Images Of Miraculous Healing In The Early Modern Netherlands

Barbara Kaminska argues that visual imagery was central to premodern disability discourses and shows how interpretations of miracle stories served to justify expectations toward the impaired and the poor.

This volume contains twenty-four essays, which, in their subjects and methodology, pay tribute to the scholarship of Walter S. Melion. The contributions are grouped under three categories: “Devotion,” “Art and Image Theory,” and “Vision and Contemplation.” The Devotion section addresses votive practices, theological theory and polemic literature. The Art and Image Theory section focuses on Jesuit image theory, the reflexive dimension of works, and artists’ reflections on the function of images. Finally, the Vision and Contemplation section discusses the ‘early modern eye’ as a tool for thoughtful, prolonged looking to ascertain visual wit, deception, self-assessment and friendship, sacred and profane allegories.

Investigates the political and spiritual agenda behind monumental paintings of Christ's miracles in late Byzantine churches.

Why was Jesus, who said "I judge no one," put to death for a political crime? Of course, this is a historical question--but it is not only historical. Jesus's life became a philosophical theme in the first centuries of our era, when "pagan" and Christian philosophers clashed over the meaning of his sayings and the significance of his death. Modern philosophers, too, such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, have tried to retrace the arc of Jesus's life and death. I Judge No One is a philosophical reading of the four memoirs, or "gospels," that were fashioned by early Christ-believers and collected in the New Testament. It offers original ways of seeing a deeply enigmatic figure who calls himself the Son of Man. David Lloyd Dusenbury suggests that Jesus offered his contemporaries a scandalous double claim. First, that human judgements are pervasive and deceptive; and second, that even divine laws can only be fulfilled in the human experience of love. Though his life led inexorably to a grim political death, what Jesus's sayings revealed--and still reveal--is that our highest desires lie beyond the political.

Miraculous Images and Votive Offerings in Mexico explores such petitionary devotion in depth through extensive fieldwork supported by research in a vast body of interdisciplinary scholarship. The study's principal themes include sacred power and human agency, reification, projective animation, faith as a cognitive filter, sacred power transfer, social and narrative construction, positive framing, collaborative and deferred control, vows (juramentos), and miracle attribution. --Publisher description.

This book discusses the early modern engagement with books that survived intentional or accidental fire in Lutheran Germany. From the 1620s until the middle of the eighteenth century, unburnt books became an attraction for princes, publishers, clergymen, and some laymen. To cope with an event that seemed counter-intuitive and possibly supernatural, contemporaries preserved these books, narrated their survival, and discussed their significance. This book demonstrates how early modern Europeans, no longer bound to traditional medieval religion, yet not accustomed to modern scientific ways of thinking, engaged with a natural phenomenon that was not uncommon and yet seemed to defy common sense.

Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine the intersection, conflict, and confluence of religion and the market before 1700. Each chapter analyzes the unique interplay of faith and economy in a different locale: Syria, Ethiopia, France, Iceland, India, Peru, and beyond. In ten case studies, specialists of archaeology, art history, social and economic history, religious studies, and critical theory address issues of secularization, tolerance, colonialism, and race with a fresh focus. They chart the tensions between religious and economic thought in specific locales or texts, the complex ways that religion and economy interacted with one another, and the way in which matters of faith, economy, and race converge in religious images of the pre- and early modern periods. Considering the intersection of faith and economy, the volume questions the legacy of early modern economic and spiritual exceptionalism, and the ways in which prosperity still entangles itself with righteousness. The interdisciplinary nature means that this volume is the perfect resource for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars working across multiple areas including history, literature, politics, art history, global studies, philosophy, and gender studies in the medieval and early modern periods.