The Use and Abuse of Sacred Places in Late Medieval Towns - - ebook

A narrative of decline punctuated by periods of renewal has long structured perceptions of Rome's late antique and medieval history. In their probing contributions to this volume, a multi-disciplinary group of scholars provides alternative approaches to understanding the period. Addressing developments in governance, ceremony, literature, art, music, clerical education and the city's very sense of its own identity, the essays examine how a variety of actors, from poets to popes, addressed the intermittent crises and shifting dynamics of these centuries with creative solutions that bolstered the city's resilience. Without denying that the past (both pre-Christian and Christian) always remained a powerful touchstone, the studies in this volume offer rich new insights into the myriad ways that Rome and Romans, between the fifth and the eleventh centuries, creatively assimilated the past in order to shape the future.

The literary, historical, and linguistic confluence that characterized the Irish-Sea region in the pre-modern period is reflected in the interdisciplinarity of these new research essays, centered on the literatures, languages, and histories of the Irish-Sea communities of the Middle Ages, much of which is still evoked in contemporary culture. The contributors to this collection dive deep into the rich historical record, heroic literature, and story lore of the medieval communities ringing the Irish Sea, with case studies that encompass Manx, Irish, Scandinavian, Welsh, and English traditions. Manannán, the famous travelling Celtic divinity who supposedly claimed the Isle of Man as his home, mingles here with his mythical, legendary, and historical neighbors, whose impact on our image and understanding of the pre-modern cultures of the Northern Atlantic has persisted down through the centuries.

Commemorating John Moorman's immense contribution to Franciscan history across five decades, the essays in this collection reflect upon Moorman's diverse writings on biography, hagiography, history, art, and prosopography. Contributors draw upon Moorman's diaries and his materials for a biographical register of the Franciscans in medieval England. The volume is in tune with recent developments in Franciscan history in general, with a special interest in the English province. This is exemplified by studies on Franciscan iconography; the English province's impact of the wider order; the scholastic enterprise; prosopography; economy; sermons; the application of Canon Law to the debates at the papal court; and the evolution of John Moorman's studies on St Francis and his followers.

This ground-breaking book brings theoretical perspectives from twenty-first century media, film, and cultural studies to medieval hagiography. Medieval Saints and Modern Screens stakes the claim for a provocative new methodological intervention: consideration of hagiography as media. More precisely, hagiography is most productively understood as cinematic media. Medieval mystical episodes are made intelligible to modern audiences through reference to the filmic - the language, form, and lived experience of cinema. Similarly, reference to the realm of the mystical affords a means to express the disconcerting physical and emotional effects of watching cinema. Moreover, cinematic spectatorship affords, at times, a (more or less) secular experience of visionary transcendence: an 'agape-ic encounter'. The medieval saint's visions of God are but one pole of a spectrum of visual experience which extends into our present multi-media moment. We too conjure godly visions: on our smartphones, on …