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To disclose the underlying mystery of the Church in relation to Christ and sinners, James Dallen traces the complex development of ecclesial repentance from the Church's first centuries to the present time. He shows that the Church has always worked with sinful members, assisting them to live out the implications of their baptismal conversion and recognizing them as members of its assemblies. It is in this history, the tradition that survives from those who have gone before marked by the sign of faith, that the Church must find the way to exercise the ministry of reconciliation today and in the future.
Peter Birks's tragically early death, and his immense influence around the world, led immediately to the call for a volume of essays in his honour by scholars who had known him as a colleague, teacher and friend. One such volume, published in 2006, contained essays largely from scholars working in England (Mapping the Law: Essays in Memory of Peter Birks, edited by Andrew Burrows and Lord Rodger). This volume contains the essays of those outside England who chose to honour Peter, and appears later than the English volume, reflecting the far flung habitations of its authors. The essays contained in this volume are focussed around the law of unjust enrichment, but are not narrowly preoccupied ...
Augustine, bishop of Hippo between 395 and 430, and his fellow bishops lived and worked through massive shifts in politics, society, and religion. Christian bishops were frequently asked to serve as intellectuals, legislators, judges, and pastors—roles and responsibilities that often conflicted with one another and made it difficult for bishops to be effective leaders. Expectations of Justice in the Age of Augustine examines these roles and the ways bishops struggled to fulfill (or failed to fulfill) them, as well as the philosophical conclusions they drew from their experience in everyday affairs, such as oath-swearing, and in the administration of penance. Augustine and his near contempo...
Using a wide variety of sources, John Boswell examines the evidence that parents of all classes gave up unwanted children, "exposing" them in public places, donating them to the church, or delivering them in later centuries to foundling hospitals. He shows what happened to these children, and he illuminates the moral codes that condoned abandonment.
No subject looms larger over the historical landscape of medieval Spain than that of the reconquista, the rapid expansion of the power of the Christian kingdoms into the Muslim-populated lands of southern Iberia, which created a broad frontier zone that for two centuries remained a region of warfare and peril. Drawing on a large fund of unpublished material in royal, ecclesiastical, and municipal archives as well as rabbinic literature, Jonathan Ray reveals a fluid, often volatile society that transcended religious boundaries and attracted Jewish colonists from throughout the peninsula and beyond. The result was a wave of Jewish settlements marked by a high degree of openness, mobility, and ...
DIVA collection of essays exploring ideologies and discourses that center on sexual otherness in medieval Iberian cultures./div
The theology of sacred or clerical orders of the Latin Church in the high and later Middle Ages developed from an amalgam of texts written from late patristic antiquity through to the early 12th century. Such texts, many studied and edited here, include letters, tracts, sermons, liturgical commentaries, ordination instructions, and canon law pieces. Within these texts multiple topics might be considered, such as the Old and New Testament origins of each of the clerical grades, their number and hierarchical ranking, the duties, dress and moral conduct of a cleric, and ordination ritual. Particularly striking are the multiple duties assigned each grade and their modification in various parts of the Western Church. Many of these texts found their way not only into more formal theological treatments of sacred orders, but also into ordination rites. Probably the most public and visible duty of a cleric was his function as a eucharistic officer, and one essay in this collection deals with perhaps the most famous early medieval depiction of this clerical ritual on the ivory covers of the 9th-century Drogo Sacramentary.
The first broad-ranging social history in English of the medieval secular clergy.
Though it may not be immediately obvious why articles on topics from such distantly removed areas of western Europe - the Iberian peninsula and southern Italy - should appear in the same volume (the fourth collection by Roger Reynolds), the materials covered illustrate that they are indeed closely related, both in their differences and their similarities. Both peninsulas had their own indigenous liturgies and music (Old Spanish and Beneventan), distinctive written scripts (Visigothic and Beneventan), and legal and theological traditions, and repeatedly these worked their influence on other areas of western Europe. Although there were frequent attempts by the papacy and secular rulers from the 9th to the 13th century to suppress these distinctive traditions in both areas, elements of these nonetheless survived well into the 16th century and beyond. Despite the differences in these traditions, the articles in this volume also demonstrate through manuscript evidence the continued exchange of the distinctive customs between the Iberian peninsula and southern Italian cultures from the very early Middle Ages through the 12th century.