Project MUSE®: The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/484
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 36 (2010) through current issueLatest Articles: The Journal of Medieval Religious CulturesTWOProject MUSE®The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures2153-96501947-6566Latest articles in The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Toward the Sense of the Image: Reading Images of the Soul with Teresa of Ávila
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981402
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Christian mysticisms have long been associated with the soul's unitive, visionary, or ecstatic encounter with the Divine. One hears the term and is tempted by the image of the mystic writhing in ecstasy, head thrown back as the little cherub pulls his dart from her entrails. In recent decades, scholarship has rightly moved to underline the practical context that underpins such extraordinary phenomena, or, in the words of Bernard McGinn, "all that leads up to and prepares for the [divine] encounter."1 Such practical context is entangled with the hermeneutic and devotional practices of medieval monasticism, particularly the notion of lectio divina. While the term does not necessarily designate one singular practice
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/484/image/coversmallToward the Sense of the Image: Reading Images of the Soul with Teresa of Ávila2026-02-12text/htmlen-USToward the Sense of the Image: Reading Images of the Soul with Teresa of Ávila2026-02-122026TWOProject MUSE®1010902026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-12Doing Time in the Spiritual Cell: A New Look at the London Charterhouse Verses
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981403
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In 1371, a new charterhouse was founded on the site of a Black Death burial ground near Smithfield in London. The extant waterworks map of this monastery (ca. 1440) depicts a central cloister surrounded by twenty-five cells, labeled alphabetically from A on the southwestern corner and proceeding clockwise (figure 1).1 These cells housed Carthusian monks. According to the eremitic spirit of the Carthusian order, which took inspiration from the dwelling spaces and behaviors of the desert fathers and mothers, Carthusians dedicated themselves to God in these enclosures; they meditated, prayed, read, worked, ate, and slept alone, coming together only rarely and at set times. Their aim was a particularly rigorous form of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/484/image/coversmallDoing Time in the Spiritual Cell: A New Look at the London Charterhouse Verses2026-02-12text/htmlen-USDoing Time in the Spiritual Cell: A New Look at the London Charterhouse Verses2026-02-122026TWOProject MUSE®1449792026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-12"And yet I Stond": Posture and Contemplative Theology in Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981404
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Look thee, I'll but lean, and my staff understands me.It stands under thee indeed.Why, "stand under" and "understand" is all one.Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love is one of the most detailed and self-reflective witnesses to contemplation in Middle English. It survives in two authorial versions, a Short Text and a Long Text, that together give an increasingly sophisticated account of contemplation as a distinct feature of the Christian life. In the late medieval period, contemplation was understood as "the soul's penetrating and easy gaze on things perceived"; more recently and even more succinctly, Bernard McGinn has defined it as "attentive regard for God alone."1 The purpose of the contemplative life
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/484/image/coversmall"And yet I Stond": Posture and Contemplative Theology in Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love2026-02-12text/htmlen-US"And yet I Stond": Posture and Contemplative Theology in Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love2026-02-122026TWOProject MUSE®940962026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-12"Examine well and diligently the points which you will see I made throughout": Catherine of Siena's Communities of Readers in Fifteenth-Century Italy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981405
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In February 1380, about two months before her death in Rome, Catherine of Siena dictated her last extant letter, a letter that was to be delivered to her confessor, the Dominican Raymond of Capua (d. 1399). Catherine wrote, "I also ask you and Frate Bartolomeo and Frate Tommaso and the master to take care of the book [her Dialogo] and any other writing of mine you may find. You, together with Messere Tommaso, do with them whatever you see would be most to God's honor."1 And indeed, in the years and decades that followed, Catherine's disciples worked tirelessly to collect, copy, and disseminate her letters throughout Italy and beyond.Many scholars have examined the late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/484/image/coversmall"Examine well and diligently the points which you will see I made throughout": Catherine of Siena's Communities of Readers in Fifteenth-Century Italy2026-02-12text/htmlen-US"Examine well and diligently the points which you will see I made throughout": Catherine of Siena's Communities of Readers in Fifteenth-Century Italy2026-02-122026TWOProject MUSE®1440332026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-12Beyond Religion and Medicine: Ministering to the Sick in and Outside of Hospitals
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981406
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In Le Livre de vie active de l'Hotel Dieu de Paris, Johann Henri—proviseur of the Hôtel Dieu hospital in Paris from 1471 to 1479 and again from 1482 up until his death in 1484—provides an allegorical account of his hospital, its staff, and the treatments undertaken in care of the sick poor. Throughout the text, the river Seine, on which the Hôtel Dieu is situated, could easily be portrayed as a barrier that separates the sick from the city, yet this is not how it is presented. The Seine is invoked in a play on words with health (saine) because it served a vital purpose in the medical and spiritual care of the hospital's patients. All patients had to pass across the river and on reaching the hospital entrance, their
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/484/image/coversmallBeyond Religion and Medicine: Ministering to the Sick in and Outside of Hospitals2026-02-12text/htmlen-USBeyond Religion and Medicine: Ministering to the Sick in and Outside of Hospitals2026-02-122026TWOProject MUSE®351862026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-12Aesthetics and the Incarnation in Early Medieval Britain: Materiality and the Flesh of the Word by Tiffany Beechy (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981407
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Tiffany Beechy's monograph Aesthetics and the Incarnation in Early Medieval Britain: Materiality and the Flesh of the Word examines the interaction between Irish and Roman Christianity in the portrayal of Incarnational doctrine in British sources from this period. Beechy builds on the work of scholars such as Johanna Kramer (Between Earth and Heaven: Liminality and the Ascension of Christ in Anglo-Saxon Literature, Manchester University Press, 2014) and Cristina Maria Cervone (Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), clarifying how the relation of the Word to words (both revealed and concealed in the material world) in early medieval Britain
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/484/image/coversmallAesthetics and the Incarnation in Early Medieval Britain: Materiality and the Flesh of the Word by Tiffany Beechy (review)2026-02-12text/htmlen-USAesthetics and the Incarnation in Early Medieval Britain: Materiality and the Flesh of the Word by Tiffany Beechy (review)2026-02-122026TWOProject MUSE®103392026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-12The Sisterbook of Master Geert's House, Deventer. The Lives and Spirituality of the Sisters, c. 1390–c. 1460. by G. H. Gerrits (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981408
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Until now, the fascinating Middle Dutch "sister books"—texts containing biographical sketches or vitae of Sisters of the Common Life and Augustinian canonesses regular that were written by, about, and for these women—have not been accessible for non-Dutch speakers. With his excellent English translation of one of these sister books, the manuscript from Master Geert's House in Deventer (referred to as the Gh Sisterbook), G. H. Gerrits has now made the first Dutch sister book available for English-speaking readers.The Gh Sisterbook consists of a collection of sixty-four vitae of women who lived in a semireligious community of Sisters of the Common Life, in the period between ca. 1390 and ca. 1460. The extant text was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/484/image/coversmallThe Sisterbook of Master Geert's House, Deventer. The Lives and Spirituality of the Sisters, c. 1390–c. 1460. by G. H. Gerrits (review)2026-02-12text/htmlen-USThe Sisterbook of Master Geert's House, Deventer. The Lives and Spirituality of the Sisters, c. 1390–c. 1460. by G. H. Gerrits (review)2026-02-122026TWOProject MUSE®87922026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-12Iacopone da Todi: The Power of Mysticism and the Originality of Franciscan Poetry ed. by Matteo Leonardi and Alessandro Vettori (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981409
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This volume represents the first essay collection in English on the thirteenth-century Italian poet Iacopone da Todi. It offers a range of perspectives on Iacopone's complex body of work: his laudario, consisting of around a hundred compositions known as laude, situated between lyric poetry and performative song and comprising various themes: autobiographical, devotional, theological, didactic. As the volume editors argue, this pluridimensional oeuvre requires a pluridimensional interpretative approach, encompassing "multidisciplinary and 'global' readings" (2). The volume's chapters thus aim to bridge numerous disciplines: literary studies, musicology, performance studies, theology, history
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/484/image/coversmallIacopone da Todi: The Power of Mysticism and the Originality of Franciscan Poetry ed. by Matteo Leonardi and Alessandro Vettori (review)2026-02-12text/htmlen-USIacopone da Todi: The Power of Mysticism and the Originality of Franciscan Poetry ed. by Matteo Leonardi and Alessandro Vettori (review)2026-02-122026TWOProject MUSE®112552026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-12Impossible Recovery: Julian of Norwich and the Phenomenology of Well-Being by Hannah Lucas (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981410
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In her first monograph, Lucas offers a powerful and deeply nuanced reading of one of the most complex of Middle English texts: Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love. Over the course of six core chapters, Lucas offers a stunning set of engagements with this medieval text and the work of the German phenomenologist Martin Heidegger. The central premise focuses on conceptions (both historical and contemporary) of recovery and illness—though the wider implications of the book are far broader and more interdisciplinary than that and move confidently into the emerging field of environmental/ecological humanities. The book will be of interest to all graduate students in the field of medieval studies and to experts
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/484/image/coversmallImpossible Recovery: Julian of Norwich and the Phenomenology of Well-Being by Hannah Lucas (review)2026-02-12text/htmlen-USImpossible Recovery: Julian of Norwich and the Phenomenology of Well-Being by Hannah Lucas (review)2026-02-122026TWOProject MUSE®96382026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-12Christ the Physician in Late-Medieval Religious Controversy: England and Central Europe, 1350–1434 by Patrick Outhwaite (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981411
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Jesus appears in many guises throughout the gospels. Following his resurrection, Mary Magdalene confuses him with a gardener; later, two disciples on the road to Emmaus mistake him for a pilgrim. In his own words, he is the good shepherd (pastor bonus), who knows and cares for his sheep, and likewise a sound physician, who attends to sick souls. When the self-righteous become discomfited by his association with sinners, Jesus observes to them curtly that "those who are healthy don't need a doctor" [Non necesse sani habent medico]. His rebuke emphasizes the practical nature of his ministry—its curative purpose and power.In this engaging book, Patrick Outhwaite explores the tradition of Christus medicus, or
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/484/image/coversmallChrist the Physician in Late-Medieval Religious Controversy: England and Central Europe, 1350–1434 by Patrick Outhwaite (review)2026-02-12text/htmlen-USChrist the Physician in Late-Medieval Religious Controversy: England and Central Europe, 1350–1434 by Patrick Outhwaite (review)2026-02-122026TWOProject MUSE®104322026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-12A People's Church: Medieval Italy and Christianity, 1050–1300 ed. by Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Neslihan Şenocak (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/981412
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Coedited by Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Neslihan Şenocak, A People's Church is a stimulating volume of essays intended to give its readers an overview of the scholarship on medieval Christian culture on the Italian peninsula. As might be anticipated from its title, it is not your father's church history focused tightly as it might have been decades ago on the institutional church, its clerics, and its administration. Instead, it aims to examine a wide array of voices, not always in harmony, including churchmen, yes, but also those of lay women and men, heretics and saints, Greek and Latin rite worshippers, and in a welcome move, in the case of one essay, Jews and Muslims residing within the hegemonic Christian
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/484/image/coversmallA People's Church: Medieval Italy and Christianity, 1050–1300 ed. by Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Neslihan Şenocak (review)2026-02-12text/htmlen-USA People's Church: Medieval Italy and Christianity, 1050–1300 ed. by Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and Neslihan Şenocak (review)2026-02-122026TWOProject MUSE®95272026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-02-12