In spite of an upsurge in interest in the social history of the Catholic community and an ever-growing body of literature on early modern 'superstition' and popular religion, the English Catholic ...community's response to the invisible world of the preternatural and supernatural has remained largely neglected. Addressing this oversight, this book explores Catholic responses to the supernatural world, setting the English Catholic community in the contexts of the wider Counter-Reformation and the confessional culture of early modern England.
InSinging the New Song, Katherine Zieman examines the institutions and practices of the liturgy as central to changes in late medieval English understandings of the written word. Where previous ...studies have described how writing comes to supplant oral forms of communication or how it objectifies relations of power formerly transacted through ritual and ceremony, Zieman shifts the critical gaze to the ritual performance of written texts in the liturgy-effectively changing the focus from writing to reading. Beginning with a history of the elementary educational institution known to modern scholars as the "song school," Zieman shows the continued centrality of liturgical and devotional texts to the earliest stages of literacy training and spiritual formation. Originally, these schools were created to provide liturgical training for literate adult performers who had already mastered the grammatical arts. From the late thirteenth century on, however, the attention and resources of both lay and clerical patrons came to be devoted specifically to young boys, centering on their function as choristers. Because choristers needed to be trained before they received instruction in grammar, the liturgical skills of reading and singing took on a different meaning. This shift in priorities, Zieman argues, is paradigmatic of broader cultural changes, in which increased interest in liturgical performance and varying definitions attached to "reading and singing" caused these practices to take on a life of their own, unyoked from their original institutional settings of monastery and cathedral. Unmoored from the context of the choral community, reading and singing developed into discrete, portable skills that could be put to use in a number of contexts, sacred and secular, Latin and vernacular. Ultimately, they would be carried into a wider public sphere, where they would be transformed into public modes of discourse appropriated by vernacular writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland.
In The Excommunication of Elizabeth I, Aislinn Muller examines the excommunication and deposition of Queen Elizabeth I of England by the Roman Catholic Church, and its political afterlife during her ...reign.
This book brings development theory and practice into dialogue with a religious tradition in order to construct a new, transdisciplinary vision of development with integral ecology at its heart.
It ...focuses on the Catholic social tradition and its conception of integral human development, on the one hand, and on the works of economist and philosopher Amartya Sen which underpin the human development approach, on the other. The book discusses how these two perspectives can mutually enrich each other around three areas: their views on the concept and meaning of development and progress; their understanding of what it is to be human - that is, their anthropological vision; and their analysis of transformational pathways for addressing social and environmental degradation. It also examines how both human development and the Catholic social tradition can function as complementary analytical lenses and mobilizing frames for embarking on the journey of structural and personal transformation to bring all life systems, human and non-human, back into balance.
This book is written for researchers and students in development studies, theology, and religious studies, as well as professional audiences in development organizations.
An account of the alliance between the Catholic Church and
the Italian Fascist regime in their campaign against
Protestants Based on previously undisclosed archival
materials, this book tells the ...fascinating, untold, and troubling
story of an anti-Protestant campaign in Italy that lasted longer,
consumed more clerical energy and cultural space, and generated far
more literature than the war against Italy's Jewish population.
Because clerical leaders in Rome were seeking to build a new
Catholic world in the aftermath of the Great War, Protestants
embodied a special menace, and were seen as carriers of dangers
like heresy, secularism, modernity, and Americanism-as potent
threats to the Catholic precepts that were the true foundations of
Italian civilization, values, and culture. The pope and cardinals
framed the threat of evangelical Christianity as a peril not only
to the Catholic Church but to the fascist government as well,
recruiting some very powerful fascist officials to their cause.
This important book is the first full account of this dangerous
alliance.
The Lay Saint Doyno, Mary Harvey
2019, 2019-10-15
eBook
In The Lay Saint, Mary Harvey Doyno investigates the phenomenon of saintly cults that formed around pious merchants, artisans, midwives, domestic servants, and others in the medieval communes of ...northern and central Italy. Drawing on a wide array of sources— vitae documenting their saintly lives and legends, miracle books, religious art, and communal records—Doyno uses the rise of and tensions surrounding these civic cults to explore medieval notions of lay religiosity, charismatic power, civic identity, and the church's authority in this period. Although claims about laymen's and laywomen's miraculous abilities challenged the church's expanding political and spiritual dominion, both papal and civic authorities, Doyno finds, vigorously promoted their cults. She shows that this support was neither a simple reflection of the extraordinary lay religious zeal that marked late medieval urban life nor of the Church's recognition of that enthusiasm. Rather, the history of lay saints' cults powerfully illustrates the extent to which lay Christians embraced the vita apostolic —the ideal way of life as modeled by the Apostles—and of the church's efforts to restrain and manage such claims.
