Maltese clergy had reached by the end of the eighteenth century. The council of Trent made a strenuous effort to transform the clergy into a professional class, conscious of their duties and separate from the laity. It envisaged especially the parish
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In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2023
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 17–35 (19 total)
L’heure du laitier ou la contestation
Résistance, anticolonialisme et nouvelle gauche sur une « petite théorie » de Claude Bourdet
Fabrice Usman
Quand on sonne chez vous à six heures du matin et que c’est le laitier, vous êtes en Dicton, en France, du temps de l’occupation allemande Juxtapose à la fatalité la résistance à la fatalité. Tu connaîtras d’étranges hauteurs . René Char, « Le
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 67–86 (20 total)
Scandal of the Church, Prison of the Soul
The Problem of Bad Custom in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Canon Law and Practice
Anthony Perron
was predominantly associated with insults to clerical power, “scandals” that implied an inversion of hierarchy, gave voice to the laity, and even satirized and belittled the professed religious. Behind such despised consuetudines , then, was an
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 20–38 (19 total)
The Opposite of Custom
Fashion, Sumptuary Law, and Consuetudo in Fifteenth-Century Northern Italy
M. Christina Bruno
laity's social mores. Commanding huge crowds at their Lenten or Advent sermons, their influence was not limited to the religious sphere, but as scholars have shown, they were also peripatetic experts who consulted on civic policy, wrote laws, brokered
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 59–78 (20 total)
Elizabeth C. Macknight
reveal the parallel agency, organizing capacities, and determination shared by Catholic aristocratic laity. The interactions between nineteenth-century nobles and religious orders, which resemble medieval and early modern interactions, reinforced a mutual
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 18–41 (24 total)
Alms, Money and Reciprocity
Buddhist Nuns as Mediators of Generalised Exchange in Thailand
Joanna Cook
In this paper I examine the part that women, in the ambiguous role of Buddhist nun (mae chee), now take in the emblematic Buddhist practice of alms donations. The monastic office of 'mae chee' is complicated. It is conveyed through the ritual adoption of religious vows and is usually undertaken for life. However, mae chee ordination is only partial and its status is far below that of monks. In Thai law mae chee are regarded as pious laywomen (upasikas) and the Department of Religious Affairs does not mention them in its annual report. Even so, because they are said to have renounced the world they do not have the right to vote. Owing to this ambiguity mae chee are able to employ both the ascetic practices of renouncers (such as accepting alms) and those of laywomen (such as offering alms). Mae chee, while debarred from the alms round, both receive alms from the laity and donate alms to monks. Furthermore, mae chee receive monetary alms from the laity on behalf of the monastic community as a whole. I argue that by handling money given to the monastic community mae chee mediate in a relationship of generalised reciprocity between the monastic community and the lay society. By donating alms to monks, mae chee appear to be reaffirming their status of partial ordination, yet in order for them to be able to receive alms donations from the laity they must see themselves, and be recognised by the laity, as an integral part of the monastic community. A nuanced understanding of these economic, religious and gendered roles is crucial to our understanding of the incorporation of women into the monastic community and the ways in which gift practices are related to interpersonal and group dynamics in the context of modern Thai monasticism.
In Anthropology in Action
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2008
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 8–21 (13 total)
Philip Nord
The interwar years have been characterized as a “watershed” in the history of French Catholicism,1 and it is not hard to see why. The Church had experienced the first decades of the Third Republic as a time of trial and persecution. World War I, however, gave believers reason to look forward to a brighter future. The republican establishment had welcomed the political representatives of Catholic opinion into the Union sacrée. The distress of soldiers and war widows had nourished a revival of popular faith.2 With the return of peace, the Catholic laity plunged into an associational activism of unprecedented proportions. The vaulting edifice of voluntary bodies they constructed reenergized the faith and at the same articulated a Catholic countervision of the proper constitution of la cité.
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2003
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–20 (20 total)
The Precarious Center
Religious Leadership among African Christians
Thomas G. Kirsch
This article addresses a long-standing conundrum in the anthropology of religion concerning the ambiguous status of religious leaders: they are subjects of power in that they are able to exert power over others, yet they are objects of power in that they rely on empowerment through others. Taking African-initiated Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity in Zambia as my example, I argue that church leaders' strategies to stabilize their authority have unintended consequences since these strategies can contribute to the precariousness of their positions. By drawing fundamental distinctions between themselves and members of the laity as regards their own extraordinariness, church leaders raise high expectations about their own capacities that may turn out to be impossible to fulfill. Yet even the opposite strategy of strengthening one's authority by embedding oneself in socio-religious networks can eventually lead to a destabilization of church leaders' authority because it increases their dependence on factors that are beyond their control.
In Religion and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2014
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 47–64 (18 total)
'I wyl wright of women prevy sekenes'
Imagining Female Literacy and Textual Communities in Medieval and Early Modern Midwifery Manuals
Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth
Defining the term ‘literacy’ in medieval and early modern England is not a simple task; it defies the more modern (and relatively uncomplicated) definition of having the ability to read and write. In medieval terminology, a litteratus was someone who was learned in Latin, while an illitteratus was someone who was not. Eventually, litteratus and illitteratus came to be associated with the clergy and laity respectively. But these terms were not used for describing literacy in the vernacular, or the various categories and levels of competence in both reading and writing, either in Latin or in the vernacular. Recently, scholars have increasingly been thinking in terms of multiple ‘literacies’, especially when considering the more elusive female literacy. In her 1998 book, Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England, Eve Sanders asserts that literacy practices following the Reformation played a role in the formation of gender identity, and that ‘different levels and forms of literacy’ were assigned to each gender. Sanders contributes to what is the project of a growing number of literary scholars, such as Margaret Ferguson and Frances Dolan, who study literacy using gender as a category of examination. By adding gender to the mix, these scholars challenge the more narrow definitions of literacy such as those established by David Cressy’s influential Literacy and the Social Order. They have sought instead to define literacies by exploring the multiple ways in which the ‘products of a culture can be acquired and transmitted.’
A Sectarian Rite Gone Mainstream and Cutting-Edge
The Blossoming of Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship Volume I
Eric L. Friedland
At the outset of the Victorian Era the liturgy of the newly formed British Reform Judaism made its first appearance in Forms of Prayer. It was essentially a rather traditional, yet venturesome prayer book by the largely self-taught charismatic spiritual leader, David W. Marks, for a congregation made up of Anglicised Sephardic and Ashkenazic families, the West London Synagogue. Unique in prayer book reform, the new rite was marked by a deemphasis on the Rabbinic tradition and a move towards an enlightened biblicism. Thus it acquired a bit of a sectarian look. Over time this qualified scriptural reductionism gave way, in the 1920s and 30s, during the days of Rabbis Morris Joseph and Harold Reinhart, to an increased appreciation of Rabbinic law and teaching and, with the influx of Liberal rabbis from Continental Europe after the Second World War, to a recovery of a connectedness with all of world Jewry. A new generation of native-born rabbis (Lionel Blue and Jonathan Magonet) produced volumes of Forms of Prayer from 1977 onward for an entire movement that carried on the Marks legacy and the learned contributions of the postwar German rabbis, while simultaneously going in wholly fresh directions. Bringing the longest continuing Reform siddur into the twenty-first century have been the energetic joint efforts of clergy, scholars and laity under the multifaceted editorial guidance of Jonathan Magonet.
In European Judaism
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2011
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 18–52 (34 total)