Liturgy and devotion in the crusader states: introduction

ABSTRACT

This special issue contains eight essays on the liturgy celebrated in the Latin East in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The papers as a whole demonstrate how the study of the liturgy can open up the religious and cultural history of the crusades and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, reveal crusade spirituality and practice, and trace how the Latins of Outremer expressed through their liturgy their historical consciousness and awareness of contemporary realities.     

Josephine's Journey: Gender‐based Violence and Marian Devotion in Urban Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This article deals with how, in the urban setting of Madang, Papua New Guinea, Marian devotion is deployed in response to domestic and gender‐based violence. While providing insight into the lived religious experiences of Catholic women living in Madang, this article shows how Mary empowers her followers to resist violence, yet, at the same time, paradoxically, is instrumental in sanctioning women to tolerate violence. Josephine's ‘journey of violence’ reveals not only Josephine's turning to Mary, but more so, her negotiations with values belonging to different cultural logics. Caught between ‘tradition’, Christianity and ‘modernity’, Josephine and other Catholic women engage in painful processes of self‐analysis and self‐transformation to adapt to and change their situation. In these processes, Mary is used as a role model.     

After thought. Devotion,Teresa de Jesús,and Miguel de Cervantes

ABSTRACT

This article explores the complex landscape of devotion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, comparing the legislated Christian-only history of Counter-Reformation with the various alternative strands of belief, faith, and devotion present in a variety of areas of cultural production. The article first examines representations of devotion—and methodologies of reading such representations—in areas of production such as architecture, dictionaries, literature, and the arts; at the end of this first section, it coins the concept of “After Thought” as a reading tool to better comprehend and possibly experience devotion in ways particular to early modern Spain, not merely en cristiano but in multiconfessional forms. “After Thought,” both the tool and the article, follow intellectual engagements with Andalusi (not merely Andalusian) past, present, and future environments in early modern Spain. They also engage alternative somatic dimensions of a different “entendimiento” of Christianity, as described by Teresa de Jesús and practiced by both her and Cervantes. Finally, in reviewing the six ducal chapters of the second part of Don Quijote as a rewriting of Castillo interior, the apocryphal condition of this segment of the novel mobilizes yet another wheel in the Trojan horse of fiction, one that exposes the way in which Cervantes refigures Teresa de Jesús, thus yielding two interactive models of “After Thought” in early modern Spain's arts, religion, and spirituality.     

The British Isles and Great Moravia in the early middle ages

The work of the Irish or Iro-Scottish missioneries on the continent of Europe in the sixth to eighth centuries is well known. An attempt is made here to show how the characteristic design of early Celtic churches found its way partly via Bavaria, where for example the Irishman Virgil became bishop of Salzburg in the mid-eight century, into Moravia, along with other Iro-Scottish cultural influences, a century or so before the well-known Christianizing mission launched into that area from Byzantium by the two brothers SS Cyril and Methodius, in 863.     

Holy Blood devotion in later medieval Scotland

Of the Christocentric devotions which achieved widespread popularity in later medieval Scotland, the cult of the Holy Blood gained the greatest prominence. Strong Scottish connections with the blood-relic centres at Bruges and, to a lesser extent, Wilsnack, primarily established by Scotland’s urban merchant class, provided the conduit for the development of the cult in the east coast burghs from the second quarter of the fifteenth century. The cult remained principally an urban phenomenon and was associated closely with the guildry of those burghs in which Holy Blood altars were founded. Holy Blood devotion, while by no means exclusively associated with members of the merchant community, provided a vehicle for expression of guild identity and, as in Bruges, a mechanism for the regulation and control of guild members’ public behaviour. That regulatory function, however, was secondary to the cult’s soteriological significance, its popularity in urban Scotland reflecting the wider late medieval European lay quest for closer and more direct personal connections with God.