...Katherine Zieman This essay explores the late medieval rhetoric of self-representation and conceptions of audience through an examination of the writings of the fifteenth-century Carthusian monk Richard Methley. Methley is considered as a “public contemplative” — a writer who offers his own...

...Julie Paulson © 2008 by Duke University Press 2008 a A Theater of the Soul’s Interior: Contemplative Literature and Penitential Education...

...Rebecca Field The fourteenth-century contemplative manual The Cloud of Unknowing and the shorter texts attributed to its author explore an extreme form of apophatic spiritual encounter. In order to guide his disciples in this kind of practice, the anonymous Cloud -author adopts a classical theory...

...Eleanor Johnson This essay analyzes the Middle English contemplative treatise, the Cloud of Unknowing , to show how its prose style is designed to embody the experience of spiritual practice. The prevalence of monosyllabic words in the treatise originates in how the Cloud -author understands time...

... tertiaries or those who belonged to the so-called terzo stato , troubled the medieval distinctions between active and contemplative lives. Tornabuoni, Pulci, and their contemporaries found ways to contribute to the public sphere by combining features of active and contemplative lives into a form of vita...

...Amy Appleford Richard Whitford's A Work for Householders constructs a model of household governance organized around the contemplative life of the lay householder and his pastoral command over his familia. A Work for Householder 's companion text, A Daily Exercise of Death , centers on willed self...

... illness with readers when he believes its physical symptoms resist communication? This essay argues that Donne bypasses this impasse by formally recreating one of his illness's contemplative symptoms: the vexed temporal disorder caused by interpreting one's world from within a sick body. Because...

... of her writings shows how they partook in a carefully orchestrated campaign of Counter-Reformation proselytization that established a network of religious houses but also a network of thought and contemplation across Europe. The key players involved with circulating her works were by and large lay people...

... and of the place of the Holy Land within it becomes a kind of virtual pilgrimage: a form of vicarious wandering that prompts religious contemplation and devotion. The article, which includes discussion of the manuscript’s unique and previously unstudied Jerusalem map, thus reminds us to keep in mind the inadequacy...

... method of Aquinas as a contemplative project, motivated and delineated by the mendicant controversies of the thirteenth century, and undertaken alongside the obscure Dionysius within their common pursuit of religious perfection. [email protected] Copyright © 2022 by Duke University Press...

..., the essay examines the role of “trees of incarnation” as contemplative models in women's religious communities for making Christ present in the imagination and in the world. M. D. Chenu's attention to the category of nature in his historical and theological writings is then revisited in order to propose...

...  115 and abstract contemplation required in theology. He identified a similar pat- tern in the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible, in which the reader first encountered natural philosophy in Ecclesiastes, before proceeding to a more mature theological contemplation in the Song of Songs.8...

... as a practical instrument for human contemplation of the divine logos. The mirror as text Specifying that his text is a steel glass, Gascoigne aligns his poem with a tra- dition of scriptural exegesis that would, over and against the worldly vanity 522 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 32.3...

... guides his reader through three stages of contemplation, lead- ing to a union of knowledge and love for God The nal stage — the only one in which the contemplative person is not an active agent — is an experi- ence of raptus, in which the contemplative is carried out of the physical body...

... the literary with what is speculatively embodied. Again, the vehicle is a promised embodiment, not yet real or actualized. By contrast, historical life must recreate this knowledge of double- ness speculatively through the mind, through reflection, contemplation, memory, hope, work, and other...

... — this Anglican community was formed around the primary activities of prayer and contemplation.16 Other projects that responded to monasticism’s disappearance were less explicitly religious in intent. In 1659 John Evelyn, one of the founding members of the Royal Society, wrote to Robert Boyle saying...

... 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...

... to other English country house poems, what is perhaps most striking about Ben Jonson's praise for Robert Sidney in “To Penshurst” is the attempt to imagine the benefits that the Sidney estate confers in the present, without the retrospective, contemplative impulses of metaphor. 17 As Alastair Fowler...

... or practical wisdom) and the ground and end of virtue (in the mode of sophia or contemplative wisdom). Condensing moral, extramoral, and intellectual powers and capacities in an efficacious mix of skill, habit, reason, and affect, virtue encompasses the human striving for perfection in an interdependent...

... is to reach gnōsis, the contemplative knowledge of God. What connects these two extensities of prayer as attending to and knowing God is the concept of apatheia. Today apatheia is familiar mostly as the Stoic ideal of being free of all passions.15 But while this definition is relevant for the Strōmateis...