... lacking absolute certainty. This essay explores this problem by focusing on the afterlife of Augustine's notion of credulitas , or “belief,” in two parallel but intertwined areas: moral theology and legal thought. In both cases, absolute certainty was the gold standard against which moral actions...

...John Jeffries Martin In early modern Europe, judges read the bodies of victims and suspects through a variety of lenses shaped by popular beliefs, Renaissance notions of physiognomy, and by the study of medicine, classical rhetoric, and natural law theory. This article explores the writings...

...Joanna Picciotto In post-Reformation England, intense pressures on belief produced sophisticated theorizations of habitual assent and of habit itself. These have been largely overlooked by scholarship on the Reformation because of its fixation on doctrine and confessional identity—the very...

... evidence in its wake. Indeed, notions of the body are integral to understanding early modern witchcraft beliefs, particularly at a time when the boundary between mind and body was viewed as porous and permeable. This was a time when emotions were seen to have physical consequences, and this belief played...

... between the B and C texts in their treatment of the subject are given special attention. The emphasis is always on the continuously evolving drama of Piers Plowman as a poem searching for the truth of belief rather than as a poem that expounds a system of already-existing belief. Duke University Press...

...John Jeffries Martin Studies of religious dissimulation have generally assumed a moral topography of concealment: one holds one’s true religious beliefs privately, internally, while conforming outwardly to the expectations of the dominant society. This essay challenges this assumption through...

.... But the stories themselves trade on the fact that they could not do so, and theological explanations of the doctrine show that they should not be expected to; both the nature of the doctrine and the nature of belief rendered such an ambition incoherent. The stories emphasize instead the sacrament’s brash affront...

... linked to prevailing expectations of gendered behavior, written conventions for expressing emotions such as grief and sorrow, as well as medical beliefs about men’s and women’s bodies. The resulting analysis offers rich insights into the words and views of patients and into gendered experiences and self...

... belief, even as various rhetorics of obligation become disconcertingly obscured in the process. © 2013 by Duke University Press 2013 a The Substance of Shadows: Imagination and Credit Culture...

... in the culture of the sacred object. Critical approaches to the status of religious objects across the period have often reflected this narrative of rupture: before the Reformations, belief that the divine inhered in the material world, and after the Reformations, concern about idolatry; before the Reformations...

...Robyn Malo As much recent work on recusancy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England has shown us, the Protestant Reformation did not instantaneously wipe out the remnants of Catholic belief. This essay takes up sixteenth- and seventeenth-century recusant prose and verse accounts...

... objects acquire the aura of the sacred. While the Barnwell monument engages with a high church view of the sacraments as signs of remembrance, the manuscript box reveals Montagu turning from the sacramental to the superstitious. This object displays how religious faith and personal belief bleed into each...

... contemporary Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture. An understudied text, Æthelwulf’s De abbatibus provides an opportunity to understand how early medieval people could situate nature at a narrative’s center, crediting it with the capacity to shape religious behavior and belief. Æthelwulf’s work should be seen among...

... and normative authority of nature, but also in complex dialogue with contemporary pastoral theory and moral philosophy (which rejected wet-nursing), as well as contemporary social practices, values, and beliefs. Physicians recognized maternal breastfeeding as the best and most natural option because...

... for understanding the history of vernacular theologies and their experimentation with different rhetorical modes for reshaping belief and practice. Copyright © 2021 by Duke University Press 2021 The success of the mother's reading is to be realized not in private, contemplative reading alone, but more...

... of the 1530s, Reginald Pole's De Unitate , and John Foxe's Acts and Monuments . It also examines the Venetian-Greek Nicander Nucius's depiction of the Henrician Reformation in his autobiography, exploring how this unique account was shaped by Nicander's religious beliefs. Eastern Christianity must...

... by demonstrating how his actual writing practices subvert his professed beliefs about the dangers of fragmentation and incompleteness. [email protected] Copyright © 2024 by Duke University Press 2024 This content is made freely available by the publisher. It may not be redistributed or altered...

... thousand years ago, might solve their suffering here and now. Yet they wouldn't dream of seeking succor in the works of Galen. Why? How have the beliefs and practices that guided Western medicine up through the eighteenth century come to seem, paradoxically, more alien and distant than ancient Chinese...

...Margaret F. Rosenthal In the past two decades, the multifaceted discipline of the history of medieval and early modern dress has benefited from reconceptualizations of the long, late Middle Ages and Renaissance as having undergone a revolution of consciousness, belief, and thought with global...

... argues that the abridgment, rather than the independent publication it is sometimes taken to be, was constructed with the same editorial strategy in mind as earlier De Bry volumes. Heathen beliefs in the western hemisphere were further emphasized, European superiority was visualized more clearly...