Bodies in Early Modern Religious Dissent: Naked, Veiled, Vilified, Worshiped

ISBN-13: 9780367533229 / Angielski / Miękka / 2023 / 274 str.

Elisabeth Fischer; Xenia Von Tippelskirch

Opis

In early modern times, religious affiliation was often communicated through bodily practices. Despite various attempts at definition, these practices remained extremely fluid and lent themselves to individual appropriation and to evasion of church and state control. Because bodily practices prompted much debate, they serve as a useful starting point for examining denominational divisions, allowing scholars to explore the actions of smaller and more radical divergent groups. The focus on bodies and conflicts over bodily practices are the starting point for the contributors to this volume who depart from established national and denominational historiographies to probe the often-ambiguous phenomena occurring at the interstices of confessional boundaries. In this way, the authors examine a variety of religious living conditions, socio-cultural groups, and spiritual networks of early modern Europe and the Americas. The cases gathered here skillfully demonstrate the diverse ways in which regional and local differences affected the interpretation of bodily signs.

This book will appeal to scholars and students of early modern Europe and the Americas, as well as those interested in religious and gender history, and the history of dissent.

Spis treści

Part 1: Prologue  1. Introduction. Corporeality and Early Modern Religious Dissent  2. Body, Remember: A Plaidoyer for the History of the Body’s Expressiveness  Part 2: Body and Soul  3. "God be Praised that I did not Sweat to Death." The Power of the Body and Martin Luther’s Concept of Melancholy  4. A Pure Abode for an Unblemished Soul: Medical, Spiritual, and Political Significances of Bodily Characteristics in Johann Christian Senckenberg’s Journals  5. Bloody Bodies: Embodied Moravian Piety in Atlantic World Travel Diaries, 1735-1765  Part 3: Naked/Veiled  6. "[…] that we strip them all bare and naked" (Hans Folz) — Nakedness as a Physical Practice in the Religious Dissent between Jews and Christians in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Times  7. From Quakers to Femen. Practices in Protest Nudity  8. The Postures and Impostures of Clothing: Jean de Labadie’s Sartorial Ambiguities  Part 4: Bodies in the Contact Zone  9. Contaminating Infidels, Burnt Bodies, and Saved Souls: Sodomy and Catholicism in the Early Modern Age  10. Like Squirrels: Religious Dissent and the Body of the "Savage" in Marie de l’Incarnation’s Writings  11. Corpses in the Contact Zone: Holy Bodies as Ambivalent Signifiers in the Seventeenth-Century French Canadian Missions  Part 5: Holy Bodies  12. Observing the Observant Self: Female Reader Portraits, Marian Imagery, and the Emergence of Skepticism in Illuminated Prayer Books and Devotional Art (ca. 1475-1566)  13. Mysticism and Sanctity in the Eighteenth Century: The Stigmatized Body of Maria Columba Schonath (1730–1787), Poor Souls, and the Discernment of Spirits