Introduces an English translation of the Book of Special Grace, a Latin mystical work composed by Mechthild of Hackeborn and her sisters at the convent of Helfta in the 1290s.

The volume explores the hitherto uncharted late medieval religious landscape of Northern Germany, from 13th-century Helfta to the 15th-century Lüneburg convents. The mystical and devotional writing of Northern Germany is contextualised through chapters on the Netherlands, Scandinavia and East Prussia. The seminal influence of the liturgy on these texts and their transmission is revealed in the creative interplay of Latin and Low German. Through the individual chapters and their appendices, which also contain translations into English, the reader can access a wealth of texts produced by communities of religious and lay women who write learnedly in Latin and fervently in Low German. Together, the chapters and appendices reveal a fascinating regional "mystical culture" which also reverberated across Northern Europe. Contributors include: Jürgen Bärsch, Anne Bollmann, Veerle Fraeters, Ulrike Hascher-Burger, Ernst Hellgardt, Tanja Mattern, Balazs Nemes, Sara S. Poor, Eva Schlotheuber, Almut Suerbaum, and Geert Warnar.

This book represents the first full-length study of the prevalence of domestic imagery in late medieval religious literature. It examines as yet understudied patterns of household imagery and allegory across four fifteenth-century spiritual texts, all of which are Middle English translations of earlier Latin works. These texts are drawn from a range of popular genres of medieval religious writing, including spiritual guidance texts, Lives of Christ and collections of revelations received by visionary women. All of the texts discussed in this book have identifiable late medieval readers, which further enables a discussion of the way in which these book users might have responded to the domestic images in each one. This is a hugely important area of enquiry, as the literal late medieval household was becoming increasingly culturally important during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and these texts’ frequent recourse to domestic imagery would have been especially pertinent.

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Music does not make itself. It is made by people: professionals and amateurs, singers and instrumentalists, composers and publishers, performers and audiences, entrepreneurs and consumers. In turn, making music shapes those who make it—spiritually, emotionally, physically, mentally, socially, politically, economically—for good or ill, harming and healing. This volume considers the social practice of music from a Christian point of view. Using a variety of methodological perspectives, the essays explore the ethical and doctrinal implications of music-making. The reflections are grouped according to the traditional threefold ministry of Christ: prophet, priest, and shepherd: the prophetic role of music, as a means of articulating protest against injustice, offering consolation, and embodying a harmonious order; the pastoral role of music: creating and sustaining community, building peace, fostering harmony with the whole of creation; and the priestly role of music: in service of reconciliation and restoration, for individuals and communities, offering prayers of praise and intercession to God. Using music in priestly, prophetic, and pastoral ways, Christians pray for and rehearse the coming of God’s kingdom—whether in formal worship, social protest, concert performance, interfaith sharing, or peacebuilding. Whereas temperance was of prime importance in relation to the ethics of music from antiquity to the early modern period, justice has become central to contemporary debates. This book seeks to contribute to those debates by means of Christian theological reflection on a wide range of musics: including monastic chant, death metal, protest songs, psalms and worship music, punk rock, musical drama, interfaith choral singing, Sting, and Daft Punk.

This book examines how the writings of the thirteenth-century nun Gertrude the Great of Helfta articulate an innovative relationship between a person's eucharistic devotion and her body. It attends to her references to the biblical, monastic, and theological traditions, including attitudes and ideas about the spiritual and corporeal senses, in order to illuminate the affirmative role Gertrude assigns to the body in making spiritual progress. Ultimately the book demonstrates that Gertrude leaves behind the dualistic aspect of the Christian intellectual and devotional tradition while exploiting its affirmative concepts of bodily forms of knowing divine union.