to do. The same is true of St. Ignatius of Loyola. St. Ignatius had a dramatic conversion which shattered not only his leg but all his previous dreams and aspirations. Such a change was not easy to get his head around, and he was forced to enter into his own period in the wilderness. This time of reflection not only brought him closer to God, but it also gave him a greater insight into himself. In this booklet, you will be able to witness the transformation which took place in the life of Ignatius from a vainglorious young man obsessed with his own success, to one who put the service of God and other people before anything else. This transformation, while dramatic, was not immediate. It took time and reflection and took him across various locations. In all of his travels, Ignatius was focused on one thing, what was God calling him to do? Ignatius conversion will allow the reader to get a perspective on how Ignatius faced the challenges which transformed his life, and hopefully, the reader may be able to make time in their own life to explore things which brought about changes in their life and see how God was operating within this change.
Tempting the Tempter considers the extent to which fifteenth-century Italian holy women were willing to go in their efforts to imitate Christ, and how their biographers used their struggles with ...demonic temptations to promote their causes for sainthood.
