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Faith’s Boundaries
Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities
Who owns the spaces of religion? Does the question matter or even make sense? Modern distinctions between sacred and secular spheres tend to assume that clergy dominate the former and lay people the latter. A man or woman living in the early modern period might not have been so sure. They would have thought more immediately of things of heaven and things of earth and would have seen each as the concern of clergy and laity alike. Faith’s boundaries while real were very porous. This collection offers the first sustained comparative examination of lay-clerical relations in confraternities through the late medieval and early modern periods. It shows how laity and clergy debated accommodated resolved or deflected the key issues of gender race politics class and power. The sixteen essays are organized into six sections that consider different aspects of the function of confraternities as social spaces where laity and clergy met mediated and sometimes competed and fought. They cover a period historically when kinship was a dominant metaphor in religious life and when kinship groups like confraternities were dominant models in religious institutions. They deal with Catholic Jewish and Islamic confraternities and range geographically from Europe to the Middle East Central and South Asia and Latin America.
Communities of Learning
Networks and the Shaping of Intellectual Identity in Europe, 1100-1500
Communities of Learning: Networks and the Shaping of Intellectual Identity in Europe 1100-1500 explores the fundamental insight that all new ideas are developed in the context of a community whether academic religious or simply as a network of friends. The essays in this volume consider this notion in a variety of contexts and locations within Europe from the pioneering age of translation activity in twelfth-century Toledo when Jewish Christian and Muslim scholars came together to discuss Aristotle to the origins of the University of Paris in the thirteenth century and up to the period of great cultural renewal in France Germany and Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The collected essays bring together disciplinary approaches that are often discussed quite separately namely that of the history of ideas and the sociologies of both intellectual and religious life with a view to exploring the multiplicity of communities in which ideas are pursued. Underpinning these various essays is an awareness of the delicate relationship between education and the diversity of religious practice and expression within Europe from 1100 to 1500. The collection emphasizes the fundamental continuity of intellectual concerns which were shaped by both classical thought and monotheist religious tradition but interpreted in a variety of ways.