Maps Of Flesh And Light

This work offers interdisciplinary perspectives by women scholars on the diverse cultural contributions of medieval women mystics.

This book examines the broad varieties of religious belief, religious practices, and the influence of religion within medieval society. Religion in the Middle Ages was not monolithic. Medieval religion and the Latin Church are not synonymous. While theology and liturgy are important, an examination of animal trials, gargoyles, last judgments, various aspects of the medieval underworld, and the quest for salvation illuminate lesser known dimensions of religion in the Middle Ages. Several themes run throughout the book including visual culture, heresy and heretics, law and legal procedure, along with sexuality and an awareness of mentalities and anxieties. Although an expanse of 800 years has passed, the remains of those other Middle Ages can be seen today, forcing us to reassess our evaluations of this alluring and often overlooked past.

Lanzetta illuminates the transformative potential of the classical tradition of women mystics, especially in light of contemporary violence against women around the world. Focusing on the contemplative process as women's journey from oppression to liberation, Lanzetta draws especially on the mysticism of Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila. She lays out the contemplative techniques used by mystics to achieve their highest spiritual potential and also investigates how unjust social and political conditions afflict women's souls. Lanzetta identifies a specific historical female mystical path (the via feminina) and draws contemporary conclusions for how women might understand their bodies, their rights, and their ethics.

Texts by, for, and about preachers from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries reveal an intense interest in the preacher's human nature and its intersection with his "angelic" role. Far from simply denigrating embodiment or excluding it from consideration, these works recognize its centrality to the office of preacher and the ways in which preachers, like Christ, needed humanness to make their performance of doctrine effective for their audiences. At the same time, the texts warned of the preacher's susceptibility to the fleshly failings of lust, vainglory, deception, and greed. Preaching's problematic juxtaposition of the earthly and the spiritual made images of women preachers, real and fictional, key to understanding and exploiting the power, as well as the dangers, of the feminized flesh. Addressing the underexamined bodies of the clergy in light of both medieval and modern discussions of female authority and the body of Christ in medieval culture, Angels and Earthly Creatures reinserts women into the history of preaching and brings together discourses that would have been intertwined in the Middle Ages but are often treated separately by scholars. The examination of handbooks for preachers as literary texts also demonstrates their extensive interaction with secular literary traditions, explored here with particular reference to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Through a close and insightful reading of a wide variety of texts and figures, including Hildegard of Bingen, Birgitta of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena, Waters offers an original examination of the preacher's unique role as an intermediary—standing between heaven and earth, between God and people, participating in and responsible to both sides of that divide.

This book begins with a pointed critique of the foundations of the understanding of Western music: that music from Pythagoras to the Renaissance has been viewed as the source and model of order in the universe and in society. Unfortunately that order was rigidly hierarchical, so that over the centuries music reinforced established social prejudices, particularly those against women. Nowhere was this more evident than in religious music that was regarded by male ecclesiastics and scholars as the instrument of choice for taming hysterical female eruptions. Through her mordant commentary on a rich selection of texts by major thinkers from two millennia of Christian theology, Heidi Epstein shows in the first part of Melting the Venusberg that music as the erotic embodiment of human engenderment has been ignored or suppressed, while music as the expression of transcendent harmony, order, and restraint has been extolled. The second re-constructive part of Melting the Venusberg draws on ignored sources and lost tropes from the Christian tradition as well as on insights from the music and thought of historical and contemporary woman composers and performers from Hildegard of Bingen and Lucrezia Vizzana to Rosetta Tharpe and Diamanda Galas. Through this recuperative synthesis, music's theological significance changes keys, as it moves beyond its symbolic function as divinely ordained, harmonious microcosm into more dissonant metaphorical registers. Those who have ears to hear will be delighted.

Winner of the 2018 Louise de Kiriline Lawrence Award for Nonfiction Longlisted for the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize Shortlisted for the 2018 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction The sweeping, epic story of the mysterious land that came to be called “Canada” like it’s never been told before. Every map tells a story. And every map has a purpose--it invites us to go somewhere we've never been. It’s an account of what we know, but also a trace of what we long for. Ten Maps conjures the world as it appeared to those who were called upon to map it. What would the new world look like to wandering Vikings, who thought they had drifted into a land of mythical creatures, or Samuel de Champlain, who had no idea of the vastness of the landmass just beyond the treeline? Adam Shoalts, one of Canada’s foremost explorers, tells the stories behind these centuries old maps, and how they came to shape what became “Canada.” It’s a story that will surprise readers, and reveal the Canada we never knew was hidden. It brings to life the characters and the bloody disputes that forged our history, by showing us what the world looked like before it entered the history books. Combining storytelling, cartography, geography, archaeology and of course history, this book shows us Canada in a way we've never seen it before.

The first book in the CG Challenge series featuring the artwork and techniques of artists participating the online CG Challenges.