The Cult of the Saints

Author: Peter Brown
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022617543X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
A new edition of the “brilliantly original and highly sophisticated” study of saint worship after the fall of the Roman Empire (Library Journal). In this groundbreaking work, Peter Brown explores how the worship of saints and their corporeal remains became central to religious life in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. During this period, earthly remnants served as a heavenly connection, and their veneration is a fascinating window into the cultural mood of a region in transition. Brown challenges the long-held two-tier idea of religion that separated the religious practices of the sophisticated elites from those of the superstitious masses, instead arguing that the cult of the saints crossed boundaries and played a dynamic part in both the Christian faith and the larger world of late antiquity. He shows how men and women living in harsh and sometimes barbaric times relied upon the holy dead to obtain justice, forgiveness, and power, and how a single sainted hair could inspire great thinkers and great artists. An essential text by one of the foremost scholars of European history, this expanded edition includes a new preface from Brown, which presents new ideas based on subsequent scholarship. “Informative…demonstrates once again Brown’s genius for sharing with his readers the fruits of not only his own painstaking and meticulous scholarship but also his penetrating understanding of the evolution of Western culture as a whole.”—Religious Studies

The Cult of the Saints

Author: Saint John Chrysostom
Publisher: St Vladimir's Seminary Press
ISBN: 9780881413021
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
"The cult of the saints is a phenomenon that expanded rapidly in the fourth century, and John Chrysostom's homilies are important witnesses to its growth. In this volume, Wendy Mayer investigates the liturgical, topographical, and pastoral aspects that marked the martyr cult at Antioch and Constantinople in John's time."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Protestants and the Cult of the Saints

Author: Carol Piper Heming
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 1935503626
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
The role of the saints became a theological dilemma for scholars and laity alike throughout the Reformation era. As Protestants tried to remove themselves from the hold of the Catholic Church, the cult of the saints remained a formidable presence. Through the analysis of 180 pamphlets published by reformers in German-speaking Europe, Carol Heming shows the struggle Protestants faced in purging the cult of the saints from their culture and religion. Heming examines why Reformation leaders so strongly and universally denounced the cult of the saints and whether the holy patrons disappeared from Protestant areas without benefit of champion or defender. Complete scriptural references used in the pamphlets against the saints and images are included.

Saints and Their Cults

Author: Stephen Wilson
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521311816
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 458

Book Description
This is a paperback edition of a collection of ten papers by different authors on the cult of saints, first published in hard covers in 1983. Six have been translated from French including a pioneering study by Robert Hertz, one of Durkheim's most eminent pupils. The editor provides a wide-ranging general and historical introduction, and a 100- page annotated bibliography covering material on the subject in all disciplines and in four main languages.

Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?

Author: Robert Bartlett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691159130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 806

Book Description
A sweeping, authoritative, and entertaining history of the Christian cult of the saints from its origin to the Reformation From its earliest centuries, one of the most notable features of Christianity has been the veneration of the saints—the holy dead. This ambitious history tells the fascinating story of the cult of the saints from its origins in the second-century days of the Christian martyrs to the Protestant Reformation. Robert Bartlett examines all of the most important aspects of the saints—including miracles, relics, pilgrimages, shrines, and the saints' role in the calendar, literature, and art. The book explores the central role played by the bodies and body parts of saints, and the special treatment these relics received. From the routes, dangers, and rewards of pilgrimage, to the saints' impact on everyday life, Bartlett's account is an unmatched examination of an important and intriguing part of the religious life of the past—as well as the present.

The Late Medieval Cult of the Saints

Author: Carmen Florea
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000460851
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
This is a book that explores the nature of sainthood in a region at the margins of medieval Latin Christendom. Defining the model of sanctity that characterized Transylvania between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the study considers how the cults of saints functioned within specific local social and cultural contexts. Analyzing case studies from a multi-ethnic region influenced by both the Latin and Eastern Christian traditions, this book provides a close reading of little-surveyed primary sources and offers a comprehensive understanding of sainthood in Transylvania, enhancing the broader study of medieval saints’ cults and their relationship to social power structures. It will be of great interest to scholars of medieval religion, researchers in medieval studies, and religious studies scholars engaged in comparative research.

Promoting the Saints

Author: Ottó Gecser
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9639776947
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
The studies in this volume concentrate on a complex set of socio-cultural phenomena, the cult of saints, in a variety of regions from Egypt to Poland, with a focus on Italy and Central Europe. The subjects of the contributions range in time from the fourth until the eighteenth century. The diversity of approaches adopted by the contributors—from literary analysis and historical anthropology to archaeology and art history—represents that open and multidisciplinary historical research that characterizes the work of Gábor Klaniczay to whom these essays are dedicated.

The Architectural Setting of the Cult of Saints in the Early Christian West c.300-c.1200

Author: John Crook
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191543004
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
This book explores the way in which church architecture from the earliest centuries of Christianity has been shaped by holy bones - the physical remains or 'relics' of those whom the Church venerated as saints. The Church's holy dead continued to exercise an influence on the living from beyond the grave, and their earthly remains provided a focus for prayer. The memoriae, house-churches and crypts of early Christian Rome; the elaborately decorated monuments containing the bodies of the bishops of Merovingian Gaul; the revival of ring crypts in the Carshingian empire; the crypts, 'tomb-shrines', and later high shrines of medieval England, all demonstrate how the presence of a holy body within a church influenced its very architecture. This is the first complete modern study of this hitherto somewhat neglected aspect of medieval church architecture in western Europe.

Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World

Author: Margaret Jean Cormack
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570036309
Category : Central America
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World traces the changing significance of a dozen saints and holy sites from the fourth century to the twentieth and from Africa, Sicily, Wales, and Iceland to Canada, Boston, Mexico, Brazil, and the Caribbean. Scholars representing the fields of history, art history, religious studies, and communications contribute their perspectives in this interdisciplinary collection, also notable as the first English language study of many of the saints treated in the volume. Several chapters chart the changing images and meanings of holy people as their veneration traveled from the Old World to the New; others describe sites and devotions that developed in the Americas. The ways that a group feels connected to the holy figure by ethnicity or regionalism proves to be a critical factor in a saint's reception, and many contributors discuss the tensions that develop between ecclesiastical authorities and communities of devotees.

The Cult of Saint Catherine of Siena

Author: Gerald Parsons
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754656456
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
This book examines the origins, development and history of the cult of Saint Catherine of Siena. Gerald Parsons argues that the cult of Catherine of Siena constitutes a remarkable example of the cult of a particular saint which, across more than six centuries, has been the vehicle for an evolving sequence of civil religious rituals and meanings. He shows how the cult of this particular saint developed, firstly, as an expression of Sienese civil religion; secondly, as a focus for Italian civil religion; and finally into an expression of European civil religion. Instead of the predominantly devotional - and frequently essentially hagiographical - approach of much of the literature on Catherine of Siena, Parsons examines the significance of her cult from the perspective of civil religion and the social history of religion.