As a major advance in the study of medieval piety the interrelationship between the veneration of relics and of the Eucharistic Host is presented here for the first time. Traced through Christian Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the veneration of the Host proves to be closely associated with the piety focused on relics of the Saints. Both were kept in the sleeping area of private homes, carried on journeys and placed in graves. They were buried together in altar tables and monks called on both for help in threatening circumstances. Like the relics, the sacred Host was later carried in procession, shown to the people for veneration and used to give blessings. This book offers a rich account of one of the most revealing dimensions of medieval belief and practice.

qVeneration of the Host and of saintly relics can only be understood as closely interrelated aspects of medieval piety. This book offers a rich account of one of the most revealing dimensions of medieval belief and practice.

Do various members of the church--regardless of their generation, gender, race, sexual orientation, country of origin, and whatever their doubts are about official church teachings and policies--have any role in determining, safeguarding, and assessing the authentic teaching and praxis of the faith of the church? This has always been a haunting question in the life of the Christian church, though only recently acknowledged, because of the long-standing role of male clergy of European descent with a Eurocentric outlook who held hierarchical offices and determined official doctrines and moral and disciplinary codes. There have been controversies that bear on these matters over the course of the church's history. But it has only been over the last fifty years that the question has received increasing attention among Roman Catholics in terms of the baptismal anointing of the Spirit that bestows the gift of the sense of the faith on individuals and the collective sense of the faithful. This gift provides discerning skills to recognize, receive, and imaginatively and practically apply the living faith in history and society. This book explores these issues from historical, sociological, systematic and theological ethical perspectives, infused by the contributions of world Christianities.

"The enigmatic link between the natural and artistic beauty that is to be contemplated but not eaten, on the one hand, and the eucharistic beauty that is both seen (with the eyes of faith) and eaten, on the other, intrigues me and inspires this book. One cannot ask theo-aesthetic questions about the Eucharist without engaging fundamental questions about the relationship between beauty, art (broadly defined), and eating."—from Eating Beauty In a remarkable book that is at once learned, startlingly original, and highly personal, Ann W. Astell explores the ambiguity of the phrase "eating beauty." The phrase evokes the destruction of beauty, the devouring mouth of the grave, the mouth of hell. To eat beauty is to destroy it. Yet in the case of the Eucharist the person of faith who eats the Host is transformed into beauty itself, literally incorporated into Christ. In this sense, Astell explains, the Eucharist was "productive of an entire 'way' of life, a virtuous life-form, an artwork, with Christ himself as the principal artist." The Eucharist established for the people of the Middle Ages distinctive schools of sanctity—Cistercian, Franciscan, Dominican, and Ignatian—whose members were united by the eucharistic sacrament that they received. Reading the lives of the saints not primarily as historical documents but as iconic expressions of original artworks fashioned by the eucharistic Christ, Astell puts the "faceless" Host in a dynamic relationship with these icons. With the advent of each new spirituality, the Christian idea of beauty expanded to include, first, the marred beauty of the saint and, finally, that of the church torn by division—an anti-aesthetic beauty embracing process, suffering, deformity, and disappearance, as well as the radiant lightness of the resurrected body. This astonishing work of intellectual and religious history is illustrated with telling artistic examples ranging from medieval manuscript illuminations to sculptures by Michelangelo and paintings by Salvador Dalí. Astell puts the lives of medieval saints in conversation with modern philosophers as disparate as Simone Weil and G. W. F. Hegel.

Stanbury explores the lost traffic in images in late medieval England and its impact on contemporary authors and artists.

The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy takes up the words, 'this is my body', 'this do', and 'remembrance of me' that divided Christendom in the sixteenth century. It traces the different understandings of these simple words and the consequences of those divergent understandings in the delineation of the Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic traditions: the different formulations of liturgy with their different conceptualizations of the cognitive and collective function of ritual; the different conceptualizations of the relationship between Christ and the living body of the faithful; the different articulations of the relationship between the world of matter and divinity; and the different epistemologies. It argues that the incarnation is at the center of the story of the Reformation and suggests how divergent religious identities were formed.

This is Volume Two of a two-volume collection that brings together contributions from cultural and military history to offer an examination of religious rites employed in connection with warfare as well as their transformative and power- and identity-building potential across political communities of medieval Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe. Covering the period ca. 900 and 1500, the work takes theoretical, textual and practical approaches to the research on religious warfare, and investigates the connections between, and significance and function of crucial war rituals such as pre-, intra- and postbellum rites, as well as various activities surrounding the military life of individuals, polities, and corporates. Contributors are Robert Antonín, Robert Bubczyk, Dariusz Dąbrowski, Jesse Harrington, Carsten Selch Jensen, Sini Kangas, Radosław Kotecki, Gregory Leighton, Kyle C. Lincoln, Jacek Maciejewski, Yulia Mikhailova, Max Naderer, László Veszprémy, and Dušan Zupka.