Alison Knowles Frazier's Books

Possible Lives

Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy

By: Alison Knowles Frazier

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Possible Lives

Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy

By: Alison Knowles Frazier

Possible Lives uses the saints'lives written by humanists of the Italian Renaissance to explore the intertwining of classical and religious cultures on the eve of the European Reformation. The lives of saints were among the most reproduced and widely distributed literatures of medieval and early modern Europe. During the century before the Reformation, these narratives of impossible goodness fell into the hands of classicizing intellectuals known as humanists. This study examines how the humanist authors received, criticized, and rewrote the traditional stories of exemplary virtue for patrons and audiences who were surprisingly open to their textual experiments. Drawn from a newly constructed catalog of primary sources in manuscript and print, the cases in this book range from the lure of martyrdom as the West confronted Islam to the use of saints'lives in local politics and the rhetorician's classroom. Frazier discusses the writers'perceptions of historical sanctity, the commanding place of the mendicant friars, and one unique account of a contemporary holy woman. Possible Lives shows that the classical Renaissance was also a saintly Renaissance, as humanists deployed their rhetorical and philological skills to "renew the persuasive force of Christian virtue" and "save the cult of the saints." Combining quantitative and anecdotal approaches in a highly readable series of case studies, Frazier reveals the contextual richness of this little-known and unexpectedly large body of Latin hagiography.

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Page Count

551

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231503393

ISBN 13

9780231503396

Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities, 1200-1600

By: Alison More

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Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities, 1200-1600

By: Alison More

Any visitor to Belgium or the Netherlands is immediately struck by the number of convents and beguinages (begijnhoven) in both major cities and small towns. Their number and location in urban centres suggests that the women who inhabited them once held a prominent role. Despite leaving a visible mark on cities in Europe, much of the story of these women - known variously as beguines, tertiaries, klopjes, recluses, and anchoresses - remains to be told. Instead of aspiring to live as traditional religious, they transcended normative assumptions about religion and gender and had a very real impact on their religious and secular worlds. The sources for their tale are often fragmentary and difficult to interpret. However, careful scrutiny allows their voices to be heard. Drawing on an array of sources including religious rules, sermons, hagiographic vitae, and rapiaria, Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities traces the story of pious laywomen between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. It both emphasizes the innovative roles of women who transcended established forms of institutional religious life and reveals the ways in which historiographical habits have obscured the dynamic and fluid nature of their histories. By highlighting the development of irregular and extraregular communities and tracing the threads of monasticisation that wove their way around pious laywomen, this book draws attention to the vibrant and dynamic culture of feminine lay piety that persisted from the later middle ages onwards.

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Page Count

331

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0192534734

ISBN 13

9780192534736

Patrons and Patron Saints in Early Modern English Literature

By: Alison Chapman

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Patrons and Patron Saints in Early Modern English Literature

By: Alison Chapman

This book visits the fact that, in the pre-modern world, saints and lords served structurally similar roles, acting as patrons to those beneath them on the spiritual or social ladder with the word "patron" used to designate both types of elite sponsor. Chapman argues that this elision of patron saints and patron lords remained a distinctive feature of the early modern English imagination and that it is central to some of the key works of literature in the period. Writers like Jonson, Shakespeare, Spenser, Drayton, Donne and, Milton all use medieval patron saints in order to represent and to challenge early modern ideas of patronage -- not just patronage in the narrow sense of the immediate economic relations obtaining between client and sponsor, but also patronage as a society-wide system of obligation and reward that itself crystallized a whole culture’s assumptions about order and degree. The works studied in this book -- ranging from Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, written early in the 1590s, to Milton’s Masque Performed at Ludlow Castle, written in 1634 -- are patronage works, either aimed at a specific patron or showing a keen awareness of the larger patronage system. This volume challenges the idea that the early modern world had shrugged off its own medieval past, instead arguing that Protestant writers in the period were actively using the medieval Catholic ideal of the saint as a means to represent contemporary systems of hierarchy and dependence. Saints had been the ideal -- and idealized -- patrons of the medieval world and remained so for early modern English recusants. As a result, their legends and iconographies provided early modern Protestant authors with the perfect tool for thinking about the urgent and complex question of who owed allegiance to whom in a rapidly changing world.

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Page Count

251

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1135132313

ISBN 13

9781135132316

Possible Lives

Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy

By: Alison Knowles Frazier

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Possible Lives

Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy

By: Alison Knowles Frazier

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

551

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231503393

ISBN 13

9780231503396

Book's by Alison Knowles Frazier

Possible Lives

Possible Lives

Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities, 1200-1600

Fictive Orders and Feminine Religious Identities, 1200-1600

Patrons and Patron Saints in Early Modern English Literature

Patrons and Patron Saints in Early Modern English Literature

Possible Lives

Possible Lives

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