...Claire Taylor Jones This essay explores how the performance of the liturgy was integrated into late medieval education of nuns, for whom liturgical text conveyed both linguistic and spiritual knowledge. In southern German Observant Dominican convents, Latin language was systematically taught...

... justify its presence in a monastic setting. © 2012 by Duke University Press 2012 Innovation and Spiritual Value in Medieval Monastic Art: The Case of the Main Narthex...

...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...

... of pain among laboring woman, saint, and Christ. • Spiritual Suffering and Physical Protection in Childbirth in the South English Legendary Lives of Saint Margaret...

..., Richard Rolle, as well as to materials from vernacular traditions — the keeping of spiritual diaries promoted by the Devotio Moderna and the English text of The Cloud of Unknowing . © 2012 by Duke University Press 2012 a Monasticism...

... of England. © 2012 by Duke University Press 2012 a The Effects of Exile on English Monastic Spirituality: William Peryn’s Spirituall Exercyses Mary C. Erler...

...Nicky Hallett The representation of time in early modern spiritual self-writing has received little critical attention. This essay seeks to redress that neglect. It focuses on the conception of time in the writings of Carmelite nuns, considering English women’s formulations alongside those...

..., pastoral and devotional, prose and poetry, intellect and affect. Rather than portray Christ in the excessively erotic context usually associated with affective spirituality, A Christian Mannes Bileeve stages a dialogue of voices that teaches how to “think with the heart.” This new understanding...

...David Marno This essay traces shifts in meditative practice from Saint Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises to the experimental philosopher Robert Boyle's Occasional Reflections , showing how Boyle's text participates in the evolution of the concept of “attention” as it changes from a spiritual...

... discourses could act as a vehicle for spiritual and psychophysiological change. Combining cognitive theories that view the heart as the tablet of memory with a physiology of the heart as a breathing organ that creates and circulates spirit, the Livre synthesizes medicine, natural philosophy, and theology...

...-Reformation plowman has long been read as an uncomplicated spokesman for an anticlerical Protestantism. This article argues, in contrast, that these plowmen are evidence of a continuing interest in a medieval Catholic symbolic imagination centered on work–as physical labor and as spiritual labor, such as good...

... combined with the developments in medieval spirituality that produced an array of lay religious groups during this period, suggests that Cistercian policy considered enclosure to be important symbolically more than pragmatically. Unlike Periculoso , the aim was never unilaterally to confine women...

.... Langland avoids these techniques and eschews scholastic forms of resolution; his predilection for debate and deep-structural dialectics insists on the need to keep central theological and spiritual counterpoints in play, all the while opening up conceptual and imaginative “gaps” that bring with them...

..., that none will read them, but if he be spirituall, he will fynd great profit; and if he be not spiritual, he will desyre to be, and wilbe encouraged to go forward in that way.45 Luis de Léon is also a key figure of authority in Matthew s translation some thirty years later unsurprisingly, given that both...

...Mary Baine Campbell This essay focuses attention on the cognitive and spiritual work of the dream and the devotional labor of the Jesuit missionary in seventeenth-century Quebec, and views these often passionately opposed spiritual efforts—performed by the various and often passionately opposed...

... experienced God, each other, and the world. Examining metaphor and imagery that adopts features of the natural world, this essay thinks through the implications for twelfth-century people's spiritual lives of the idea that God, through the Incarnation, entered not nature, but creation. In particular...

... or couldn't reform their spiritual lives, and suggests a new view of why changing minds wasn't as easy as the reformers had hoped, and why stripping the churches of their rood screens, burning or hiding statues of saints, overpainting narrative wall murals, and replacing stained glass with plain windows...

... of the confessional divide, in a deep suspicion of, as well as a longing for, the possibilities of satisfacere , making or feeling “enough” in matters of spiritual restitution. In The Merchant of Venice , this fraught understanding of penitential experience takes special shape around the Jew Shylock. Shylock's...