Witchcraft, Exorcism and the Politics of Possession in a Seventeenth-Century Convent

Witchcraft, Exorcism and the Politics of Possession in a Seventeenth-Century Convent
Author: Nicky Hallett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2017-11-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351143026

Presenting a remarkable set of previously unpublished papers, this book concerns the bewitchment, possession and exorcism of two seventeenth-century nuns living in exile in an English convent in the Spanish Netherlands. The two women left behind an extensive set of personal writing that reveals unprecedented detail about their devotional lives and spiritual states before, during and after exorcism. Unlike other similar cases, here the women write for themselves; for the first time in 350 years this book allows their voices - and their silences - to resound in all their vibrancy. An extensive introduction discusses the politics of piety and possession at a time when exorcism had become increasingly contentious, amidst conflicting claims for rival church reform. The book includes both autobiographical and biographical material, written by the nuns and about them, and casting new light on processes of female self-writing at just the time when the 'modern subject' is often said to have emerged.

English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800, Part I, vol 2

English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800, Part I, vol 2
Author: Caroline Bowden
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 467
Release: 2024-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040250076

Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns’ writings from this time form a unique resource.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion
Author: Andrew Hiscock
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 937
Release: 2017-07-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191653438

This pioneering Handbook offers a comprehensive consideration of the dynamic relationship between English literature and religion in the early modern period. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the most turbulent times in the history of the British church and, perhaps as a result, produced some of the greatest devotional poetry, sermons, polemics, and epics of literature in English. The early-modern interaction of rhetoric and faith is addressed in thirty-nine chapters of original research, divided into five sections. The first analyses the changes within the church from the Reformation to the establishment of the Church of England, the phenomenon of puritanism and the rise of non-conformity. The second section discusses ten genres in which faith was explored, including poetry, prophecy, drama, sermons, satire, and autobiographical writings. The middle section focuses on selected individual authors, among them Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton. Since authors never write in isolation, the fourth section examines a range of communities in which writers interpreted their faith: lay and religious households, sectarian groups including the Quakers, clusters of religious exiles, Jewish and Islamic communities, and those who settled in the new world. Finally, the fifth section considers some key topics and debates in early modern religious literature, ranging from ideas of authority and the relationship of body and soul, to death, judgment, and eternity. The Handbook is framed by a succinct introduction, a chronology of religious and literary landmarks, a guide for new researchers in this field, and a full bibliography of primary and secondary texts relating to early modern English literature and religion.

Elizabeth Tyrwhit's Morning and Evening Prayers

Elizabeth Tyrwhit's Morning and Evening Prayers
Author: Susan M. Felch
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2017-05-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351940872

In 1574, Christopher Barker published a volume of prayers and poems collected and composed by Elizabeth Tyrwhit, an intimate member of Katherine Parr's circle, governess to the princess Elizabeth, wife of a Tudor court functionary, and a wealthy widow. Later, Tyrwhit's Morning and Evening Prayers was selected by Thomas Bentley to be republished in his 1582 compilation of devotional works, The Monument of Matrones. This volume presents critical, old-spelling editions of both versions of Morning and Evening Prayers. Placing them side by side, Susan Felch discloses that the second version contains nearly a quarter more material that the first, and is organized quite differently. Felch convincingly argues that the additional material and revised arrangement of the longer version are likely copied direct from another, no longer extant authorial version, either printed or manuscript. In the volume's introduction, Felch provides background on Tyrwhit's life and family, including new information unearthed in her research; and sets Tyrwhit's work within the context of sixteenth- century English prayerbooks. Felch here posits that Tyrwhit's reorganization and framing of traditional material indicates her own considerable creativity. The Textual Notes and Appendix A compare the 1574 and 1582 versions and identify the source texts from which Tyrwhit derives her prayers and poems. The edition is completed by an autograph note by Tyrwhit; a discussion of the Tyrwhit family connections, and several versions of the rhymed Hours of the Cross as background to Tyrwhit's rendition entitled, 'An Hymne of the Passion of Christ'.

Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain
Author: Alexandra Walsham
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 509
Release: 2016-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317169247

The survival and revival of Roman Catholicism in post-Reformation Britain remains the subject of lively debate. This volume examines key aspects of the evolution and experience of the Catholic communities of these Protestant kingdoms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rejecting an earlier preoccupation with recusants and martyrs, it highlights the importance of those who exhibited varying degrees of conformity with the ecclesiastical establishment and explores the moral and political dilemmas that confronted the clergy and laity. It reassesses the significance of the Counter Reformation mission as an evangelical enterprise; analyses its communication strategies and its impact on popular piety; and illuminates how Catholic ritual life creatively adapted itself to a climate of repression. Reacting sharply against the insularity of many previous accounts, this book investigates developments in the British Isles in relation to wider international initiatives for the renewal of the Catholic faith in Europe and for its plantation overseas. It emphasises the reciprocal interaction between Catholicism and anti-Catholicism throughout the period and casts fresh light on the nature of interconfessional relations in a pluralistic society. It argues that persecution and suffering paradoxically both constrained and facilitated the resurgence of the Church of Rome. They presented challenges and fostered internal frictions, but they also catalysed the process of religious identity formation and imbued English, Welsh and Scottish Catholicism with peculiar dynamism. Prefaced by an extensive new historiographical overview, this collection brings together a selection of Alexandra Walsham's essays written over the last fifteen years, fully revised and updated to reflect recent research in this flourishing field. Collectively these make a major contribution to our understanding of minority Catholicism and the Counter Reformation in the era after the Council of Trent.

Religion, Culture and National Community in the 1670s

Religion, Culture and National Community in the 1670s
Author: Tony Claydon
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2011-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1783164638

A significant collection of essays by leading scholars on the vital decade of the 1670s in Britain, Ireland and North America. This was a period of profound tension and uncertainty (culminating in the exclusion crisis of 1678-83),, in which the 1660s restoration settlement began to break down, and debates came to seem much more complex and ambiguous than the earlier simple polarity between royalist Anglicanism and a radical, non-conformist opposition. New issues included the disturbing prospect of open catholicism at court, realisation that religious dissent would not simply be persecuted out of existence, confusion over the correct response to the rise of Louis XIV’s France on the continent, the evident emergence of public opinion in the form of the press and coffee house culture;, new questions about the proper relationship between England, Ireland, Scotland and the North American colonies, and refashionings of national identities connected to all these issues. These essays explore the political, cultural and religious turbulence which resulted; and break new ground in the interdisciplinary study of the newly confusing, but highly innovative world. Taken together they suggest the 1670s was a crucial period in the emergence of ‘modern’ assumptions and concerns.

The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600-1800

The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600-1800
Author: Nicky Hallett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2016-03-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317016327

Offering a comprehensive analysis of newly-uncovered manuscripts from two English convents near Antwerp, this study gives unprecedented insight into the role of the senses in enclosed religious communities during the period 1600-1800. It draws on a range of previously unpublished writings-chronicles, confessions, letters, poetry, personal testimony of various kinds-to explore and challenge assumptions about sensory origins. Author Nicky Hallett undertakes an interdisciplinary investigation of a range of documents compiled by English nuns in exile in northern Europe. She analyzes vivid accounts they left of the spaces they inhabited and of their sensory architecture: the smells of corridors, of diseased and dying bodies, the sights and sounds of civic and community life, its textures and tastes; their understanding of it in the light of devotional discipline. This is material culture in the raw, providing access to a well-defined locale and the conditions that shaped sensory experience and understanding. Hallett examines the relationships between somatic and religious enclosure, and the role of the senses in devotional discipline and practice, considering the ways in which the women adapted to the austerities of convent life after childhoods in domestic households. She considers the enduring effects of habitus, in Bourdieu's terms the residue of socialised subjectivity which was (or was not) transferred to a contemplative career. To this discussion, she injects literary and cultural comparisons, considering inter alia how writers of fiction, and of domestic and devotional conduct books, represent the senses, and how the nuns' own reading shaped their personal knowledge. The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600-1800 opens fresh comparative perspectives on the Catholic domestic household as well as the convent, and on relationships between English and European philosophy, rhetorical, medical and devotional discourse.

After Taste

After Taste
Author: Slavko Kacunko
Publisher: via tolino media
Total Pages: 855
Release: 2021-06-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3752147725

After Taste is an inquiry into a field of study dedicated to the reconsideration, reconstruction and rehabilitation of the concept of Taste. Taste is the category, whose systematic, historical and actual dimensions have traditionally been located in a variety of disciplines. The actuality and potential of the study is based on a variety of collected facts from readings and experiences, which materialize in the following features: One concept (figurative Taste), two thinking traditions (analytic and synthetic/continental) and three interrelated dimensions (systematic, historic and actual) are presented in three parts or volumes. As such, the study presents a salient comprehensive companion for wider readership of humanities approaching conceptions of Taste for the first time. Moreover, After Taste is intended for anyone who hopes to make a further contribution to the subject. Since its appearance and apparently short triumph some 250 years ago, the concept of non-literary Taste remained the linchpin of aesthetic theory and practice, but also a category outreaching aesthetics. Taste as the personal unity of the production, theory and criticism of art and literature, which was still largely taken as a given in the eighteenth century, has meanwhile given way to a highly-differentiated art world, in which aesthetic discourse is placed in such a way that it can seemingly no longer have a conceptual or linguistic effect on general opinion making. After Taste fills the gaps of systematic research by a comprehensive tracing of the emergence of the doctrines, discourses and disciplinary dimensions of Taste up to the peak of its systematic and historical trajectory in the eighteenth century and onwards into the present day. The guiding goal is a post-disciplinary rehabilitation of the contested category as a preparation for its productive usage in emerging academic and popular contexts. It shows how the category of Taste became the foundation, legitimation and the catalyst for the emerging division of labour, faculties and disciplines, confirming the hypothesis of the immense impact and actuality of Taste in the contemporary world.

English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800, Part I, vol 1

English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800, Part I, vol 1
Author: Caroline Bowden
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2024-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040244564

Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns’ writings from this time form a unique resource.