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The Life and Afterlife of Qisha Canon (Qishazang 磧砂藏‎)

Lucille Chia

in Spreading Buddha's Word in East Asia: The Formation and Transformation of the Chinese Buddhist Canon

Chapter 6 delineates the contour of the history of Qisha Canon and its relation to various donor groups.

From Old Worlds to New

Sarah A. Curtis

in Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire

This chapter introduces missionary Philippine Duchesne, who entered a cloistered Visitation convent in Grenoble in 1787. Forced to leave because of the Revolution, she joined the Religious of the ... More

This chapter introduces missionary Philippine Duchesne, who entered a cloistered Visitation convent in Grenoble in 1787. Forced to leave because of the Revolution, she joined the Religious of the Sacred Heart (RSCJ) in order to re‐Christianize France through the education of girls. She also developed a missionary vocation, finally realized with her departure for Missouri in 1818. The chapter contrasts the cloistered religious life in the Visitation with the active apostolic life in the RSCJ. It also explores the choices open to women religious expelled from their convents during the French Revolution and the development of a missionary vocation for women modeled on that of Marie de l'Incarnation and the Canadian Ursulines in the seventeenth century.Less

Impermanent Burials: Relic Deposits

Sonya S. Lee

in Surviving Nirvana: Death of the Buddha in Chinese Visual Culture

This chapter discusses the appearance of the nirvana image in relic deposits of the tenth to twelfth centuries which marks the final episode in the account of the motif's development in medieval ... More

This chapter discusses the appearance of the nirvana image in relic deposits of the tenth to twelfth centuries which marks the final episode in the account of the motif's development in medieval China. It examines the two important finds from the late tenth century in Dingzhou, Hebei. In addition to being a surface décor on some of the metal and stone containers in the deposit assemblage, the nirvana motif also figured prominently in the underground structures respectively at Jingzhi Monastery and Jingzhong Cloister in the form of painted murals. It discusses the viewership and the very act of seeing the nirvana image in the hidden space of relic deposits.Less

Introduction

Joan Greatrex

in The English Benedictine Cathedral Priories: Rule and Practice, c. 1270-1420

This chapter provides the general historical background to this study of monastic life in the nine English cathedral priories in the fourteenth century. It includes a detailed survey of the physical ... More

This chapter provides the general historical background to this study of monastic life in the nine English cathedral priories in the fourteenth century. It includes a detailed survey of the physical layout of their monastic precincts, drawing attention to their similarities and differences. This is followed by a section devoted to some general observations about the names and family origins of the members of these monastic communities together with some statistical information regarding the fluctuations in numbers during the period under study.Less

From Beijing to Jiangnan: Ziyong Chengru

Beata Grant

in Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China

This chapter focuses on Chan master Ziying Chengru. It was on Mount Wutai that she met Chan master Gulu Fan, the monk under whom she would receive Dharma transmission. In her brief description of her ... More

This chapter focuses on Chan master Ziying Chengru. It was on Mount Wutai that she met Chan master Gulu Fan, the monk under whom she would receive Dharma transmission. In her brief description of her meeting with Gulu Fan, she mentioned being tested on Linji’s “three painful blows and his three mysteries and three essentials” and being asked to produce a gatha (religious poem) to demonstrate her understanding of these. She eventually became one of Gulu Fan’s official Dharma successors, and in 1691, she was named abbess of the Eternal Glory Chan Cloister in Beijing. She also served at several other convents in the imperial city, including the Vast Benevolence Convent and the Eternal Life Chan Cloister.Less

Books for the Seeker: Liberal Religion and the Literary Marketplace in the 1990s

Erin A. Smith

in What Would Jesus Read?: Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America

This chapter examines some of the best-selling mainstream religion/spirituality titles of the 1990s in light of increasing numbers of self-reported “spiritual seekers”—individuals with fluid, dynamic ... More

This chapter examines some of the best-selling mainstream religion/spirituality titles of the 1990s in light of increasing numbers of self-reported “spiritual seekers”—individuals with fluid, dynamic religious styles who move freely in and out of congregations across the life course, cobbling together a set of spiritual practices by combining elements of various traditions. In particular, it looks at Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul (1992), Karen Armstrong's A History of God (1993), Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk (1996), and Jack Miles's God: A Biography (1996), along with reviews by their readers on Amazon. These religious books have served as resources for spiritual seekers crafting their own religious identity narratives by modeling the formation of alternative spiritual faiths outside formal religious institutions, responding to the ills of consumer culture and consumer capitalism, and celebrating literary or poetic ways of being in the world.Less

An Estranged Wilderness

Sara Ritchey

in Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity

This chapter examines the relationship of natural metaphors to their literal referents in the material world by focusing on the status of the wilderness in later medieval Carthusian devotion. It ... More

This chapter examines the relationship of natural metaphors to their literal referents in the material world by focusing on the status of the wilderness in later medieval Carthusian devotion. It first considers the imaginative theology of speculation offered by the Dominican friar Henry Suso before turning to two Carthusian instructional treatises on speculation: the Vita Jesu Christi of Ludolph of Saxony and the anonymously authored poem The Desert of Religion. It then discusses the ways that these Carthusian treatises of spiritual instruction demonstrate an uneasy relationship to the real, material world and an uncertainty as to how the professed religious might properly regard it with trained meditative eyes. These and a number of other Carthusian devotional treatises represent a pivotal moment in the operation of speculation of the natural world. This chapter also describes the cloister architecture of the later medieval Carthusians.Less

A Woman for the West Mother Katharine Drexel

Anne M. Butler

in Across God's Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920

This chapter presents a biographic sketch of Mother Katharine Drexel, a woman from the cloister who shaped entire segments of Catholic education in the American South and the American West. It ... More

This chapter presents a biographic sketch of Mother Katharine Drexel, a woman from the cloister who shaped entire segments of Catholic education in the American South and the American West. It discusses her early life, early initiatives, her search for a religious congregation, and her founding of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People.Less

Introduction

Dipesh Chakrabarty

in The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth

The Introduction explains why and how this book came to be written and introduces Sarkar and Sardesai, the two main historians at the center of the narrative. It situates their historiographical ... More

The Introduction explains why and how this book came to be written and introduces Sarkar and Sardesai, the two main historians at the center of the narrative. It situates their historiographical endeavours and debates with their contemporaries on historical methods within some general propositions regarding the tensions that characterize what may be described as the two lives of the academic discipline of history: its regulated life in educational and research institutions (described here as the discipline’s “cloistered” life); and its relatively unregulated life in the world of “amateur” historians, here described as history’s “public life.” From a general discussion of the distinction proposed between the “public” and “cloistered” lives of all social-science disciplines, this section argues that history remains specifically vulnerable to the pressures emanating from its “public life,” and proposes that methodological debates in history should be viewed not only in their own abstract terms but also in the context of the tensions that exist between the two lives of the discipline, something that varies across time and geographical regions. This section also explains the colonial context in which Sarkar and other nationalist-minded Indian historians debated various versions of history in public, which shaped the academic discipline of history.Less

Superstition in Court and Cloister

Michael D. Bailey

in Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe

This chapter examines the heightened debate about two broad categories of superstition that emerged from courts and university cloisters in the fourteenth century. The first category concerns what we ... More

This chapter examines the heightened debate about two broad categories of superstition that emerged from courts and university cloisters in the fourteenth century. The first category concerns what we might view as the mainly religious errors of demonic sorcery. The second involves certain seemingly more scientific errors associated with astrology. Such divisions are blurry at best when applied to the Middle Ages, since many authorities maintained that faulty and hence superstitious astrology could open the door to malevolent demonic influence, while rigorous scholastic understandings of demonic sorcery regularly situated demonic power within a physical world governed by Aristotelian natural philosophy. Nevertheless, the chapter argues that while the boundaries between these two kinds of superstition were fragile and permeable, they showed some signs of strengthening during the 1300s.Less

Exporting Peace: Ecclesiology and Evangelism

Jehangir Yezdi Malegam

in The Sleep of Behemoth: Disputing Peace and Violence in Medieval Europe, 1000-1200

This chapter chronicles the struggle of early twelfth-century churchmen in making sense of the definition and place of secular activities; the tension between a universal community and an unblemished ... More

This chapter chronicles the struggle of early twelfth-century churchmen in making sense of the definition and place of secular activities; the tension between a universal community and an unblemished one; the sense of living through significant events of salvation history rather than after them, and the corresponding need to fashion the present according to the demands of scriptural past and future. Canonial movements sought a more active component to the regular life and thus worked to dismantle incompatibilities between the cloister and ministry. New groups emerged around a variety of approaches to “living well,” defined broadly as living in imitation of the apostles. It had become necessary for the clergy to demonstrate that while secular engagement would not disrupt the peace of the church, conveyance of the true peace to the world must be a disruptive process that exploited secular instruments such as carnal seduction, emotional assault, and physical force.Less

Subjective Desires: The Role of the Catholic Family Romance in The Nun's Story (1959)

Maureen Sabine

in Veiled Desires: Intimate Portrayals of Nuns in Postwar Anglo-American Film

Chapter 3 focuses exclusively on The Nun's Story, a film which still polarizes viewers more than fifty years after its debut. Feminist cultural critics have found it especially hard to sympathize ... More

Chapter 3 focuses exclusively on The Nun's Story, a film which still polarizes viewers more than fifty years after its debut. Feminist cultural critics have found it especially hard to sympathize with the inner spiritual drama of the film's conflicted protagonist Sister Luke or appreciate the all-time great film performance of Audrey Hepburn; and this chapter suggests that their animus stems from political hostility to the nun's struggles with the religious vow of unquestioning obedience. It argues that the nun has internalized an alternative code of obedience deriving from the history of her Catholic family romance, that is to say, her lifelong devotion to a loving and approving doctor father, and her core desire to emulate him professionally. It details the conflict Sister Luke experiences between her original family romance and the Catholic romance of the cloister with its surrogate family structure, and between her professional desire to do the nursing work she loves in the Congo and her religious desire to become the perfect nun her order wants her to be.Less

Sacred Desires: Passion and Pathology in in this House of Brede (1975) and Agnes of God (1985)

Maureen Sabine

in Veiled Desires: Intimate Portrayals of Nuns in Postwar Anglo-American Film

Chapter 5 considers why it should be that, in contrast to The Nun's Story, In This House of Brede and Agnes of God pathologize the intense mother-daughter relationships that bloom in the ... More

Chapter 5 considers why it should be that, in contrast to The Nun's Story, In This House of Brede and Agnes of God pathologize the intense mother-daughter relationships that bloom in the pseudo-family culture of the cloister. It suggests that the male filmmakers may have imagined the the claustral space as a claustrophic extension of the female emotional world of the home; and it reads the films against a Freudian discourse of psychosexual and gender tension in the oedipal family. It shows the ways in which the artistic input of women such as the novelist Rumer Godden who wrote In This House of Brede, the actress Diana Rigg who played the principal nun in the film version of Godden's novel and a French missionary superior thirty years later in The Painted Veil (2006), and the movie star activist Jane Fonda as forensic psychiatrist Dr. Martha Livingston in Agnes of God, open up alternative readings of passionate desire in these films.Less

Material Visions: Artifacts in Community Contexts

Stacy C. Kozakavich

in The Archaeology of Utopian and Intentional Communities

Artifacts made, bought, and used within past intentional communities demand careful interpretation. They may reaffirm or challenge our long-held ideas about a group, and as mute witnesses to the past ... More

Artifacts made, bought, and used within past intentional communities demand careful interpretation. They may reaffirm or challenge our long-held ideas about a group, and as mute witnesses to the past can invite conflicting views among scholars and community descendants. This chapter spans the volume's widest temporal range, from eighteenth-century ceramics and food remains left by Pennsylvania's Ephrata Cloister to twentieth-century vinyl records listened to by members of California's Chosen Family. Examples from the Shakers, Harmonists, and Moravians demonstrate the importance of building community-specific contexts of interpretation that are sensitive to differences between individual groups as well as temporal changes within long-lived communities.Less

Separation, Empowerment, and Flight from Pennsylvania

Aaron Spencer Fogleman

in Two Troubled Souls: An Eighteenth-Century Couple's Spiritual Journey in the Atlantic World

This chapter presents a story included in the Chronicon Ephratense about the return of “John Reignier” to the celibate cloister from 1762 to 1765, this time with his wife. Georg Conrad Beissel, now ... More

This chapter presents a story included in the Chronicon Ephratense about the return of “John Reignier” to the celibate cloister from 1762 to 1765, this time with his wife. Georg Conrad Beissel, now seventy-one years old, was still the leader of the cloister when Reynier returned. Beissel placed Reynier's “Delilah” in the sisters' convent, which pleased Reynier, who joined the brothers' convent. Soon, however, his wife regretted the separation and demanded that he come to her for sex. Reynier complied, against his will, and the shock of the experience drove him to madness for the second time in the cloister. When he recovered, Reynier's old hatred for Beissel returned, and he began once again to slander and tell lies, now about the “whoredom” that took place in the cloister.Less

The Media of Sensation

Niklaus Largier

in Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader

This chapter discusses the significance of medieval practices of prayer both for the modern rediscovery of media and for the anthropology of sensation. It demonstrates how medieval theories of ... More

This chapter discusses the significance of medieval practices of prayer both for the modern rediscovery of media and for the anthropology of sensation. It demonstrates how medieval theories of reading, prayer, and contemplation thematize ways in which specific media—words, images, and music—are to be used in order to produce sensual and affective cognition. In doing so, these theories develop a sophisticated understanding of media on one side, and a specific understanding of the human soul as a sphere of evocation of possible sensation and affect on the other side. In working through this complex intersection of media and soul-formation I focus on this very notion of possibility, its significance in the context of an ‘anthropology of Catholicism’, and its presence in catholic discourses from the Middle Ages up to the twentieth century. Through discussion of the source texts an understanding of the seemingly established anthropological distinction between “inner man” and “outer man,” “interiority” and “exteriority” is challenged and what remains is a radically different way of thinking about interiority.Less

Passing on the Lamp: The Dharma Successors of Qiyuan Xinggang

Beata Grant

in Eminent Nuns: Women Chan Masters of Seventeenth-Century China

This chapter focuses on Qiyuan Xinggang’s Dharma successors. Qiyuan Xinggang had seven officially designated Dharma heirs, although many more disciples either lived at the Lion-Subduing Chan Cloister ... More

This chapter focuses on Qiyuan Xinggang’s Dharma successors. Qiyuan Xinggang had seven officially designated Dharma heirs, although many more disciples either lived at the Lion-Subduing Chan Cloister or spent time with her on retreat. Of these seven, Yikui Chaochen is the most well-known; she was the author of Qiyuan Xinggang’s biography. Meanwhile, Yigong Chaoke was one of the two nuns charged with the leadership of the Lion-Subduing Chan Cloister after Qiyuan Xinggang’s death. The remaining five Dharma heirs include Yichuan Chaolang, the other nun summoned to take over the leadership of the Lion-Subduing Chan Cloister; Yiyin Chaojian, who became the abbess of a newly refurbished Protection of Goodness Convent in Danghu; Puwen Chaoyuan, Yiran Chaoshe, and Guding Chaozhen.Less

Daily Life in the Convent

in Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico

This chapter examines the daily life of nuns in colonial Mexico, focusing on the permeability of the cloisters and its interdependence with the community outside its walls. It suggests that ... More

This chapter examines the daily life of nuns in colonial Mexico, focusing on the permeability of the cloisters and its interdependence with the community outside its walls. It suggests that prohibitions to engage with the world were ineffective in keeping a strict separation of the presumably closed gardens of virgins and the seculars beyond their walls and explains that convents had porteria and locutorios for receiving guests and visitors from the outside. This chapter also argues that the codification of class and ethnic separation which prevailed in the cloisters allowed these humble women of the convent to gain respectability as embodiments of a sanctity they were not expected to possess.Less

Nuns and Priests Sensations of the Cloister: Charlotte Brontë's Villette and the Monologues of Robert Browning

in Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature

This chapter examines the contribution of sensational character types, including priests, nuns and monks — and the cloistered life in particular — to the construction and interrogation of gender ... More

This chapter examines the contribution of sensational character types, including priests, nuns and monks — and the cloistered life in particular — to the construction and interrogation of gender roles and the ideology of respectability in Victorian writing, with particular reference to Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853) and certain religious monologues by Robert Browning. In Villette, a new model of female autonomy that challenges marriage and domesticity as a woman's sole destiny is provided by the adaptation of the popular convent exposé and the feminized convent space, whereas Browning's monologues are concerned with the masculine world of the public sphere where conduct is governed by cynical devotion to respectability, convention and social appearance. Victorian literary imaginings of the cloister are brilliant examples of a pressing middle-class conundrum: the difficulty of striking a sound balance between tyranny and control, between self-expression and disciplined restraint with their complex intertwining of the horrors of oppression and romances of rebellion and escape.Less