"An interdisciplinary reassessment of the creation and reception of religious imagery, and of its place in the devotional practices of Castilian Christians, situated against the broader panorama of Spanish culture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries"--Provided by publisher.

This book is devoted to medieval Iberian women, readers and writers. Focusing on the stories and texts women heard, visually experienced or read, and the stories that they rewrote, the work explores women’s experiences and cultural practices and their efforts to make sense of their place within their familial networks and communities. The study is based on two methodological and interpretive threads: a new paradigm to represent premodern reading and, a study of women’s writing, or, more precisely, women’s textualities, as a process of creating words but also acts, social practices, emotions and, ultimately, affectus, understood here as the embodiment of the ability to affect and be affected.

Staging Christ’s Passion in Eighteenth-Century Nahua Mexico explores the Passion plays performed in Nahuatl (Aztec) by Indigenous Mexicans living under Spanish colonial occupation. Though sourced from European writings and devotional practices that emphasized the suffering of Christ and his mother, this Nahuatl theatrical tradition grounded the Passion story in the Indigenous corporate community. Passion plays had courted controversy in Europe since their twelfth-century origin, but in New Spain they faced Catholic authorities who questioned the spiritual and intellectual capacity of Indigenous people and, in the eighteenth century, sought to suppress these performances. Six surviving eighteenth-century scripts, variants of an original play possibly composed early in the seventeenth century, reveal how Nahuas passed along this model text while modifying it with new dialogue, characters, and stage techniques. Louise M. Burkhart explores the way Nahuas merged the Passion story with their language, cultural constructs, social norms, and religious practices while also responding to surveillance by Catholic churchmen. Analytical chapters trace significant themes through the six plays and key these to a composite play in English included in the volume. A cast with over fifty distinct roles acted out events extending from Palm Sunday to Christ’s death on the cross. One actor became a localized embodiment of Jesus through a process of investiture and mimesis that carried aspects of pre-Columbian materialized divinity into the later colonial period. The play told afar richer version of the Passion story than what later colonial Nahuas typically learned from their priests or catechists. And by assimilating Jesus to an Indigenous, or macehualli, identity, the players enacted a protest against colonial rule. The situation in eighteenth-century New Spain presents both a unique confrontation between Indigenous communities and Enlightenment era religious reformers and a new chapter in an age-old power game between popular practice and religious orthodoxy. By focusing on how Nahuas localized the universalizing narrative of Christ’s Passion, Staging Christ’s Passion in Eighteenth-Century Nahua Mexico offers an unusually in-depth view of religious life under colonial rule. Burkhart’s accompanying website also makes available transcriptions and translations of the six Nahuatl-language plays, four Spanish-language plays composed in response to the suppression of the Nahuatl practice, and related documentation, providing a valuable resource for anyone interested in consulting the original material. Comments restricted to single page plays composed in response to the suppression of the Nahuatl practice, and related documentation, providing a valuable resource for anyone interested in consulting the original material

How did the early-modern Christian West conceive of the spaces and times of the afterlife? The answer to this question is not obvious for a period that saw profound changes in theology, when the telescope revealed the heavens to be as changeable and imperfect as the earth, and when archaeological and geological investigations made the earth and what lies beneath it another privileged site for the acquisition of new knowledge. With its focus on the eschatological imagination at a time of transformation in cosmology, this volume opens up new ways of studying early-modern religious ideas, representations, and practices. The individual chapters explore a wealth of – at times little-known – visual and textual sources. Together they highlight how closely concepts and imaginaries of the hereafter were intertwined with the realities of the here and now. Contributors: Matteo Al Kalak, Monica Azzolini, Wietse de Boer, Christine Göttler, Luke Holloway, Martha McGill, Walter S. Melion, Mia M. Mochizuki, Laurent Paya, Raphaèle Preisinger, Aviva Rothman, Minou Schraven, Anna-Claire Stinebring, Jane Tylus, and Antoinina Bevan Zlatar.

In Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators, historian Katherine Aron-Beller analyzes the common Christian charge that Jews habitually and compulsively violated Christian images, identifying this allegation as one that functioned alongside other anti-Jewish allegations such as ritual murder, blood libel, and host desecration to ultimately inform dangerous and long-lasting prejudices in medieval and early modern Europe. Through an analysis of folk tales, myths, legal proceedings, and religious art, Aron-Beller finds that narratives alleging that Jews committed violence against images of Christ, Mary, and the disciples flourished in Europe between the fifth and seventeenth centuries. She then explores how these narratives manifested differently across the continent and the centuries, finding that their potency reflected not Jewish actions per se, but Christians’ own concerns about slipping into idolatry when viewing depictions of religious figures. In addition, Aron-Beller considers Jews’ own attitudes toward Christian imagery and the ways in which they responded to and rejected—or embraced—such allegations. By examining how desecration allegations affected Jewish individuals and communities spanning Byzantium, medieval England, France, Germany, and early modern Spain and Italy, Aron-Beller demonstrates that this charge was a powerful expression of the Christian majority’s anxiety around committing idolatry and their eagerness to participate in practices of veneration that revolved around visual images—an anxiety that evolved through the centuries and persists to this day.

The book investigates the aesthetic theology embedded in the Franciscan artistic tradition. The novelty of the approach is in applying concepts gleaned from Franciscan textual sources to create a deeper understanding of how art in all its sensual forms was foundational to the Franciscan milieu. Chapters range from studies of statements about aesthetics and the arts in theological textual sources to examples of visual, auditory, and tactile arts communicating theological ideas found in texts. The essays cover not only European art and textual sources, but also Franciscan influences in the Americas found in both texts and artifacts.