Affective meditation on the Passionwas one of the most popular literary genres of the high and later Middle Ages. Proliferating in a rich variety of forms, these lyrical, impassioned, script-like ...texts in Latin and the vernacular had a deceptively simple goal: to teach their readers how to feel. They were thus instrumental in shaping and sustaining the wide-scale shift in medieval Christian sensibility from fear of God to compassion for the suffering Christ.Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassionadvances a new narrative for this broad cultural change and the meditative writings that both generated and reflected it. Sarah McNamer locates women as agents in the creation of the earliest and most influential texts in the genre, from John of Fécamp'sLibellusto theMeditationes vitae Christi, thus challenging current paradigms that cast the compassionate affective mode as Anselmian or Franciscan in origin. The early development of the genre in women's practices had a powerful and lasting legacy. With special attention to Middle English texts, including Nicholas Love'sMirrorand a wide range of Passion lyrics and laments,Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassionilluminates how these scripts for the performance of prayer served to construct compassion itself as an intimate and feminine emotion. To feel compassion for Christ, in the private drama of the heart that these texts stage, was to feel like a woman. This was an assumption about emotion that proved historically consequential, McNamer demonstrates, as she traces some of its legal, ethical, and social functions in late medieval England.
This book examines women’s relationship to the Virgin Mary in two different cultural and religious contexts, and compares how these relationships have been analyzed and explained on a theological and ...a sociological level. The figure of the Virgin Mary is a divisive one in our modern culture. To some, she appears to be a symbol of religious oppression, while to others, she is a constant comfort and even an inspiration towards empowerment. Drawing on the author’s own ethnographic research among Catholic Costa Rican women and Orthodox Finnish women, this study relates their experiences with Mary to the folklore and popular religion materials present in each culture. The book combines not only different social and religious frameworks but also takes a critical look at ways in which feminists have (mis)interpreted the meaning of Mary for women. It therefore combines theological and ethnographic methods in order to create a feminist Marian theology that is particularly attentive to women’s lived religious practices and theological thinking. This study provides a unique ethnographically informed insight into women’s religious interactions with Mary. As such, it will be of great interest to those researching in religious studies and theology, gender studies, Latin American studies, anthropology of religion, and folklore studies.
Every December 12th, thousands of Mexican immigrants gather for the mass at New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe’s feast day. They kiss images ...of the Virgin, wait for a bishop’s blessing—and they also carry signs asking for immigration reform, much like political protestors. It is this juxtaposition of religion and politics that Alyshia Gálvez investigates in Guadalupe in New York .
The Virgin of Guadalupe is a profound symbol for Mexican and Mexican-American Catholics and the patron saint of their country. Her name has been invoked in war and in peace, and her image has been painted on walls, printed on T-shirts, and worshipped at countless shrines. For undocumented Mexicans in New York, Guadalupe continues to be a powerful presence as they struggle to gain citizenship in a new country.
Through rich ethnographic research that illuminates Catholicism as practiced by Mexicans in New York, Gálvez shows that it is through Guadalupan devotion that many undocumented immigrants are finding the will and vocabulary to demand rights, immigration reform, and respect. She also reveals how such devotion supports and emboldens immigrants in their struggle to provide for their families and create their lives in the city with dignity.
In this book Thomas H. Bestul constructs the literary history of the Latin Passion narratives, placing them within their social, cultural, and historical contexts. He examines the ways in which the ...Passion is narrated and renarrated in devotional treatises, paying particular attention to the modifications and enlargements of the narrative of the Passion as it is presented in the canonical gospels.
Of particular interest to Bestul are the representations of Jews, women, and the body of the crucified Christ. Bestul argues that the greatly enlarged role of the Jews in the Passion narratives of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is connected to the rising anti-Judaism of the period. He explores how the representations of women, particularly the Virgin Mary, express cultural values about the place of women in late medieval society and reveal an increased interest in female subjectivity.
Immaculate Conceptions examines devotional writings, religious and literary texts, and visual art that feature the mystery of the immaculacy of the Virgin Mary in the culture of early modern Spain. ...The author's analysis is motivated by the complexity and multivalent capacity of the doctrine and its icon at a time when the debates around Mary's conception imbued all levels of religious and social life. She considers the many interests--political, doctrinal, artistic, and gender-driven--that intersect and compete in the exegesis and textual and visual representations of the Immaculate Conception. She argues that the Immaculate Conception of Mary proved to be a fertile conceptual and ideological field wherein the identities of the Spanish state, local communities, and individuals were negotiated, variously defined, and contested. The study's broader aim is to delineate a speculative category, the religious imagination, defined as a spiritual, intellectual, or artistic pursuit in which the individual is committed to sacred truth yet articulates this truth through contingent, partial, and contextually determined theological propositions. The representational status of the image and its relationship to theories of physical sight and spiritual vision are central to the author's formulation of this category.
A Mother who nurtures, empathizes, and heals . . . a Warrior who defends, empowers, and resists oppression. . . the Virgin Mary plays many roles for the peoples of Spain and Spanish-speaking America. ...Devotion to the Virgin inspired and sustained medieval and Renaissance Spaniards as they liberated Spain from the Moors and set about the conquest of the New World. Devotion to the Virgin still inspires and sustains millions of believers today throughout the Americas. This wide-ranging and highly readable book explores the veneration of the Virgin Mary in Spain and the Americas from the colonial period to the present. Linda Hall begins the story in Spain and follows it through the conquest and colonization of the New World, with a special focus on Mexico and the Andean highlands in Peru and Bolivia, where Marian devotion became combined with indigenous beliefs and rituals. Moving into the nineteenth century, Hall looks at national cults of the Virgin in Mexico, Bolivia, and Argentina, which were tied to independence movements. In the twentieth century, she examines how Eva Perón linked herself with Mary in the popular imagination; visits contemporary festivals with significant Marian content in Spain, Peru, and Mexico; and considers how Latinos/as in the United States draw on Marian devotion to maintain familial and cultural ties.
Currently, many people are pursuing small home industries to improve their welfare and support the resilience of the national economy. One of the home industries that manages wood to make rattan ...chair crafts is owned by Mr. M. Shodiq in the Kedungkandang sub-district, Kedungkandang sub-district, Malang City. However, several obstacles are still faced by these small industries, including obstacles in increasing the quality and quantity of rattan chair handicraft production due to several factors such as: lack of knowledge about how to process good and varied rattan chair crafts from both the shape and motif aspects, the use of tools which has not been touched by science and technology. The method of community service is socialization about innovation in the development of rattan chair product quality, namely by providing training materials on the use of innovative tools to develop and improve the rattan chair craft industry. The results of this community service include 1) partners have received education and skills in diversifying rattan chair craft products, 2) partners have received appropriate technology-based tools in the form of rattan cutting machines to increase product sales.
The Oxford Handbook of Mary includes chapters on textual, literary, and media analysis; theology; Church history; art history; studies on devotion in a variety of forms: liturgy, hymns, homilies, ...prayer, pilgrimage, lived belief and practice; also cultural history; folk tradition; gender analysis; apparitions; and apocalypticism. These have been contributed by a range of scholars, established names in Marian Studies, writing about Mary the mother of Jesus from within their own expertise. The group is international in scope, from the three countries of North America; various nations in Europe; Jerusalem; Taiwan; Australia. As well as those of no religious affiliation, chapters have been written by Jewish, Muslim, and Christian academics, the last group including priests from within the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican traditions. What is shared between everyone in this diverse group is a commitment to academic rigour as well as a special interest in Mary the mother of Jesus, who is known as the Theotokos, Mother of God. The Handbook looks at both Eastern and Western perspectives and tries to correct imbalance in previous books on Mary towards the West. There is also a chapter on Mary in Islam, and on pilgrimages shared by Christian, Muslim, and Jewish adherents. Mary can be a source of theological disagreement, but the emphasis of this volume is on Mary’s rich potential for inter-faith and inter-denominational dialogue and shared experience.
PDF
