Browsing by Subject "Monasticism"
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Item Embodied reading as political action in the "Hortus Deliciarum”(2016-12) Celentano, Sarah Susan; Holladay, Joan A.; Peers, Glenn A.; Clarke, John R.; Newman, Martha G.; Joyner, DanielleThe Hortus Deliciarum was an educational manuscript created between about 1168 and about 1182 for the Augustinian canonesses of the Alsatian monastery at Hohenbourg. The original manuscript was destroyed in the 1870 bombing of the Strasbourg Municipal Library. About two thirds of its contents have come down through nineteenth-century copies. Scholars agree that the abbess Relinde and her successor, Herrad, designed the manuscript collaboratively and that Herrad continued the project after Relinde’s death. Scholars have noticed iconographic and stylistic commonalities between the Hortus images and the mosaic programs of Norman Sicilian sites such as the Cappella Palatina and Monreale cathedral. The visual kinship is undeniable, but attempts to explain it have been unsatisfying; the common theory suggests the abbesses relied on a model book from the Sicilian mosaic workshops. In this study I argue that the abbesses intentionally incorporated Norman visual and literary material into their work because it was politically charged as a signifier of papal support during the conflict between Alexander III and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. I present Norman material in the Hortus heretofore undetected and additional evidence for engagement between Hohenbourg and the Regno—the Norman kingdom comprising Sicily and southern Italy. Ultimately, the Hortus attests to Hohenbourg’s engagement with global politics and contact with the Norman kingdom. While I contend the manuscript was the result of Relinde’s and Herrad’s first-hand encounters with the material culture of the Regno through travel, I argue its emphasis on Norman culture enabled a virtual journey for Hohenbourg canonesses of lower rank who did not enjoy such agency: the adoption of Norman culture at Hohenbourg invited the canonesses to travel virtually through the Regno by means of its images and texts. The end point of this embodied reading through the Hortus was the heavenly Jerusalem, the true and desired goal of all pilgrimage. As I show, through the efforts of the Norman rulers, the Regno had become conflated with the Holy Land in western Christian minds by the twelfth century. The canonesses thus reach Jerusalem via a surrogate Holy Land ruled by the papacy’s defenders, the Normans of the Mediterranean.Item "Jesus the Christ, amen" : (re)Christianizing the Apocryphon of John(2014-05) King, Bradley Forrest; Friesen, Steven J.; White, L. M.With four surviving copies, the Apocryphon of John is the best attested of the forty-five unique texts discovered in the Nag Hammadi library, and it is also one of the collections longest and most comprehensive tractates. For these and other reasons, the Apocryphon of John is one of the most studied texts of the Nag Hammadi corpus. To date, most interest in the Apocryphon of John has focused on the text's relationship to "Gnosticism" and/or the early phases of its composition, for which there is virtually no evidence aside from Irenaeus’s description of the Barbeloites and Ophites in Adversus Haereses I.29--30. Despite the breadth and number of these studies, little attention has been paid to the text's redaction history and what it reveals about the evolving socio-religious circumstances through which the Apocryphon of John was transmitted. Indeed, the four surviving copies preserve evidence of at least two different versions--generally distinguished as the "long" and "short" recensions--that are dissimilar enough to raise serious questions about the degree to which they represent compatible socio-religious traditions. In this thesis, I demonstrate that many of these reading variants preserve evidence of the tractate's ongoing adoption and adaptation to the shifting religio-political and socio-historical contexts through which it was transmitted, and this is especially true with regard to the longer form of the texts, which is the product of a comprehensive rewriting program that reshaped much of tractate's contents. Paying close attention to shifts in the text's practical, ideological, and theological dimensions, I also argue that all surviving forms of the Apocryphon of John indicate that it was thoroughly embedded in the conversations and concerns of contemporaneous Christian culture(s) and that it continued to be shaped and reshaped along with the evolving Christian landscape until it was finally abandoned, most likely as a result of the episcopate's increasing control over previously independent monastic communities in the fifth-century.