... the fate of souls after death felt particularly urgent and important evidence for the afterlife was provided by spirits traveling back and forth between this life and the next. Insisting on a bodily experience of a spiritual space, rather than a visionary one, the knight Owein provided powerful eyewitness...

... perspectives have in common, however, an understanding of dancing as a shared experience and intercorporeal communication that created spiritual communitas . [email protected] Copyright © 2024 by Duke University Press 2025 medieval exempla dance bodily experience lay religious...

..., reading, or listening) functions in a way similar to the rite of baptism by evoking the saint's protection of mothers and infants during childbirth. More so than other late medieval versions of her life, the SEL life of Margaret connects bodily and salvific suffering, emphasizing the shared experience...

... concept of “lived religion” of their own. [email protected] Copyright © 2024 by Duke University Press 2025 early modern English spirituality Calvinist beliefs proof of salvation emotions bodily experience In March 1673, a devout London matron and Protestant dissenter by the name...

...Jessica Tabak John Donne composed his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) to share a revelatory experience of illness with readers. Yet, in the book's final chapter, Donne himself indicates that bodily pain is nearly incommunicable. This raises a question: How can Donne hope to share his...

.... An ascending hierarchy of spirits rose from the liver, to the heart, up into the brain. This essay examines the distinctive role that bodily spirits played in Protestant religious experience, focusing especially on moments of particular interior drama. At a time when some Christians believed that the Spirit...

... performances examined below display the workings of agency within female bodies when they represent the mind and womb as connected. And as literary representations of lived bodily experiences com- mon to their audiences, they do something that the “discursive construction of . . . bodies at the levels...

... how the qualities that tend to alienate women’s mystical texts from the canon (the focus on embodiment, immediacy, and experi- ence) are in fact critical to understanding their literary qualities. Bodily experience should be understood as a form of textuality, albeit in a very particular way...

..., it is a bodily experience, both deeply and personally felt, yet devoid of anything concrete or even imageable to which the contemplative (or, for that matter, the divine) might lay claim. It combines the gift of divine visitation with the contemplative’s devotional agency with the common desires...

... the Vesalian illustrations, this man is perfectly suited to these realms. The male management of bodily sense experience in the domains of politics and the academy suggests why a bodily epistemology can afford those who are typically excluded some access to these realms. From this room...

... implies, cultural ideologies are necessarily imbricated in any representation of the body, Lindemann warns of the danger of addressing symbolic valences without sufficient attention to the physical dimensions of disease — to the premodern experience of the body as body. Her caveat is echoed...

... shows how apparently diabolical signs can indicate God's divine presence. Copyright © 2021 by Duke University Press 2021 Julian of Norwich discernment of medieval women's visionary experience sanctity and heresy trials Revelation of Love divine revelation and bodily reception...

... the bodily submissiveness of the devotee to Christ, which is not as apparent in Rous’s text but echoes the late medieval exam- ples above. Here, Christ takes complete control of the devotee, becoming both protector and all- consuming lover, absolutely engul ng her with his love. Unlike the experience...

... bodily wholeness and about what impaired integrity implied. Parents agonized over their chil- dren’s bodily flaws and imperfections. Anxieties about ambiguous or mal- formed genitalia sent parents hunting for medical aid or legal assistance, as in the case...

... physiognomic knowledge and practice, thus defining more refined criteria for reading the external, bodily “signs of nature in man”—as reads the title of Antonio Pellegrini's 1545 physiognomic dialogue. In this framework, the particularities of criminal physiognomies entered into physiognomists’ scope...

... plays, how the interplay of writing-as-algorithm with known bodily practices might enable interpreters to use the plays to assess the limits and purposes of commodified embodiment—acting—as means to a wider, historical understanding of embodiment. Attending to the embodiment implied by cue-scripts...

... Semiotics of Bodily Fluids in Early Modern Culture Patricia Simons University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan Pissing putti, virtually always male, merrily populate the imagery...

... of empty nostalgia or mere convention Sara- cens continued to inhabit the fantasies of times and places no longer pas- sionately invested in the destruction of Islam. My aim in this essay is there- fore threefold: to trace briefly the genealogy of a racialized bodily otherness...

... was the mediator, and before the gift of faith in Christ’s sacrifice was freely and undeservedly bestowed, all-sinful man faced all-holy God directly. Luther has been seen as recreating for Christianity the directness and the terror of Old Testament encounters with God, the experience of “fear and trembling...

... 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...