Translating Christ in the Middle Ages

Translating Christ in the Middle Ages
Author: Barbara Zimbalist
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0268202214

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This study reveals how women’s visionary texts played a central role within medieval discourses of authorship, reading, and devotion. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, women across northern Europe began committing their visionary conversations with Christ to the written word. Translating Christ in this way required multiple transformations: divine speech into human language, aural event into textual artifact, visionary experience into linguistic record, and individual encounter into communal repetition. This ambitious study shows how women’s visionary texts form an underexamined literary tradition within medieval religious culture. Barbara Zimbalist demonstrates how, within this tradition, female visionaries developed new forms of authorship, reading, and devotion. Through these transformations, the female visionary authorized herself and her text, and performed a rhetorical imitatio Christi that offered models of interpretive practice and spoken devotion to her readers. This literary-historical tradition has not yet been fully recognized on its own terms. By exploring its development in hagiography, visionary texts, and devotional literature, Zimbalist shows how this literary mode came to be not only possible but widespread and influential. She argues that women’s visionary translation reconfigured traditional hierarchies and positions of spiritual power for female authors and readers in ways that reverberated throughout late-medieval literary and religious cultures. In translating their visionary conversations with Christ into vernacular text, medieval women turned themselves into authors and devotional guides, and formed their readers into textual communities shaped by gendered visionary experiences and spoken imitatio Christi. Comparing texts in Latin, Dutch, French, and English, Translating Christ in the Middle Ages explores how women’s visionary translation of Christ’s speech initiated larger transformations of gendered authorship and religious authority within medieval culture. The book will interest scholars in different linguistic and religious traditions in medieval studies, history, religious studies, and women’s and gender studies.

Translating the Middle Ages

Translating the Middle Ages
Author: Karen L. Fresco
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2016-02-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317007212

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Drawing on approaches from literary studies, history, linguistics, and art history, and ranging from Late Antiquity to the sixteenth century, this collection views 'translation' broadly as the adaptation and transmission of cultural inheritance. The essays explore translation in a variety of sources from manuscript to print culture and the creation of lexical databases. Several essays look at the practice of textual translation across languages, including the vernacularization of Latin literature in England, France, and Italy; the translation of Greek and Hebrew scientific terms into Arabic; and the use of Hebrew terms in anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim polemics. Other essays examine medieval translators' views and performance of translation, looking at Lydgate's translation of Greek myths through mental images rendered through rhetorical figures or at how printing transformed the rhetoric of intervernacular translation of chivalric romances. This collection also demonstrates translation as a key element in the construction of cultural and political identity in the Fet des Romains and Chester Whitsun Plays, and in the papacy's efforts to compete with Byzantium by controlling the translation of Greek writings.

Translating Christ in Medieval Women's Visionary Texts

Translating Christ in Medieval Women's Visionary Texts
Author: Barbara Erin Zimbalist
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN: 9781303444340

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"Translating Christ in Medieval Women's Visionary Texts" argues that by translating Christ's visionary speech, female authors created new discursive positions from which to instruct a growing audience of vernacular readers during the later Middle Ages. Translating Christ's visionary speech meant transforming divine speech into human language; aural event into textual artifact; visionary experience into linguistic record; and individual encounter into communal repetition. Chapter one analyzes Christ's speech through the theoretical intersection of gender, vision, and voice. Chapter two unpacks the hermeneutics of Christ's collaborative speech within twelfth- and thirteenth-century Liégeois hagiography, focusing on male-female collaborative authorship. The third chapter surveys vernacular visionary texts in the Low Countries, demonstrating how Flemish Beguines and members of the devotio moderna used Christ's voice to instruct devotional readers in reformist communities from the mid-thirteenth through the early sixteenth centuries. The fourth and fifth chapters turn to the texts of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, respectively, arguing that a more participatory conception of "the Word" emerged within the rapidly shifting vernacular reading cultures of late-medieval England. These diverse visionary texts share common literary and spiritual goals: the desire to hear Christ speak in their own language and to provide their communities with the immediately accessible Word of God. These acts of translation constituted the location of fundamental changes in late-medieval culture: a re-imagining of the role of lay women in the religious sphere; of the spiritual function of vernacular texts; of the meaning and identity of the Word of God; of the constitution of the devotional canon; and the re-conceptualization of the Christian reading community.

Illuminating Jesus in the Middle Ages

Illuminating Jesus in the Middle Ages
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2019-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004409424

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In Illuminating Jesus in the Middle Ages, editor Jane Beal and other contributing scholars analyse the reception history of Jesus in medieval cultures (6th–15th c.), considering a wide variety of Christological images and ideas and their influence.

The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages

The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages
Author: Mary Dzon
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2017-01-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0812293703

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Beginning in the twelfth century, clergy and laity alike started wondering with intensity about the historical and developmental details of Jesus' early life. Was the Christ Child like other children, whose characteristics and capabilities depended on their age? Was he sweet and tender, or formidable and powerful? Not finding sufficient information in the Gospels, which are almost completely silent about Jesus' childhood, medieval Christians turned to centuries-old apocryphal texts for answers. In The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages, Mary Dzon demonstrates how these apocryphal legends fostered a vibrant and creative medieval piety. Popular tales about the Christ Child entertained the laity and at the same time were reviled by some members of the intellectual elite of the church. In either case, such legends, so persistent, left their mark on theological, devotional, and literary texts. The Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx urged his monastic readers to imitate the Christ Child's development through spiritual growth; Francis of Assisi encouraged his followers to emulate the Christ Child's poverty and rusticity; Thomas Aquinas, for his part, believed that apocryphal stories about the Christ Child would encourage youths to be presumptuous, while Birgitta of Sweden provided pious alternatives in her many Marian revelations. Through close readings of such writings, Dzon explores the continued transmission and appeal of apocryphal legends throughout the Middle Ages and demonstrates the significant impact that the Christ Child had in shaping the medieval religious imagination.

The Christian World of the Middle Ages

The Christian World of the Middle Ages
Author: Bernard Hamilton
Publisher: The History Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2003-02-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0752494767

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This account of the Christian world, East and West, from AD 312 - 1500 challenges the usual Euro-centric view of medieval Christianity. The author reconstructs the faith and heritage of medieval Christendom, revealing its extraordinary impact in both great empires and tiny enclaves.

Christendom and Christianity in the Middle Ages

Christendom and Christianity in the Middle Ages
Author: Adriaan Bredero
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 424
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780802849922

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This is a print on demand book and is therefore non- returnable. Though buffeted on all sides by rapid and at times cataclysmic social, political, and economic change, the medieval church was able to make adjustments that kept it from becoming simply a fossil from the past rather than an enduring institution of salvation. The dynamic interaction between the medieval church and society gives form to this compelling and well-informed study by Adriaan Bredero. By considering medieval Christianity in full relation to its historical context, Bredero elucidates complex medieval realities -- many of which run counter to common modern notions about the Middle Ages. Bredero moves beyond the usual treatment of history by framing his overall discussion in terms of a fascinating and relevant question: To what extent is Christianity today still molded by medieval society? The book begins with an overview of religion and the church in medieval society, from the early Christianization of Western Europe through the fifteenth century. Bredero counters earlier romanticized assessments of the Middle Ages as a thoroughly Christian period by arriving at a definition of Christendom, not in its original sense as the empire of Charlemagne, but rather as "the countries, people, and matters which stood under the influence of Christ."

Cultures of Piety

Cultures of Piety
Author: Anne Clark Bartlett
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2018-09-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1501726765

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Devotional texts in late medieval England were notable for their flamboyant piety and their preoccupation with the tortured body of Christ and the grief of the Virgin Mary. Generations of readers internalized and shaped the "cultures of piety" represented by these works. Anne Clark Bartlett and Thomas H. Bestul here gather seven examples of this literature, all written in the period 1350–1450, one in Anglo-Norman, the remainder in Middle English. (The volume includes an appendix containing the original texts of the latter six pieces.) The collection illustrates the polyglottal, conflicting, and often polemical nature of devotional culture in the Middle Ages. It provides a valuable context for and interesting counterpoint to the Canterbury Tales and other classic works of late medieval England. The introduction and the translators' headnotes discuss crucial aspects of the texts' histories and thematics, including the importance of the body in spiritual practices, the development of female patronage and of a wide audience for this literature, and the indivisibility of the political and the religious in medieval times.

The Medieval Translator

The Medieval Translator
Author: René Tixier
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1991
Genre:
ISBN: 9782503504483

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