BOB2020MOME

The Abbaye du Saint Esprit was a successful work of vernacular spiritual advice for women, surviving in sixteen manuscripts and a widely copied Middle English translation. Unlike many other didactic religious texts, it offers few prescriptions for behaviour; rather, it instructs the reader to build a convent of virtues in her conscience and uses the allegorical structure of the building and its inhabitants to arrange brief teachings on prayer and virtuous practice. Between its genesis in the last quarter of the thirteenth century to its final development towards the end of the fifteenth, it was reworked several times for new audiences of women both lay and cloistered, bourgeois and aristocratic. The examination of these successive adaptations offers insights into the growth of lay religious culture, the participation of women in new religious movements, and the use and transformation of twelfth and early thirteenth-century monastic formation literature for new audiences.This book also offers, for the first time, editions of all the French versions of the Abbaye and a modern English translation of the earliest version.

How are we to regard our body? As a prison, an enemy, or, maybe, an ally? Is it something bad that needs to be humiliated and extinguished, or should one see it as a huge blessing, that deserves attention and care? Is the body an impediment to human experience of God? Or, rather, does the body have a crucial role in this very experience? Alexandros Chouliaras’ book The Anthropology of St Gregory Palamas: the Image of God, the Spiritual Senses, and the Human Body argues that the fourteenth-century monk, theologian, and bishop Gregory Palamas has interesting and persuasive answers to offer to all these questions, and that his anthropology has a great deal to offer to Christian life and theology today.

Amongst this book’s contributions are these: for Palamas, the human is superior to the angels concerning the image of God for specific reasons, all linked to his corporeality. Secondly, the spiritual senses refer not only to the soul, but also to the body. However, in Paradise the body will be absorbed by the spirit, and acquire a totally spiritual aspect. But this does not at all entail a devaluing of the body. On the contrary, St Gregory ascribes a high value to the human body. Finally, central to Palamas’ theology is a strong emphasis on the human potentiality for union with God, theosis: that is, the passage from image to likeness. And herein lies, perhaps, his most important gift to the anthropological concerns of our epoch.