To Govern Is to Serve Lester, Anne E; Gaposchkin, M. Cecilia; Field, Sean L ...
2023, 2023-01-15, 2023-02-15
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To Govern Is to Serve explores the practices of collective governance in medieval religious orders that turned the precepts of the Gospels—most notably that the first will be last, the last will be ...first—into practices of communal deliberation and the election of superiors. Jacques Dalarun argues that these democratic forms have profoundly influenced modern experiences of democracy, in particular the idea of government not as domination but as service. Dalarun undertakes meticulous textual analysis and historical research into twelfth and thirteenth-century religious movements—from Fontevraud and the Paraclete of Abelard and Heloise through St. Dominic and St. Francis—that sought their superiors from among the less exalted members of their communities to chart how these experiments prefigured certain aspects of modern democracies, those allowing individuals to find their way forward as part of a collective. Wide ranging and deeply original, To Govern Is to Serve highlights the history of the reciprocal bonds of service and humility that underpin increasingly fragile democracies in the twenty-first century.
Selected byChoicemagazine as an Outstanding Academic Book InCovert Operations, Karma Lochrie brings the categories and cultural meanings of secrecy in the Middle Ages out into the open. Isolating ...five broad areas-confession, women's gossip, medieval science and medicine, marriage and the law, and sodomitic discourse-Lochrie examines various types of secrecy and the literary texts in which they are played out. She reads texts as central to Middle English studies as the "Parson's Tale," the "Miller's Tale," theSecretum Secretorum, andSir Gawain and the Green Knightas well as a broad range of less familiar works, including a gynecological treatise and a little-known fifteenth-century parody in which gossip and confession become one. As she does so she reveals a great deal about the medieval past-and perhaps just as much about the early development of the concealments that shape the present day.
According to the received history, the Cistercian order was founded in Cîteaux, France, in 1098 by a group of Benedictine monks who wished for a stricter community. They sought a monastic life that ...called for extreme asceticism, rejection of feudal revenues, and manual labor for monks. Their third leader, Stephen Harding, issued a constitution, the Carta Caritatis, that called for the uniformity of custom in all Cistercian monasteries and the establishment of an annual general chapter meeting at Cîteaux. The Cistercian order grew phenomenally in the mid-twelfth century, reaching beyond France to Portugal in the west, Sweden in the north, and the eastern Mediterranean, ostensibly through a process of apostolic gestation, whereby members of a motherhouse would go forth to establish a new house. The abbey at Clairvaux, founded by Bernard in 1115, was alone responsible for founding 68 of the 338 Cistercian abbeys in existence by 1153. But this well-established view of a centrally organized order whose founders envisioned the shape and form of a religious order at its prime is not borne out in the historical record. Through an investigation of early Cistercian documents, Constance Hoffman Berman proves that no reliable reference to Stephen's Carta Caritatis appears before the mid-twelfth century, and that the document is more likely to date from 1165 than from 1119. The implications of this fact are profound. Instead of being a charter by which more than 300 Cistercian houses were set up by a central authority, the document becomes a means of bringing under centralized administrative control a large number of loosely affiliated and already existing monastic houses of monks as well as nuns who shared Cistercian customs. The likely reason for this administrative structuring was to check the influence of the overdominant house of Clairvaux, which threatened the authority of Cîteaux through Bernard's highly successful creation of new monastic communities. For centuries the growth of the Cistercian order has been presented as a spontaneous spirituality that swept western Europe through the power of the first house at Cîteaux. Berman suggests instead that the creation of the religious order was a collaborative activity, less driven by centralized institutions; its formation was intended to solve practical problems about monastic administration. With the publication ofThe Cistercian Evolution, for the first time the mechanisms are revealed by which the monks of Cîteaux reshaped fact to build and administer one of the most powerful and influential religious orders of the Middle Ages.
The medieval world was full of malicious demons: fallen angels commissioned to tempt humans away from God. From demons disguised as beautiful women to demons that took frightening animal-like forms, ...this book explores the history of thought about demons: what they were, what they could and could not do, and how they affected human lives. It considers the debates, stories, and writing that eventually gave shape to the witchcraze of the early modern period.
For the first time, this volume presents a geographically and phenomenologically broad range of case studies on late medieval changes of rule, from dynastic succession to conquest by force. The focus ...will be on the border regions of Latin Europe, political and cultural contact zones with distinctive dynamics. By presenting examples from the Canaries to Moscow and from Sicily to Norway, late medieval Europe will be covered in all its diversity.
Whalen explores the belief that Christendom would spread to every corner of the earth before the end of time. During the High Middle Ages the Western followers of Rome imagined the future conversion ...of Jews, Muslims, pagans, and Eastern Christians into one fold of God's people, assembled under the authority of the Roman Church.
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