One of the central and defining beliefs in late-medieval and early-modern spirituality was the notion of the formability of the religious self. Identified with the soul, the self was conceived, indeed experienced, not as an abstraction, but rather as an essential spiritual persona, as well as the intellectual and sensory center of a human being. This volume investigates the role played by images construed as formal and semantic variables - mental images, visual tropes and figures, pictorial and textual representations - in generating and sustaining processes of meditation that led the viewer or reader from outward perception to various forms of inward perception and spiritual discernment. The fifteen articles address the history of the soul as a cultural construct, an internal locus of self-formation where the divine is seen to dwell and the person may experience her/himself as a place inhabited by the spirit of God. Three central questions are approached from various disciplines: first, how was the self-contained soul created in God's likeness, yet stained by sin and as such susceptible both to destructive and redemptive forces, refashioned as a porous and malleable entity susceptible to metaphysical effects and human practices, such as self-investigation, meditative prayer, and other techniques of inwardness? Second, how did such practices constitutive of an inner liturgy prepare the soul - the anima, bride - for an encounter with God that trains, purifies, moulds, shapes, and transforms the religious self? Finally, in this process of self-reformation, how were images of place and space mobilized, how were loci found, and how did the soul come to see itself situated within these places mapped upon itself?

This study is an exploration of lived religion and gender across the Reformation, from the 14th–18th centuries. Combining conceptual development with empirical history, the authors explore these two topics via themes of power, agency, work, family, sainthood and witchcraft. By advancing the theoretical category of ‘experience’, Lived Religion and Gender reveals multiple femininities and masculinities in the intersectional context of lived religion. The authors analyse specific case studies from both medieval and early modern sources, such as secular court records, to tell the stories of both individuals and large social groups. By exploring lived religion and gender on a range of social levels including the domestic sphere, public devotion and spirituality, this study explains how late medieval and early modern people performed both religion and gender in ways that were vastly different from what ideologists have prescribed. Lived Religion and Gender covers a wide geographical area in western Europe including Italy, Scandinavia and Finland, making this study an invaluable resource for scholars and students concerned with the history of religion, the history of gender, the history of the family, as well as medieval and early modern European history. The Introduction chapter of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Domestic devotion has become an increasingly important area of research in recent years, with the publication of a number of significant studies on the early modern period in particular. This Special Issue aims to build on these works and to expand their range, both geographically and chronologically. This collection focuses on lived religion and the devotional practices found in the domestic settings of late medieval and early modern Europe. More particularly, it investigates the degree to which the experience of personal or familial religious practice in the domestic realm intersected with the more public expression of faith in liturgical or communal settings. Its broad geographical range (spanning northern, southern, central and eastern Europe) includes practices related to Christianity, Judaism and Islam. This Special Issue will be of interest to historians, art historians, medievalists, early modernists, historians of religion, anthropologists and theologians, as well as those interested in the history of material religious culture. It also offers important insights into research areas such as gender studies, histories of the emotions and histories of the senses.

Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England demonstrates that experiences of divine revelation, both biblical and contemporary, were central to late medieval and early modern English religion. The book sheds light on previously under-explored notions about divine revelation and the role these notions played in shaping large portions of English thought and belief. Bringing together a wide variety of source materials, from contemplative works and accounts of revelatory experiences to biblical commentaries, devotionals, and religious imagery, David J. Davis argues that in the period there was a collective representation of divine revelation as a source of human knowledge, which transcended other religious and intellectual divisions. Not only did most people think that divine revelation, through a ravishing encounter with God, was possible, but also divine revelation was understood to be the pinnacle of religious experience and a source of pure understanding. The book highlights a common discourse running through the sources that underpinned this collective representation of how human beings experienced the divine, and it demonstrates a continual effort across large swathes of English religion to prepare an individual's soul for an encounter with the divine, through different spiritual disciplines and devotional practices. Over a period of several centuries this discourse and the larger culture of revelation provided an essential structure and legitimacy both to contemporary claims of divine revelation and the biblical precedents that contemporary experiences were modelled after. This discourse detailed the physical, metaphysical, and epistemological features of how a human being was understood to experience divine revelation, providing a means to delimit and define what happened when an individual was rapture by God. Finally, the book situates the experience of revelation within the wider context of knowledge and identifies the ways that claims to divine revelation were legitimated as well as stigmatized based on this common understanding of the experience of rapture.

Dr Jennifer Welsh received her M.A. in Medieval Studies from Cornell University in 2000, and her M.A. and PhD in History from Duke University in 2004 and 2009. Her dissertation dealt with the cult of St. Anne in late medieval and early modern Europe. After four years as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, she started working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Lindenwood-University Belleville in Belleville, IL in August of 2014. This is her first book.

The notions of other peoples, cultures, and natural conditions have always been determined by the epistemology of imagination and fantasy, providing much freedom and creativity, and yet have also created much fear, anxiety, and horror. In this regard, the pre-modern world demonstrates striking parallels with our own insofar as the projections of alterity might be different by degrees, but they are fundamentally the same by content. Dreams, illusions, projections, concepts, hopes, utopias/dystopias, desires, and emotional attachments are as specific and impactful as the physical environment. This volume thus sheds important light on the various lenses used by people in the Middle Ages and the early modern age as to how they came to terms with their perceptions, images, and notions. Previous scholarship focused heavily on the history of mentality and history of emotions, whereas here the history of pre-modern imagination, and fantasy assumes center position. Imaginary things are taken seriously because medieval and early modern writers and artists clearly reveal their great significance in their works and their daily lives. This approach facilitates a new deep-structure analysis of pre-modern culture.

Katherine of Alexandria was a major object of devotion within medieval Europe, ranking second only to the Virgin Mary in the canon of female saints. Yet despite her undoubted importance, relatively little is known about the significance and function of her cult within the German-speaking territories that stood at the heart of Europe. Anne Simon's study adds a welcome new interdisciplinary perspective to the study of Saint Katherine and the wider ecclesiastical landscape of a medieval Europe poised on the edge of religious change. Taking as a case study the wealthy and politically influential merchant city of Nuremberg, this book draws on a wide variety of textual and visual sources to explore interrelated themes: the shaping of urban space through the cult of Saint Katherine; her role in the moulding and advertising patrician identity and alliances through cultural patronage; and patrician use of the saint to showcase the city's political, economic, cultural and religious importance at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire. Further , the book reveals the construction of exemplarity in Saint Katherine's legend and miracles and their resonance within the context of the city and the Dominican Convent of Saint Katherine, whose nuns came from the same status-aware, confident patrician elite that so loyally supported successive Emperors. Filling a significant gap in current research, the work has much to offer scholars of medieval history, hagiography, art history, German studies, cultural and urban studies. Hence it not only expands our understanding of Saint Katherine's importance in German-speaking territories, but also adds to the picture of her cult in its European perspective.

In recent years, writing on early-modern culture has turned from examining the upheavals of the Reformation as the ruptured birth of early modernity out of the late medieval towards a striking emphasis on processes of continuity, transition, and adaptation. No longer is the ‘religious’ seen as institutional or doctrinaire, but rather as a cultural and social phenomenon that exceeds the rigid parameters of modern definition. Recent analyses of early-modern cultures offer nuanced accounts that move beyond the limits of traditional historiography, and even the bounds of religious studies. At their centre is recognition that the scope of the religious can never be extricated from early-modern culture. Despite its many conflicts and tensions, the lingua franca for cultural self-understanding of the early-modern period remains ineluctably religious. The early-modern world wrestled with the radical challenges concerning the nature of belief within the confines of church or worship, but also beyond them. This process of negotiation was complex and fuelled European social dynamics. Without religion we cannot begin to comprehend the myriad facets of early-modern life, from markets, to new forms of art, to public and private associations. In discussions of images, the Eucharist, suicide, music, street lighting, or whether or not the sensible natural world represented an otherworldly divine, religion was the fundamental preoccupation of the age. Yet, even in contexts where unbelief might be considered, we find the religious providing the fundamental terminology for explicating the secular theories and views which sought to undermine it as a valid aspect of human life. This collection of essays takes up these themes in diverse ways. We move from the 15th century to the 18th, from the core problem of sacramental mediation of the divine within the strict parameters of eucharistic and devotional life, through discussion of images and iconoclasm, music and word, to more blurred contexts of death, street life, and atheism. Throughout the early-modern period, the very processes of adaption – even change itself – were framed by religious concepts and conceits.

The doctrine of the Incarnation was wellspring and catalyst for theories of images verbal, material, and spiritual. Section I, “Representing the Mystery of the Incarnation”, takes up questions about the representability of the mystery. Section II, “Imago Dei and the Incarnate Word”, investigates how Christ’s status as the image of God was seen to license images material and spiritual. Section III, “Literary Figurations of the Incarnation”, considers the verbal production of images contemplating the divine and human nature of Christ. Section IV, “Tranformative Analogies of Matter and Spirit”, delves into ways that material properties and processes, in their effects on the beholder, were analogized to Christ’s hypostasis. Section V, “Visualizing the Flesh of Christ”, considers the relation between the Incarnation and the Passion.

Ut pictura amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500-1700 examines the related themes of lovemaking and image-making in the visual arts of Europe, China, Japan, and Persia. The term ‘reflexive’ is here used to refer to images that invite reflection not only on their form, function, and meaning, but also on their genesis and mode of production. Early modern artists often fashioned reflexive images and effigies of this kind, that appraise love by exploring the lineaments of the pictorial or sculptural image, and complementarily, appraise the pictorial or sculptural image by exploring the nature of love. Hence the book’s epigraph—ut pictura amor—‘as is a picture, so is love’.