Illuminating the Vitae patrum
Title | Illuminating the Vitae patrum PDF eBook |
Author | Denva Gallant |
Publisher | Penn State Press |
Pages | 294 |
Release | 2024-01-18 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 0271098031 |
During the fourteenth century in Western Europe, there was a growing interest in imitating the practices of a group of hermits known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Laypeople and religious alike learned about their rituals not only through readings from the Vitae patrum (Lives of the Desert Fathers) and sermons but also through the images that brought their stories to life. In this volume, Denva Gallant examines the Morgan Library’s richly illustrated manuscript of the Vitae patrum (MS M.626), whose extraordinary artworks witness the rise of the eremitic ideal and its impact on the visual culture of late medieval Italy. Drawing upon scholarship on the history of psychology, eastern monasticism, gender, and hagiography, Gallant deepens our understanding of the centrality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers to late medieval piety. She provides important insights into the role of images in making the practices of the desert saints both compelling and accessible to fourteenth-century city dwellers, who were just beginning to cultivate the habit of private devotion on a wide scale. By focusing on the most extensively illuminated manuscript of the Vitae patrum to emerge during the trecento, this book sheds new light on the ways in which images communicated and reinforced modes of piety. It will be of interest to art historians, religious historians, and students focusing on this period in Italian history.
Sacred Fictions
Title | Sacred Fictions PDF eBook |
Author | Lynda L. Coon |
Publisher | University of Pennsylvania Press |
Pages | 253 |
Release | 2010-11-24 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0812201671 |
Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynda Coon unpacks these paradoxical representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women's roles in the early Christian centuries. Coon discerns three distinct paradigms for female sanctity in saints' lives and patristic and monastic writings. Women are recurrently figured as repentant desert hermits, wealthy widows, or cloistered ascetic nuns, and biblical discourse informs the narrative content, rhetorical strategies, and symbolic meanings of these texts in complex and multivalent ways. If hagiographers made their women saints walk on water, resurrect the dead, or consecrate the Eucharist, they also curbed the power of women by teaching that the daughters of Eve must make their bodies impenetrable through militant chastity or spiritual exile and must eradicate self-indulgence through ascetic attire or philanthropy. The windows the sacred fiction of holy women open on the past are far from transparent; driven by both literary invention and moral imperative, the stories they tell helped shape Western gender constructs that have survived into modern times.
The Vitae Patrum in Old and Middle English Literature
Title | The Vitae Patrum in Old and Middle English Literature PDF eBook |
Author | Mrs. Constance (Lowengrund) Rosenthal |
Publisher | |
Pages | 186 |
Release | 1936 |
Genre | Christian literature, English (Middle) |
ISBN |
Sacred Biography
Title | Sacred Biography PDF eBook |
Author | Thomas J. Heffernan |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 348 |
Release | 1992-10-01 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 019536001X |
Though medieval "saints' lives" are among the oldest literary texts of Western vernacular culture, they are routinely patronized as "pious fiction" by modern historiography. This book demonstrates that to characterize the genre as fiction is to misunderstand the intentions of medieval authors, who were neither credulous fools nor men blinded by piety. Concentrating on English texts, Heffernan reconstructs the medieval perspective and considers sacred biography in relation to the community for which it was written; identifies the genre's rhetorical practices and purposes; and demonstrates the syncretistic way in which the life of the medieval saint was transformed from oral tales to sacred text. In the process, Heffernan not only achieves a more contextually accurate understanding of the medieval saints' lives, but details a new critical method that has important implications for the practice of textual criticism.
Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe
Title | Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe PDF eBook |
Author | Liz Herbert McAvoy |
Publisher | Boydell & Brewer Ltd |
Pages | 258 |
Release | 2010 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1843835207 |
An examination of the growth and different varieties of anchoritism throughout medieval Europe.
The Lady as Saint
Title | The Lady as Saint PDF eBook |
Author | Brigitte Cazelles |
Publisher | University of Pennsylvania Press |
Pages | 343 |
Release | 2015-02-23 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 0812292308 |
Among the thirteenth-century saints exalted are female martyrs and hermits of early Christianity. In The Lady as Saint, Brigitte Cazelles offers the first English translation of these lives and provides extensive commentary on the portrayal of female spirituality.
Holy Men and Holy Women
Title | Holy Men and Holy Women PDF eBook |
Author | Paul E. Szarmach |
Publisher | SUNY Press |
Pages | 414 |
Release | 1996-01-01 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 9780791427156 |
This is a collection of essays on the literature of "saints' lives" in Anglo-Saxon literature.