| Description |
1 online resource (222 pages) |
| Series |
Oxford studies in medieval European history |
|
Oxford studies in medieval European history.
|
| Contents |
1: Introduction: Demons in Daily Life -- Lived Religion and Devotional Strategies -- 2: Reasons for Possession: Perilous People, Hazardous Places -- 3: Vulnerable Persons: Corporeality and the Female Life Course -- 4: Community Responses to Demonic Presence -- 5: Constructing the Sacred: Demons, Priests, and Pilgrims -- 6: The Interwoven Fabric of the Sacred and the Political -- 7: The Need for Control: Demonic Sex and the Feminine -- 8: Conclusions: Demonic Devices: Lived Religion as a Methodology -- Bibliography -- Index |
| Summary |
This book focuses on conceptualizations of lived religion by analysing significant case studies from canonization processes (c. 1240-1450). Geographically it covers Western Europe and one of its aims is to compare Northern and Southern material and customs. 'Lived religion' is both a thematic approach and a methodology: a focus on rituals, symbols, and gestures as well as sensitivity to nuances and careful contextualizing of the sources are constitutive elements of the argumentation. Demonic possession was a spiritual state that often had physical symptoms. The main argument developed throughout is, however, that demonic possession was a social phenomenon which should be understood with regard to the community and culture. Each set of sources formed its own specific context, in which demonic presence derived from different motivations, reasonings, and methods of categorization. Rituals, gestures, emotions, and sensory elements in constructing demonic presence reveal negotiations over authority and agency. In the argumentation, the hierarchy between the 'learned' and 'popular' within religion is contested, as is a strict polarity between individual and collective religious participation. Cases of demonic possession demonstrate how the personal affected the communal, and vice versa, and how they were eventually transformed into discourses and institutions of the Church; that is, definitions of the miraculous and the diabolical. Alterity and inversion of identity, gender, and various forms of corporeality and the interplay between the sacred and diabolical are themes running throughout the volume |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Online resource; title from web page (Oxford Scholarship Online, viewed on July 28, 2020) |
| Subject |
Demoniac possession -- Europe -- History -- To 1500
|
|
Demoniac possession
|
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Religion
|
| SUBJECT |
Europe -- Religion -- History -- To 1500
|
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Europe -- Religious life and customs -- To 1500
|
| Subject |
Europe
|
| Genre/Form |
Electronic books
|
|
History
|
| Form |
Electronic book
|
| ISBN |
0192591029 |
|
9780192591029 |
|
9780192591012 |
|
0192591010 |
|
9780191885563 |
|
0191885568 |
|
