Stephen Conway
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199210855
- eISBN:
- 9780191725111
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199210855.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History
This chapter focuses on the sense of British and Irish Christians that they belonged to a wider European Christian community — based either on broad conceptions of Christian unity or on narrower ...
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This chapter focuses on the sense of British and Irish Christians that they belonged to a wider European Christian community — based either on broad conceptions of Christian unity or on narrower confessional allegiances. Consideration is first given to the continuing idea of ‘Christendom’, which seems periodically to have acted as an antidote to the more familiar sectarian conflicts between Catholics and Protestants and within Protestantism, especially when the Ottomans were seen as a threat to south eastern Euroope in the first decades of the period studied. The place of Britain and particularly Ireland within Catholic Europe is then examined. The next part of the chapter looks at the importance of the Protestant Interest, touched upon already in the context of British foreign policy, but here explored more fully as a force connecting Britain and Ireland with parts of the rest of Europe. The final section explores the impact of the French Revolution, which had the effect of reviving British and Irish support for Christian unity, both at home and across Europe.Less
This chapter focuses on the sense of British and Irish Christians that they belonged to a wider European Christian community — based either on broad conceptions of Christian unity or on narrower confessional allegiances. Consideration is first given to the continuing idea of ‘Christendom’, which seems periodically to have acted as an antidote to the more familiar sectarian conflicts between Catholics and Protestants and within Protestantism, especially when the Ottomans were seen as a threat to south eastern Euroope in the first decades of the period studied. The place of Britain and particularly Ireland within Catholic Europe is then examined. The next part of the chapter looks at the importance of the Protestant Interest, touched upon already in the context of British foreign policy, but here explored more fully as a force connecting Britain and Ireland with parts of the rest of Europe. The final section explores the impact of the French Revolution, which had the effect of reviving British and Irish support for Christian unity, both at home and across Europe.
Timothy S. Miller and John W. Nesbitt
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451355
- eISBN:
- 9780801470776
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451355.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Medieval History
Leprosy has afflicted humans for thousands of years. It wasn't until the twelfth century, however, that the dreaded disease entered the collective psyche of Western society, thanks to a frightening ...
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Leprosy has afflicted humans for thousands of years. It wasn't until the twelfth century, however, that the dreaded disease entered the collective psyche of Western society, thanks to a frightening epidemic that ravaged Catholic Europe. The Church responded by constructing charitable institutions called leprosariums to treat the rapidly expanding number of victims. As important as these events were, the book reminds us that the history of leprosy in the West is incomplete without also considering the Byzantine Empire, which confronted leprosy and its effects well before the Latin West. This book offers the first account of medieval leprosy that integrates the history of East and West. It challenges a number of misperceptions and myths about medieval attitudes toward leprosy (known today as Hansen's disease). It argues that ethical writings from the Byzantine world and from Catholic Europe never branded leprosy as punishment for sin; rather, theologians and moralists saw the disease as a mark of God's favor on those chosen for heaven. The stimulus to ban lepers from society and ultimately to persecute them came not from Christian influence but from Germanic customary law. Leprosariums were not prisons to punish lepers but were centers of care; some even provided both male and female residents the opportunity to govern their own communities under a form of written constitution. The book also includes three key Greek texts regarding leprosy (one of which has never been translated into English before).Less
Leprosy has afflicted humans for thousands of years. It wasn't until the twelfth century, however, that the dreaded disease entered the collective psyche of Western society, thanks to a frightening epidemic that ravaged Catholic Europe. The Church responded by constructing charitable institutions called leprosariums to treat the rapidly expanding number of victims. As important as these events were, the book reminds us that the history of leprosy in the West is incomplete without also considering the Byzantine Empire, which confronted leprosy and its effects well before the Latin West. This book offers the first account of medieval leprosy that integrates the history of East and West. It challenges a number of misperceptions and myths about medieval attitudes toward leprosy (known today as Hansen's disease). It argues that ethical writings from the Byzantine world and from Catholic Europe never branded leprosy as punishment for sin; rather, theologians and moralists saw the disease as a mark of God's favor on those chosen for heaven. The stimulus to ban lepers from society and ultimately to persecute them came not from Christian influence but from Germanic customary law. Leprosariums were not prisons to punish lepers but were centers of care; some even provided both male and female residents the opportunity to govern their own communities under a form of written constitution. The book also includes three key Greek texts regarding leprosy (one of which has never been translated into English before).
Menso Folkerts, Barnabas Hughes, Immo Warntjes, Menso Folkerts, Barnabas Hughes, Roi Wagner, and J. Lennart Berggren
Victor J. Katz (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780691156859
- eISBN:
- 9781400883202
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691156859.003.0002
- Subject:
- Mathematics, History of Mathematics
This chapter is about the mathematics that developed in Latin Catholic Europe, circa 800–1480. During this time, the quadrivium, a term which referred to the four subjects—arithmetic, geometry, ...
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This chapter is about the mathematics that developed in Latin Catholic Europe, circa 800–1480. During this time, the quadrivium, a term which referred to the four subjects—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—provided the template for the curricula of the first period of Latin mathematics. The second period, covered in the years 1140–1480, witnessed the birth of universities and the wealth of studies gathered and translated in Spain and Italy that would become much of the curricula for these institutions. Finally, the third period, which overlaps about half of the second, lasted 1300–1480. During this time, students learned abacus and algorism, as well as foreign exchange, geometry, and algebra. This type of education would flourish and spread throughout Italy and into the rest of Europe, thus setting the stage for the explosion of mathematics in the Renaissance.Less
This chapter is about the mathematics that developed in Latin Catholic Europe, circa 800–1480. During this time, the quadrivium, a term which referred to the four subjects—arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy—provided the template for the curricula of the first period of Latin mathematics. The second period, covered in the years 1140–1480, witnessed the birth of universities and the wealth of studies gathered and translated in Spain and Italy that would become much of the curricula for these institutions. Finally, the third period, which overlaps about half of the second, lasted 1300–1480. During this time, students learned abacus and algorism, as well as foreign exchange, geometry, and algebra. This type of education would flourish and spread throughout Italy and into the rest of Europe, thus setting the stage for the explosion of mathematics in the Renaissance.
Robert Hertz
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780520288423
- eISBN:
- 9780520963368
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520288423.003.0002
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Anthropology, Religion
The works of French sociologist Robert Hertz (1881–1915) are now staple readings in general anthropology. This study of the cult of a saint in the Italian Alps is lesser known than Hertz’s celebrated ...
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The works of French sociologist Robert Hertz (1881–1915) are now staple readings in general anthropology. This study of the cult of a saint in the Italian Alps is lesser known than Hertz’s celebrated essay on the symbolism of death and sin, “Death and the Right Hand” (1907), yet it remains a model of classic ethnography. Hertz was raised in a devout Parisian Jewish family, studied at the École Normale Supérieure under Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, and later became a critical member of the famous Année Sociologique group. The influence of the Année—its concern with theoretically driven, detailed, holistic, and integrative analyses of social phenomena—can be seen in his essay “Saint Besse: Étude d’un culte alpestre” (first published in 1913 in the French Revue de l’Histoire des Religions and translated into English in 1988).1 The essay is a painstaking, eloquent ethnohistory, locating Saint Besse intimately in divergent paths of regional history and local tradition, where Saint Besse’s shrine in a rocky Alpine overhang is, quite literally, embedded in the landscape. The essay portrays beautifully the independent spirit of popular Catholicism, especially in the flexibility of the hagiography of Saint Besse, which allows each community—whether mountain peasants or village dwellers, even church authorities—to lay claim to the saint through the qualities he is seen to manifest: the courage of a soldier, the moral stature of a bishop, and the devotion of a pious shepherd. The work is methodologically unorthodox for a Durkheimian, for Hertz not only draws on oral and archival sources, popular, local, and ecclesiastical traditions, but also has left his Parisian armchair for direct, “participant observation” in the field. In the Italian Alps, as elsewhere, a vibrant popular Catholicism evolves from pagan, telluric sources, sometimes articulating with official Catholicism, sometimes not. In typically Durkheimian fashion, Hertz describes the tremendous power of Saint Besse to knit together diverse communities of people morally and physically through collective religious devotion. In Hertz’s focus on Saint Besse as a material source and mediator of social identity we can read this work as a precursor to many other great ethnographies on Catholic saints (popular and more official), whether in Europe, Latin America, or elsewhere. But we can also read in the essay the political and moral vision of a socialist, activist—and Jewish—scholar who saw in a popular rural Catholic saint cult the vitality of community life that he might have seen as missing in his own social milieu of pre–World War I France.Less
The works of French sociologist Robert Hertz (1881–1915) are now staple readings in general anthropology. This study of the cult of a saint in the Italian Alps is lesser known than Hertz’s celebrated essay on the symbolism of death and sin, “Death and the Right Hand” (1907), yet it remains a model of classic ethnography. Hertz was raised in a devout Parisian Jewish family, studied at the École Normale Supérieure under Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, and later became a critical member of the famous Année Sociologique group. The influence of the Année—its concern with theoretically driven, detailed, holistic, and integrative analyses of social phenomena—can be seen in his essay “Saint Besse: Étude d’un culte alpestre” (first published in 1913 in the French Revue de l’Histoire des Religions and translated into English in 1988).1 The essay is a painstaking, eloquent ethnohistory, locating Saint Besse intimately in divergent paths of regional history and local tradition, where Saint Besse’s shrine in a rocky Alpine overhang is, quite literally, embedded in the landscape. The essay portrays beautifully the independent spirit of popular Catholicism, especially in the flexibility of the hagiography of Saint Besse, which allows each community—whether mountain peasants or village dwellers, even church authorities—to lay claim to the saint through the qualities he is seen to manifest: the courage of a soldier, the moral stature of a bishop, and the devotion of a pious shepherd. The work is methodologically unorthodox for a Durkheimian, for Hertz not only draws on oral and archival sources, popular, local, and ecclesiastical traditions, but also has left his Parisian armchair for direct, “participant observation” in the field. In the Italian Alps, as elsewhere, a vibrant popular Catholicism evolves from pagan, telluric sources, sometimes articulating with official Catholicism, sometimes not. In typically Durkheimian fashion, Hertz describes the tremendous power of Saint Besse to knit together diverse communities of people morally and physically through collective religious devotion. In Hertz’s focus on Saint Besse as a material source and mediator of social identity we can read this work as a precursor to many other great ethnographies on Catholic saints (popular and more official), whether in Europe, Latin America, or elsewhere. But we can also read in the essay the political and moral vision of a socialist, activist—and Jewish—scholar who saw in a popular rural Catholic saint cult the vitality of community life that he might have seen as missing in his own social milieu of pre–World War I France.
