Medieval Religious Research Articles

“This word in Latyn”: Translation and Untranslatability in Late Medieval Religious Macaronic Lyrics

“This word in Latyn”: Translation and Untranslatability in Late Medieval Religious Macaronic Lyrics

From Medieval Religious Pageantry to Contemporary Social Messaging: The Medieval Cycle Plays in Honduras’ Teatro La Fragua

Using medieval religious drama as a model, Honduras’ Teatro La Fragua has developed a Gospel dramatization program that both reflects the practices of medieval theater in style and expresses the issues of a modern-day world in message. Their vernacular cycle plays are performed in public spaces by local people, written by and for the community, and staged in the streets and public spaces for ordinary people in both urban and remote rural areas. Medieval vernacular drama thus maintains an enduring stylistic presence in a modern-day counterpart as it underscores the Gospel’s message of inclusion, equity, and diversity while incorporating elements of agency and native culture.

A Musical Variation on Late Medieval Religious Reform: Johannes Nider and the Observant Dominican Liturgy

A Musical Variation on Late Medieval Religious Reform: Johannes Nider and the Observant Dominican Liturgy

Addressing Women in Early Medieval Religious Texts

Addressing Women in Early Medieval Religious Texts

Traces of The Medieval Religious Sects Yesevism and Bektashism in The Sirach Alevis: The Case of Hafik Beydili and Tokat Hubyar

Son yılların gerek akademide gerekse akademi dışındaki entelektüel camiada en çok ele alınan, tartışılan, farklı bakış açılarıyla ortaya konulmaya çalışılan konulan konulardan bir tanesi de Alevilik konusudur. Bazı çalışmalar Aleviliğin inanç boyutu üzerine odaklanırken, bazı çalışmalar da Aleviliğin siyasal boyutunu irdelemektedir. Günümüzde Alisiz Alevilik, Aleviliğin bir mezhep olmayıp siyasal bir itiraz olduğu, Cumhuriyetin kuruluşuyla birlikte kentlileşen bir yaşam tarzı olduğu, diğer yandan da Aleviliğin Orta Asya Şaman Türklüğünün günümüze kadar ulaşmış biçimi olduğu konuları bu tartışmaların odak konusunu oluşturmaktadır.
 Bu çalışmanın amacı bahsedilen bu tartışma konularına angaje olmak değildir. Aleviliği verili bir durum kabul ederek tasavvuf ve inanç boyutundaki Ortodoksi diyebileceğimiz ibadet ritüellerini spesifik bir grup olarak Sıraç ve Hubyar Alevileri üzerinden değerlendirme amacındadır. Avrupa, Orta çağ döneminin Kilise karanlığını yaşarken Anadolu’da Ahmet Yesevî (11. ve 12. yüzyılda yaşamış) ve Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli gibi düşünür ve dinsel önderler daha hümanist ve kadın-erkek ilişkisi anlamında daha eşitlikçi bir görüşü temsil ediyordu. Bu iki düşünürün görüşleri ve dinsel önerileri günümüzde Sivas Beydili Sıraç Alevileri ve Tokat yöresi Hubyar Alevileri tarafından sıkı bir biçimde uygulanmaktadır. Ortodoksi bir katılıkta uygulanan bu ibadet ritüelleri çalışmanın temel konusunu oluşturmaktadır.
 Metodolojik olarak tarihsel süreç içerisindeki gelişim değerlendirilmiş ve Orta çağda yaşamış bu düşünürlerin günümüzdeki dinsel varislerinin bu konudaki inanç ve uygulamaları ele alınmıştır. Bu çalışma nitel araştırıma deseni olan Odak Grup görüşmesi kullanılarak gerçekleştirilmiştir. Ahmet Yesevî ve Hacı Bektaş-ı Veli geleneğini sürdüren Sıraç Alevilerinden, farklı illerde yaşayan 8 kişi ile yüz yüze ve telefonla görüşme yapılmıştır. Katılımcıların görüş ve düşünceleri aktarıldıktan sonra zaman zaman tarihsel karşılaştırmalar yapılarak bahsedilen geleneğin günümüzde ne kadar sürdürüldüğü ortaya konulmaya çalışmıştır.

Between Orders and Heresy: Rethinking Medieval Religious Movements ed. by Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane and Anne E. Lester (review)

Between Orders and Heresy: Rethinking Medieval Religious Movements ed. by Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane and Anne E. Lester (review)

Trevor J. Dadson (1947–2020)

Trevor J. Dadson (1947–2020)

Horses in the Early Medieval (10th-13th c.) Religious Rituals of Slavs in Polish Areas-An Archaeozoological, Archaeological and Historical Overview.

Simple SummaryThe military and prestigious importance of the horse as a cavalry mount (hussars and lancers) in post-medieval Poland has been well recorded in the pages of chronicles and historical records. However, information about the horse from Poland’s earliest Slavic history (10th–13th century) is very modest and can be found in few written sources. Therefore, to change this state of knowledge, data from archaeozoological and archaeological research were used to complement the information from chronicles. This was undertaken as part of a project focusing on the early medieval period. This article presents issues related to the role of the horse in religious rituals. This is discussed through a presentation of older and current views resulting from new research. The article presents and discusses textual and archaeological data supported by archaeozoological sources. The horse is known to be a military, elite and magical animal but also as the source of meat for food and bones for the manufacture of items. Although there is no doubt of treatment of the horse as a magical animal among the Slavs in Poland, it is clear that this animal was not buried in cemeteries in separate graves or with riders, as seen amongst contemporary neighbouring tribes.Knowledge about horses from early medieval (10th–13th c.) Poland has been largely based on historical and archaeological data. Archaeozoological information has only been used to a limited extent. Therefore, this article aims to present the current state of knowledge on this subject, drawing on archaeozoological data from studies of horse bones. Apart from confirming earlier reflections regarding the sacred significance of the horse, additional information was obtained about specific individuals who were the subject of magical treatments. It turned out that sites with horse skeletons and skulls are few compared to the familiar presence of horse remains among kitchen waste. This contrasts with the neighbouring regions, where horses were buried more frequently among the Germans, Scandinavians and Prussians. Some new data have been obtained thanks to taphonomic analyses, which demonstrated that horse skulls of apotropaic status were not only exposed to public viewing but were also deposited under stronghold ramparts. Horses suffering from infectious diseases could also be buried under such ramparts. Considerations in the article lead to conclusions that horses were used in religious rituals as sacrificial animals, apotropaic deposits, as fortune-telling animals and cosmological figures.

Editors’ Introduction

We are delighted to present this special issue of the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures.Instead of the usual set of scholarly articles, this issue brings together new editions and translations of primary texts with new research guides, ranging from well- to little-known figures from the medieval religious world. First, Ana Rita Parreiras Reis offers an edition of the heretofore unedited Treatise Against Fleshly Affections, an anonymous fifteenth-century Middle English text found in London, British Library, MS Royal 17 C xviii, which may have originated at Syon Abbey. Second, Andrew Fogleman translates Jean Gerson’s Sermon on Angels, a text that reveals some of the origins of Gerson’s later (and better-known) thought on the discernment of spirits. Next, Clarck Drieshen’s article explores manuscript evidence that suggests that a visionary text from Hampole Priory may in fact be an English adaptation of Continental sources, rather than an original production of the Priory, and suggests new areas of comparative material research in medieval women’s visionary texts. Finally, Andrew Halpin and Claudio Peri provide an extensive bibliographic survey on Jacopone da Todi, highlighting the importance of international scholarship to a fuller understanding of his poetry.While each piece collected here is concerned with distinct texts and is not inherently related to the others, all suggest exciting new opportunities for research into later medieval Christianity, in particular on areas that have long been the subject of study: Syon Abbey, discretio spirituum, the presumably English origins of the Hampole revelation, and Jacopone da Todi’s mystical verses. Reis speculates that the Treatise may have been affiliated with Syon Abbey, which would offer new insights into that community; Fogleman’s translation illuminates Gerson’s well-known thoughts on the validity of visionary experience; Drieshen challenges received assumptions regarding the source of a visionary text; and Halpin and Peri argue for the inclusion of both European and Anglophone scholarship in the study of a well-known Italian mystic. Alongside these new editions, translations, and approaches, we are pleased to present our inaugural special review essay: in “Denying Sameness, Making Race: Medieval Anti-Judaism,” Samantha Katz Seal surveys several new books focused on different aspects of medieval Judaism, illuminating emerging work in an important area of medieval religious culture. Additional book reviews survey new theoretical approaches, new interdisciplinary readings of visual culture, and new work on religious literatures and cultures from Ireland to Iceland. With this special issue dedicated to new bibliographic, editorial, methodological, and translation work, we aim to expand the JMRC’s offerings to medieval studies, making room for considerations of method alongside new scholarship, and inspire new approaches to all areas of medieval religious cultures.

The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary

The Enclosed Garden and the Medieval Religious Imaginary

Cushions, Kitchens and Christ: Mapping the Domestic in Late Medieval Religious Writing by Louise Campion

Reviewed by: Cushions, Kitchens and Christ: Mapping the Domestic in Late Medieval Religious Writing by Louise Campion Luke Penkett Louise Campion, Cushions, Kitchens and Christ: Mapping the Domestic in Late Medieval Religious Writing ( Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2022), xviii + 190 pp. The Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages series from the University of Wales Press is a notable addition to research on the Middle Ages, bringing to the fore both studies that engage with texts that significantly shaped medieval religion and culture and those that highlight understudied aspects of these two areas. One of their latest publications is Cushions, Kitchens and Christ—the first monograph [End Page 236] by independent scholar Louise Campion, who has a particular interest in religious texts translated from Latin into Middle English during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and in their impact on the literary culture of late medieval England. Beginning as a doctoral thesis, Cushions, Kitchens and Christ focuses on four such texts: The Doctrine of the Hert (a thirteenth-century treatise), Nicholas Love's The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (a fifteenth-century translation of a fourteenth-century vita), Bridget of Sweden's Liber Celestis (a translation of over 700 of her visions), and another collection of visions experienced by Mechthild of Hackeborn in her Booke of Ghostlye Grace (written after 1290 and translated into Modern English by 1450). One of the connections between these four texts is their "repeated and consistent recourse to the language and imagery of the domestic sphere as a means of explicating the salient concerns of their authors, from the proper conduct of spiritual practice to the key events of Christ's life, to vociferous criticism of corrupt Church officials" (2). As such, Campion's book contributes to the relatively new and illuminating area of materiality research, studying the place of the domestic in relation to both religion and culture, significant patterns of domestic imagery, and the growing importance attached to the household in the late Middle Ages. After a useful introduction, Campion begins with a chapter titled "The Kitchen of the Heart, Spiritual Furniture and Noble Visitors." The mid-thirteenth-century guidance text and preaching manual De doctrina cordis was a hugely popular text, full of homely vocabulary, read in its Middle English translation by monastics and laypeople alike. Campion highlights the sharing of the Eucharist with Christ in the private household of the recipient's heart as well as the household as a locus to receive divine messages from the Eucharistic visitor. This last point prepares the modern-day reader for Campion's next two chapters. Both Mechthild and Bridget regarded domestic images as central to their visionary vocabulary. Mechthild goes further and allegorizes the heart as a house. Along with Bridget and, also, Catherine of Siena and Elizabeth of Hungary, Mechthild's spirituality—at the same time as her "approuyd wymmen"–—is orthodox; and yet, it is inevitably shaped by circumstance. In Mechthild's case, her "conventual community and her joyous relationship with Christ" (39) is addressed in the second chapter, "The Domesticity of the Sacred Heart." Chapter 3, "Marriage, Storehouses and Celestial Visitors, focuses on Brigid's use of household language, which "facilitates a deep engagement with the religious and political anxieties of the later Middle Ages" (61). Unlike Mechthild, Campion clearly points out that Bridget's domestic vocabulary allows her to sharply comment on "a broad range of ecclesiastical leaders and spiritual ideas" (61). Like Margery Kempe, her fifteenth-century counterpart, Bridget eschews her home in favour of multiple pilgrimages. Bridget's Liber not surprisingly reflects her place in the world, through which she describes her "distinctiveness as a conduit of the divine message" by commenting upon ecclesial corruption, moral apocalypse, spiritual union, the prospect of salvation, her understanding of God, and the proper conduct of bishops (87). In the final chapter, "From Wanderer to Householder: The Domestication of Jesus, the Disciples and the Holy Family," Campion convincingly argues that "the domestic sphere is the primary affective framework through which [End Page 237] [Nicholas] Love invites his reader to identify with Christ" (112). "Domestic space," she reminds us, "is the environment to hear about Christ, listen to his...

Cushions, Kitchens and Christ: Mapping the Domestic in Late Medieval Religious Writing by Louise Campion

Cushions, Kitchens and Christ: Mapping the Domestic in Late Medieval Religious Writing by Louise Campion

Women's Literacy in a Late Medieval Religious Community: Organisation and Memorialisation at Santa Marta in Milan, 1405–1454

This article argues for literacy as a form of memorialisation in female religious organisations in late medieval Italy. Using freshly discovered archival materials from the Archivio di Stato in Milan, focus is placed on organisation and memorialisation in one particular community, the women of Santa Marta during the period 1405–1454. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, new communities formed who wished to organise according to their own principles. Some of these communities eventually adopted an official rule, such as the Rule of Saint Augustine, and obtained papal approval for their specific way of living when they did not follow the rule absolutely. This article argues that access to reading and writing were fundamental aspects in these communities, and enabled women to empower themselves in ways that had not been possible. I focus on the writing of a semi‐religious nun, Margherita Lambertenghi, and the other narratives relating to the convent of Santa Marta in Milan during the early fifteenth century, as a case‐study to show the central role that literacy played in the development of the community. Since the extant writing of the convent reveals interesting practices of copying and memorialisation, sometimes mediated by men, the article also discusses these issues.

Medieval and Early Modern Religious Cultures: Essays Honouring Vincent Gillespie on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Laura Ashe and Ralph Hanna

Medieval and Early Modern Religious Cultures: Essays Honouring Vincent Gillespie on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Laura Ashe and Ralph Hanna

Education of Nuns, Feast of Fools, Letters of Love: Medieval Religious Life in Twelfth Century Lyric Anthologies from Regensburg, Ripoll and Chartres. Ed., trans., and intro. by David A. Traill and Justin Haynes. Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations, 26. Leuven, Paris, and Bristol, CT: Peeters, 2021, xi, 184 pp., 1 frontispiece.

Abstract: One of the hotly debated questions in Medieval Studies has been whether Heloise could have actually written those famous letters to her teacher, lover, and later husband, Peter Abelard. The issue has hinged on the issue that the female voice uses a strongly erotic language and does not shy away from talking about herself in most explicit terms. May that be as is, with the availability and English translation of the Latin poems in the Regensburg, Ripoll, and Chartres collections, the entire argument might gain renewed relevance, especially because here we come across (at least in the first collection) apparentlysome female voices who express their erotic desires.

List of Medieval Religious Houses on Islands: Norway

The paper offers a survey of monastic island communities in Medieval Norway, including brief historical descriptions of their foundation, patrons, dissolution, sources, remaining building structure...

A Comparative Study on the Medieval Religious Policies as a Social Operating System -Based on case of Visigothic Kingdom and ‘Umayyad Dynasty of Córdova’-

A Comparative Study on the Medieval Religious Policies as a Social Operating System -Based on case of Visigothic Kingdom and ‘Umayyad Dynasty of Córdova’-

Medieval and Early Modern Religious Cultures: Essays Honouring Vincent Gillespie on his Sixty-fifth Birthday ed. by Laura Ashe and Ralph Hanna

Reviewed by: Medieval and Early Modern Religious Cultures: Essays Honouring Vincent Gillespie on his Sixty-fifth Birthday ed. by Laura Ashe and Ralph Hanna Greg Waite Ashe, Laura, and Ralph Hanna, eds, Medieval and Early Modern Religious Cultures: Essays Honouring Vincent Gillespie on his Sixty-fifth Birthday, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2019; hardback; pp. xii, 284; 17 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843845294. Vincent Gillespie, J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, has made enormous contributions to scholarship in the areas of literature and religious culture of Late Medieval and Early Modern England, not least of them his monumental work Syon Abbey, in the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues series (British Academy, 2001). His scholarly output, fully catalogued in this volume, attests to his varied research [End Page 172] interests, and is all the more impressive when balanced against the demands of teaching, research supervision, and administration that fall upon the incumbent of the Tolkien Chair at Oxford. The twelve essays of this volume, arranged into four chronological bands extending from ‘After Lateran IV: The Thirteenth Century’ to ‘Reform or Renewal? The Sixteenth Century’ (at least the earlier part of it), all connect well with Vincent’s own research interests, and in some cases respond to his work. Annie Sutherland explores the tradition that Christ was born in a ‘house without walls, in the street’, which in the context of Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerde is an apophatic space, invoked to challenge the anchorite, actually enclosed within ‘fowr wahes’ to mirror Christ in vulnerability to the world. Nicholas Watson explores the transmission and reception of Nicholas of Abingdon’s influential and widely disseminated Mirror of the Holy Church. Daniel Orton discusses Roger Bacon’s humanistic campaign and reassertion of the category of the poetic in response to scholastic disinterest in, if not hostility towards, poetry in thirteenth-century Paris and elsewhere. The set of essays focused on the later fourteenth century begins with Anne Hudson’s study of Oxford, New College MS 67, an ‘Early Version’ copy of the Wycliffite Bible, but with distinctive revisions, including readings from the ‘Late(r) Version’ in the latter parts, from the Pauline epistles. While this manuscript seems to be an unusual departure from the usual tendency to avoid blending of versions in manuscript transmission, it warrants further attention in itself, along with attention to revisions in other manuscripts as yet only cursorily catalogued as ‘EV’ or ‘LV’. Michael Sargent proceeds in a similar vein, exploring the patterns of circulation of, and variation in, the two books of Walter Hilton’s English text of The Scale of Perfection and Thomas Fishlake’s Latin translation and transformation of the work. Barry Windeatt explores changing spiritual and cultural currents in post-Conquest English treatments of the Assumption of the Virgin in texts (including drama) and iconography, and the delicacy with which some accounts approach the questions of bodily resurrection, the nature of Mary’s death or ‘dormition’ and other aspects of the narrative details that accreted around the story. Ian Johnson discusses the mediation of voices and discourses in the writing of Nicholas Love and Reginald Pecock, demonstrating how they reshaped their sources and spiritual discourses in distinctive ways. Susan Powell examines the textual material relating to Santa Zita (known in English as Saint Sithe), found in a later fifteenth-century English manuscript, now Biblioteca Statale di Lucca, MS 3540. Remarkably, a cult of this thirteenth-century saint from Lucca (a patron of domestic servants, and, in England at least, those who have lost keys) spread quite widely in later medieval England. Denis Renevey explores the contributions of Archbishop Thomas of Rotherham and Lady Margaret Beaufort to the popularization of devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus, which also forms the subject matter of a sermon Caxton added to his 1491 edition of John Mirk’s Festial. [End Page 173] In the last section of the book, Alexandra da Costa examines the changing early-Reformation contexts in which lay readers engaged in study of the Bible and devotional works in the vernacular, and the views on how such reading should be conducted, as...

In Memoriam: Catherine Innes-Parker

Other| July 01 2020 In Memoriam: Catherine Innes-Parker The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures (2020) 46 (2): vii–viii. https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.46.2.0vii Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation In Memoriam: Catherine Innes-Parker. The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 1 July 2020; 46 (2): vii–viii. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.46.2.0vii Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures Search Advanced Search We would like to dedicate this issue to Professor Catherine Innes-Parker, who passed away in 2019. Catherine was a dedicated member of the journal's editorial board and offered unfailing support, even offering to read manuscripts while recovering from eye surgery. What follows are two personal statements about Catherine, the first from Bob Hasenfratz, former editor of MQ and JMRC, and the second from Nicholas Watson, editorial board member. When I first became intrigued by everything anchoritic, I believe I met Catherine Innes-Parker for the first time at a Kalamazoo session on the Catherine Group (that may be too much of a coincidence), I'm guessing in the 1990s. Her quiet erudition and enthusiasm for the strange (to me) world of professional recluses struck me immediately, and in the subsequent years, Catherine and I periodically came out of our various academic anchorholds and continued our conversations about our work and various... You do not currently have access to this content.

From the Editors

Editorial| July 01 2020 From the Editors The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures (2020) 46 (2): v–vi. https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.46.2.000v Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation From the Editors. The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 1 July 2020; 46 (2): v–vi. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.46.2.000v Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures Search Advanced Search Dear JMRC Readers,We sincerely wish to thank our readers, contributors, and board members over the years for their support of JMRC. After many years of coediting (over ten for Christine Cooper-Rompato and five for Sherri Olson), we have decided to step down and hand the journal on to the next generation of coeditors, Barbara Zimbalist and Jessica Barr. Barbara Zimbalist is a newly promoted associate professor of English at the University of Texas El Paso with a specialty in medieval women's religious literatures from England and the Low Countries, and Jessica Barr is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a specialty in medieval European vision literature and hagiography. Together they have great plans for future directions for the journal. We look forward to seeing JMRC continue to grow and to maintain the important place that it has held for nearly forty... You do not currently have access to this content.