The impetus of religious reform between ca. 1380-1520, which expressed itself in a variety of Observant initiatives in many religious orders all over Europe, and also brought forth the Devotio moderna movement in the late medieval Low Countries, had considerable repercussions for the production of a wide range of religious texts, and the embrace of other forms of cultural production (scribal activities, liturgical innovations, art, music, religious architecture). At the same time, the very impetus of reform within late medieval religious orders and the wish to return to a more modest religious lifestyle in accordance with monastic and mendicant rules, and ultimately with the commands of Christ in the Gospel, made it difficult to wholeheartedly embrace the material consequences of learning, literary and artistic prowess, as the very pursuit of such pursuits ran against basic demands of evangelical poverty and humility. This volume explores how this tension was negotiated in various Observant and Devotio moderna contexts, and how communities connected with these movements instrumentalized various types of writing, learning, and other forms of cultural expression to further the cause of religious reform, defend it against order-internal and external criticism, to shape recognizable reform identities for themselves, and to transform religious life in society as a whole.

Bodies beyond Labels explores moments of joy and joyful expressions of self-identity, intimacy, sexuality, affect, friendship, social relationships, and religiosity in imperial Spanish cultures, a period when embodiments of such joy were shadowed by comparatively more constrictive social conventions. Viewed in this manner, joy frames historic references to gender, sexuality, and present-day concepts of queerness through homoeroticism, non-labelled bodies, gender fluidity, and performativity. This collection reveals diverse glimmers of joy through a variety of genres, including plays, poems, novels, autobiographies, biblical narratives, and civil law texts, among others. The book is divided into five categories: theatrical works that use mythology to enjoy themes of homoeroticism; narrative prose and visual arts that reveal public and private homoerotic expressions; scopophilia within garden and museum spaces that make possible joyous observations of non-labelled and non-corporeal bodies; biblical narratives and epistolary works that signal religious transgressions of gender and friendship; and sexual geographies explored in historic and legal documents. As new generations develop more nuanced senses of gender and sexual identities, Bodies beyond Labels strives to provide new academic optics, as framed by non-labelled bodies, queer theorizations, joy in unexpected places, and the light that has historically (re)emerged from the shadows.

The Observant Movement was a widespread effort to reform religious life across Europe. It took root around 1400, and for a century and more thereafter it inspired or shaped much that became central to European religion and culture. The Observants produced many of the leading religious figures of the later Middle Ages—Catherine of Siena, Bernardino of Siena and Savonarola in Italy, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros in Spain, and in Germany Martin Luther himself. This volume provides scholars with a current, synthetic introduction to the Observant Movement. Its essays also seek collectively to expand the horizons of our study of Observant reform, and to open new avenues for future scholarship. Contributors are Michael D. Bailey, Pietro Delcorno, Tamar Herzig, Anne Huijbers, James D. Mixson, Alison More, Carolyn Muessig, Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Bert Roest, Timothy Schmitz, and Gabriella Zarri.

Over the past three decades scholars have transformed the study of women and gender in early modern Europe. This Ashgate Research Companion presents an authoritative review of the current research on women and gender in early modern Europe from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The authors examine women’s lives, ideologies of gender, and the differences between ideology and reality through the recent research across many disciplines, including history, literary studies, art history, musicology, history of science and medicine, and religious studies. The book is intended as a resource for scholars and students of Europe in the early modern period, for those who are just beginning to explore these issues and this time period, as well as for scholars learning about aspects of the field in which they are not yet an expert. The companion offers not only a comprehensive examination of the current research on women in early modern Europe, but will act as a spark for new research in the field.

Through the exploration of nine common myths about the history and culture of early modern Europe, roughly 1350–1700, this book uses common assumptions to introduce newcomers to the period and its key figures, developments, and events. Many myths about early modern Europe originated in the 19th and 20th centuries and continue to appear today across popular media. In recent years, such popular documentaries and television shows as Game of Thrones have tended to reinforce what we think we know about the world during the early modern period. Early modern Europe birthed the modern world-just not in the way we think it did. This installment in the Facts and Fictions series utilizes primary sources to interrogate popular beliefs about early modern Europe and reveal the true story behind such movements and events as the Scientific Revolution, the Crusades, and the European witch hunts. Focusing on how perceptions of these events have shifted and evolved through history, this book is an excellent resource for students of this period as well as general readers interested in understanding what really happened during this time.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of Islamic studies find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated related. This ebook is a static version of an article from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation, a dynamic, continuously updated, online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of European history and culture between the 14th and 17th centuries. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibliographies.com.

The eleven chapters in this international volume draw on a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to focus our attention on medieval and early modern things (ca. 700–1600). The range of things includes actual objects (the Altenburg Crucifixion, a copy of Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Liber de arte distillandi, a pilgrim’s letter), imagined objects (a prayed cloak for the Virgin Mary), and narrative objects in texts (the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the Ordene de Chevalerie, Hartmann von Aue’s Erec, Heinrich of Neustadt’s Apollonius of Tyre, Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas, and the vita of Saint Guthlac). Each in its own way, the papers consider how things do what they do in texts and art, often foregrounding the intersection between the material and the immaterial by exploring such questions as how things act, how they express power, and how texts and images represent them. Medieval and early modern things are repeatedly shown to be more than symbolic or passive, they are agentive and determinative in both their intra- and extradiegetic worlds. The things that are addressed in this volume are varied and are embedded, or entangled, in different contexts and societies, and yet they share a concerted engagement in human life.

Zealots for souls draws attention to the impact of the Observant reforms within the Order of Preachers, and ambitiously stirs up a broad scope of questions pertaining to the institutional narratives produced within the order between c. 1388 and 1517. Through the narratives and the forms of remembrance they fostered, the author traces the development of contemporary characteristics of the Dominican self-understanding. The book shows the fluid boundaries between the genres (order chronicles, convent chronicles, collective biographies), highlights the interplay between the narrative and the intended audience, addresses the complex question of authorship, and assesses the indebtedness of 'modern' (printed) narratives to older chronicles or biographical collections. The book demonstrates that the majority of the extant institutional narratives were written by Observant Dominicans, who strived for the internal reform of their order. They wrote history to justify their own reform agenda and therefore produced invariably partisan chronicles. The work's method is widely applicable and contributes to further reassessment of institutional narratives as sources for the analysis of religious and intellectual transformations.

Examining correlations between the material and the mystical, this books investigates collective writing and devotional culture in late medieval piety.

An introduction to the Rules and Customaries of the main religious Orders in Medieval Europe: Benedictine, Cistercian, Carthusian, Augustinian, Premonstratensian, Templar, Hospitaller, Teutonic, Dominican, Franciscan, and Carmelite.