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This chapter analyzes the rich visionary traditions in medieval Christianity. It first analyzes the visions of Julian of Norwich, the first known female author in England. These visions are recorded in two texts, both of which begin with Julian's wish for three things: a vivid perception of Christ's Passion; bodily sickness; and for God to give her three wounds. It then attempts to understand the symbolic meanings of dryness by interrogating a study on the parallelism between the “holy anorexia” of Christian female religious virtuosos and anorexia nervosa, the neurotic condition afflicting modern-day females. Next, it examines the notion of fasting females and the spiritual nourishment that sustained them through St. Teresa of Avila (1515–1582). The remainder of the chapter discusses Margery Kempe, born around 1373, and her unique relation to Jesus, that is, her continual weeping and crying whenever she recollects his Passion.

This chapter discusses the obsession of medieval Christianity with gathering Jewish converts. It states that despite being frequently asked to convert by well-intentioned missionaries and the elite clerics, medieval Jews experienced rejection and distrust from others. It examines the different images of the unchanging nature of Jewish converts and the Christian's suspicion towards Jewish converts. The discussion then looks at the violence that the Christians showed towards the Jews in an effort to coerce them into converting, which also played a role in punishing criminals. It then looks at how Jews viewed baptism as a form of deception and the push that was given to the Jewish converts to prove themselves to the Christians by attacking Judaism and Jews.

The chapter outlines the salient features of early Irish ecclesiastical organisation. Some characteristic forms of liturgy, piety and devotion are indicated. Among the issues addressed is the relationship between pagan past and Christian present in early medieval Ireland. This is an essential factor not only for the grafting of the new religion onto forms of Celtic thought and culture, but also for how in later centuries the Irish would look to their ‘Celtic past’ for a sense of themselves. Some consideration is given to the Irish contribution to the Christianisation of north Britain and areas of mainland continental Europe. It also raises the question of whether or not there was a distinctively Celtic form of Christianity. Finally, the chapter explores the issue of the formative influences of this early period on the post-Norman developments in Irish religion, society and identity.

Chapter 1 explores the central role that the promise of universal resurrection and its enactment in the liturgy played in the constitution of the late medieval Christian community of faith. Together, it argues, raised voices and the promise of the resurrection of the dead created the ideal of a universal Christian community that was to remain forever united and that was bound together by a shared experience of ritual. The chapter presents a case study of the ways in which resurrection pervaded the aural, visual, and material culture of Nuremberg, particularly in the commemoration of the dead with the Requiem Mass and the Office of the Dead. Throughout the late medieval city, sounds, objects, and gestures defined a community of faith that was understood to encompass all Christians from the time of Christ until the apocalypse.

This chapter examines the distinctive and revealing aspects of Jacopo's work and his original contributions to standard narratives. It looks at some of the saints' lives included in the Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend), beginning with the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; followed by the quartet of Michael the Archangel, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, and Paul. Three classic authorities for medieval Christianity—Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Bernard of Clairvaux—credited Jacopo for how he viewed the history of theological thought. In addition, contemporary thirteenth-century figures Dominic (1170–1221), Francis (1182/83–1226), Peter Martyr (1206–52), and Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–31) provide insights on how Jacopo responded to the world in which he lived.

Gottschalk of Orbais was an exceptional religious dissenter and heretic in the Carolingian Empire, whose Christianity required cooperation with ecclesiastical superiors and willing participation in religious correction. The Introduction surveys the book’s approaches in relation to historiography on Gottschalk and on the Carolingian Empire, emphasizing how this study interprets his literary and spiritual self-representations, his Augustinian-based theology of predestination, his modes of argument, his prophetic claims to martyrdom and miraculous powers, and his shocking defiance to bishops as strategies for influencing contemporaries in changing political circumstances. In the larger history of medieval heresy and dissent, Gottschalk’s case reveals how the Carolingian Empire preserved order within the church through coercive reform. The hierarchy compelled Christians to accept correction of perceived sins and errors, while punishing as sources of spiritual corruption those rare dissenters who resisted its authority.

This chapter discusses the model of thinking put forth by Dante in his effort to establish harmony between human love and religious love. This model has been put to good use by philosophers in the Italian Renaissance, most importantly by Marsilio Ficino, whose goal was simple; he endeavored to combine Plato’s philosophy with the orthodox dogmas of the Christian faith. Ficino, who dedicated himself to Platonism and became a parish priest, aiming to be wholly Platonic and wholly Christian, searched for complementary truths in each tradition so that he could strengthen both. It can be argued that his mission had already been accomplished, since medieval Christianity cannot be understood without its Platonic element. Ficino himself did not feel that his attempts to merge Platonism and Christianity were in any way revolutionary.

The conclusion reflects on some of the main findings from the book, especially its implications for a view of the relationship between church and world. It considers the changing efforts of law-makers to engage with welfare across a millennium, stressing what is most significant in their diverse responses: a consistent understanding of the character and role of a xenodochium or hospital, as something imagined and made by any of the faithful. It was a model not merely recognized but cultivated by law-makers and prelates. Welfare was an obligation incumbent on any Christian, not merely to see, but to recognize the humanity in even the most wretched stranger. This obligation, fundamental to salvation, lay at the heart of Christian society and so medieval Christianity itself.

Christian devotional culture took very seriously the instruction of the Bible maxim “In all thy works remember thy last end [memorare novissima tua] and thou shalt never sin” (Sirach 7:40). From it were derived all kinds of practices and schemes for meditating on the so-called “last things”: death, judgment, hell, heaven, and (once the belief was codified dogmatically) purgatory. The introduction explains why the period from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century was crucial for the dissemination and transformation of instructions for meditating on death and the afterlife, and draws attention to the importance of written texts in enabling and supporting individual believers in their daily routines of devotion and meditation.

This chapter compares early-medieval Christian and Islamic ideas regarding the acceptability or otherwise of pagan law under the monotheist dispensation. It argues that by and large there is a clear contrast between the two approaches. The default attitude among early-medieval Christians is that pagan law is acceptable in the absence of specific grounds for rejecting it, whereas the default among Muslims is that it is unacceptable unless there are specific grounds for adopting it. The chapter also seeks to identify the motivations involved—both the reasons actually advanced by jurists on both sides and the underlying historical causes of the divergence.

This chapter presents a media-archaeological approach to the study of religion and technology in order to reformulate religious practices in technological terms. The chapter focuses on the historical development of mechanical clocks, from their origins in the monasteries of mediaeval Christian Europe to the oscillating time-keeping mechanisms that lie at the basis of modern computers. The author argues that, despite the original religious and cultural goals that fostered the development of mechanical time-keeping, the history of the oscillating clock reveals a non-cultural, techno-poetical element at work, as demonstrated in the chapter's analysis of one of the clock's key mechanisms: the anchor escapement. Once set in motion, the anchor mechanism of the oscillating clock operated according to its own its technical logic, resulting in the generation of time-based media processes that challenge our very conceptions of historical narrative and the place of religion therein.

Gottschalk of Orbais was an exceptional ninth-century religious dissenter and heretic in the Carolingian Empire, whose literary and spiritual self-representations, his Augustinian-based theology of predestination, his modes of argument, his prophetic claims to martyrdom and miraculous powers, and his shocking defiance to bishops were strategies for influencing contemporaries in changing political circumstances. In the larger history of medieval heresy and dissent, Gottschalk’s case reveals how the Carolingian Empire preserved order within the church through coercive reform. The hierarchy compelled Christians to accept correction of perceived sins and errors, while punishing as sources of spiritual corruption those rare dissenters who resisted its authority. Yet the important role of patrons and supporters throughout Gottschalk’s career also shows how individuals within the Carolingian Empire sought to protect their allies from the severe aspects of the empire’s system whenever possible.

This chapter talks about “fiction” as it is used in scientific contexts and describes Vilém Flusser’s efforts to close the gap between the natural sciences and the humanities through Don Ihde’ Expanding Hermeneutics. It discusses Flusser’s essay Da ficcao (Of Fiction), in which Flusser enumerates assorted imaginations where the world is similar to deceptive fiction, such as the Platonists who insisted that people are merely perceive shadows and medieval Christianity who thought of the world as a nightmare invented by the devil. According to Flusser, the known world has always existed as an effigy and that reality as a whole cannot be ascertained.