Search Results (36)

Although an edition of Petrus Hispanus’ commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius’ De divinis nominibus has long been available, his contribution to the pivotal question of beauty—so extensively explored by medieval commentators on this treatise—has remained virtually unnoticed. This article seeks to address that lacuna by examining the principal passages devoted to beauty, primarily in Chapter 4, where Pseudo-Dionysius’s presents God as subsistent beauty and as the source of both good and beauty, thereby articulating a profound connection between goodness, beauty and being. The study undertakes a comparative analysis of Petrus Hispanus’ commentary and the gloss on the same Dionysian text by Thomas Gallus, upon whom Petrus Hispanus depends to a considerable degree. This comparison reveals that, in the section on beauty, Petrus Hispanus offers a richer and more nuanced treatment than Gallus’ paraphrase. The theme of beauty emerges in close relation to the soul’s ascent toward God within a Christian framework deeply shaped by Neoplatonic thought. While Petrus Hispanus retains traditional descriptions of beauty—such as harmony or order—he also emphasizes its intelligible nature more strongly than either Dionysius or Vercelli did, assigning to the intellect a privileged role in the apprehension of beauty. Full article

This article undertakes a cross-cultural comparative inquiry into the motif of “women’s weaving” in medieval Daoism and Christianity. Although the two traditions developed with minimal historical contact, both elevate women’s textile labor into a central metaphor for cosmogenesis, sacred order, and individual salvation. Nevertheless, their hermeneutic trajectories diverge in essential ways. Working within a tripartite analytical framework (intellectual roots, artistic images, ritual practices) to argue that Daoism interprets “women’s weaving” as a proactive technique of transformation and nurture, based on a cosmology of immanent huasheng lun. In this reading, the image is affiliated with the cosmic creativity of nüxian, the inner transformation of their body, and the autonomous pursuit of transcendence. By contrast, within Christianity’s transcendent theological horizon of creatio ex nihilo, “women’s weaving” is configured primarily as an ethical discipline of responsive obedience, closely tied to the mystery of the Incarnation, the imitatio Dei, and communal spiritual exercises and charity under monasticism. The cross-cultural resonance of this motif, I contend, is grounded in the “men’s ploughing and women’s weaving” economic formation, patriarchal gender order, and shared symbolic cognition; its decisive bifurcation arises from contrasting deep cultural structures—namely, cosmology, conceptions of the body, soteriology, and church–state arrangements. Through this micro-case, the article further argues that the sacralization of secular gender roles constitutes an agentic cultural choice, one that indexes distinct civilizational pathways in understanding creation, nature, the body, and freedom. Full article

This article explores devotional responses to childbirth in Byzantine and medieval Western Christianity, focusing on the interplay between maternal experience, sacred objects, and saintly intercession. It begins by examining how the Virgin Mary was revered as a powerful intercessor in matters of fertility and childbirth. Drawing on literary, liturgical, and visual sources, the study also highlights vernacular practices such as the use of ritual girdles and protective garments. It then traces how these traditions migrated to Western Europe, where Mary’s girdle became a widespread devotional object, particularly in Italy and England. Later in the study, special attention is given to the cult of Saints Julitta and Kerykos, known in the West as Quiricus/Cyricus and Julitta, a mother-and-child martyr pair whose veneration in the Latin West gained renewed significance in the late Middle Ages, particularly through its symbolic parallels with Marian devotion in childbirth-related contexts. While Byzantine traditions emphasized theological regulation and elite contexts, Western Christianity fostered more accessible, embodied, and affective forms of devotional practice. The article concludes that childbirth devotion, variably expressed across regions, formed a significant part of Christian spirituality, shaped by institutional authority, local needs, and ritual acts grounded in bodily experience and articulated through images, objects, and gesture. Full article

One of the central themes of this journal is to ‘re-boot’ the mystical tradition for the contemporary seeker. The author, a practising psychotherapist, undertakes this in the present article by connecting three strands of thought and practice to propose a ‘mystical therapy’. First, there is the Christian mystical tradition as exemplified by the medieval tradition of theologia mystica. Second, the practices and insights of present-day therapy and counselling arising from the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and his successors, including recent approaches from practitioners such as James Hillman and Wilfred Bion. Finally, the philosophical reflections of Freud’s Viennese contemporary Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), especially in regard to das Mystische and the choreography of saying and showing. All three strands are blended together as the author reflects on three decades of work in the area and the possibility of ‘re-booting’ the mystical through these means. Full article

This article examines the entangled relationship between hagiographic memory, liturgical space, and sacred landscape in the rock-cut monastic settlements of Cappadocia. Drawing on archeological, iconographic, and acoustic analyses, this article argues that the morphology of these sanctuaries—shaped by volcanic tuff and carved over centuries—was not only functional but performed a theological and mnemonic function. The spatial arrangement of apses, naves, and funerary chambers encoded rituals and commemorative acts, while painted iconographies mediated doctrinal meaning and cosmic orientation. Furthermore, this study situates Cappadocia within broader traditions of monastic hagiography, tracing how carved architecture preserved saintly narratives, communal memory, and devotional performance. By engaging with recent debates in heritage theory, the article also contends that these monastic landscapes continue to act as living archives, sustaining religious and cultural identities beyond their historical moment. The study thus contributes to emerging interdisciplinary discussions on sacred space, material devotion, and the performativity of memory in medieval Christian monasticism. Full article

In hagiographic accounts, the fictitious Christian saint Judas Kyriakos is made to speak Hebrew-like words. In both his inventio and passio narratives, Judas Kyriakos’ voice is made to transverse the fraught landscape of Jewish conversion, and highlights his indelible Jewishness even long after his conversion to Christianity. Despite not being actual Hebrew, his pseudo-Hebrew gibberish has been labelled as Hebrew across sources for a millennium. The present essay examines how Judas Kyriakos’ speech is challenged and subverted by a parallel figure, Rabbi Yehuda, composed as his foil in the Jewish Toledot Yeshu tradition; and the ways in which doctrine, magic, polemic, and identity are all entangled within saintly speech in both legends. Specific case studies of Judas Kyriakos’ cult in the medieval trade cities of Provins and Ancona are analyzed to illustrate how his public veneration posed direct polemical threats to local Jewish communities, further necessitating the counter-narrative. Full article

This work is devoted to the development of dialogical hermeneutics. As a special field of research, hermeneutics was formed as a result of the efforts of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer. The first source of hermeneutics is Aristotle’s treatise “On Interpretation”, which formulates the special type of speech—‘logos apophantikos’—that aligns speech with the identification of thinking and being. However, this approach is challenged by the hermeneutics of the sophists, for whom speech is a command, a prayer, a question, an answer, or a narrative. The second source of hermeneutics is the predominantly Protestant tradition of interpreting biblical texts. This paper examines the hermeneutic strategies of Jewish classical texts, which differ significantly from the Christian tradition of understanding text. Jewish classical texts, from Tanakh and Talmud to Jewish mysticism and philosophy, are more focused not on propositions, but on commands, prayers, questions, answers, dialogue, and narrative. Thus, the hermeneutic strategy of Jewish texts converges with investigations of the Greek sophists. Particular emphasis is placed on the medieval Jewish philosophy. The paper examines three works: “Emunot ve-deot” by Saadia Gaon, “Kuzari” by Halevi, and “Guide of the Perplexed” by Maimonides. In this regard, we discuss the system of dual argumentation, the relation between halakha and aggadah, and the strategy of concealment and revelation in language—approaches that in many ways present an alternative to the hermeneutics of understanding. The Study of rabbinic tradition leads us to the development of dialogical hermeneutics that forms the methodological foundation of humanistic culture. Full article

This article examines the theological trajectories of Watchman Nee (1903–1972) and Witness Lee (1905–1997) on sanctification, union with Christ, and deification, situating their contributions within recent reappraisals of the doctrine of theosis in the academy. Though deification was universally affirmed by the early church and retained in various forms in medieval and early Protestant theology, post-Reformation Western Christianity marginalized this theme in favor of juridical and forensic soteriological categories. Against this backdrop, Nee and Lee offer a theologically rich, biblically grounded, and experientially oriented articulation of deification that warrants greater scholarly attention. Drawing from the Keswick Holiness tradition, patristic sources, and Christian mysticism, Nee developed a soteriology that integrates justification, sanctification, and glorification within an organic model of progressive union with God. Though he does not explicitly use the term “deification”, the language he employs regarding union and participation closely mirrors classical expressions of Christian theosis. For Nee, sanctification is not merely moral improvement but the transformative increase of the divine life, culminating in conformity to Christ’s image. Lee builds upon and expands Nee’s participatory soteriology into a comprehensive theology of deification, explicitly referring to it as “the high peak of the divine revelation” in the Holy Scriptures. For Lee, humans become God “in life and nature but not in the Godhead”. By employing the phrase “not in the Godhead”, Lee upholds the Creator–creature distinction—i.e., humans never participate in the ontological Trinity or God’s incommunicable attributes. Yet, in the first portion of his description, he affirms that human beings undergo an organic, transformative process by which they become God in deeply significant ways. His framework structures sanctification as a seven-stage process, culminating in the believer’s transformation and incorporation into the Body of Christ to become a constituent of a corporate God-man. This corporate dimension—often overlooked in Western accounts—lies at the heart of Lee’s ecclesiology, which he sees as being consummated in the eschatological New Jerusalem. Ultimately, this study argues that Nee and Lee provide a coherent, non-speculative model of deification that integrates biblical exegesis, theological tradition, and practical spirituality, and thus, present a compelling alternative to individualistic and forensic soteriologies while also highlighting the need for deeper engagement across global theological discourse on sanctification, union with Christ, and the Triune God. Full article

Medieval writers designated Siena as a “new city”. Seemingly confirming this assessment, the Sienese Church possessed no hagiographic tradition of early bishops that would prove that their urban settlement was a true civitas in late antiquity. As part of their effort to verify that their city had not only Roman but also early Christian origins, the Sienese, primarily spearheaded by lay officials, refashioned the image of their martyr-saint, Ansanus (d. 296). By the thirteenth century, the implication that the lay martyr had baptized the citizens was added to his second Latin passion narrative. Yet, only beginning in the fifteenth century do vernacular passions and images of Ansanus baptizing the Sienese appear, revealing that the baptismal event emerged as a defining point in the sacred history of the city and was communicated to citizens both textually and visually. These were produced at the behest of lay institutions, such as the Opera del Duomo and the communal government. By performing the sacrament of baptism, Ansanus fulfilled a crucial function of a proto-bishop, namely the transformation of the pagan Sienese into a true community of the baptized. Though some Sienese humanists sought to identify the earliest bishops, no episcopal cult was ever established. Considering that the default for other major cities in Italy was to identify and venerate their early bishops, Ansanus’s transformation into “the Baptizer” presents a case study of how saints could be adapted in unconventional ways to fix a problematic civic past. Full article

Kris Martin: Altar/Altering Perspectives Flemish artist Kris Martin’s work exists in relationship to the city of Ghent and his reflection on that city’s medieval past. His pieces that implicitly engage with the Ghent Altarpiece by Hubert and Jan van Eyck question the position of human beings in both physical and subjective relationships to works of art. They invite viewers, particularly residents of Ghent, to participate in a new narrative of Ghent, one that is framed, sometimes literally, by the layers of Romanesque and Gothic art and architecture and the symbolism and visual language of Flemish Christianity. They reveal his baroque interest in bringing together tradition and a contemporary conceptual ideology and fall somewhere between the theatricality of the carnival and the artificiality of the spectacle. While a few pieces pointedly reference a Flemish Catholic ideology, the medieval manipulation of the public and the direct iconography are missing. Through his manipulation of scale and placement in non-traditional locations, the pieces are open to new readings beyond the emotive and didactic. But, much in the tradition of the Northern Renaissance, they engage the viewer intellectually and ask for introspection. Full article

The Cairo Genizah collections provide scholars with a profound insight into Jewish culture, history, and the deeply intertwined relationships between Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Among these treasures are often overlooked Arabic poetic fragments from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, which illuminate the shared Abrahamic legacy. This paper explores mainly two unpublished poetic fragments written in Judaeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew script), analyzing how they reflect a shared Jewish–Muslim cultural memory and history, particularly through the reverence for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and other key figures central to both traditions across the medieval Mediterranean and Middle East. By situating these poetic voices within broader historical and cultural contexts, this study underscores the role of poetry in reflecting sociocultural and historical dimensions while fostering cross-cultural and religious coexistence. It demonstrates how poetry acts as a bridge between religion, history, and culture by revealing the shared Abrahamic heritage of Jews and Muslims within two Arabic poetic fragments from the Cairo Genizah. Full article

During the first millennium of Christian presence in Ethiopia (from the fourth century), church architecture was first in accordance with, and later partially based on, the basilica plan. Circa the early sixteenth century, a new and unique church plan appeared, circular, concentric, and with a square sanctuary, and became the dominant church plan in the northwestern Ethiopian Highlands. This church plan has been referred to in scholarship as an innovation, and its sources of inspiration have not yet been definitively established. In this article, I will argue that this plan is a culmination of a process with roots in the Late Antique and Medieval Holy Land, by which the concentric prayer house plan came to be associated with the Jerusalem Temple. This process transcended religious boundaries and is expressed in the religious architecture of three monotheistic religious traditions. Full article

This study addresses Roger Scruton’s understanding of what he called “moments of revelation”. In two short essays, both entitled “Effing the ineffable”, Scruton framed his discussion of moments of revelation with reference to the medieval Christian mystical discourse. Introducing the medieval discussion of this topic, this study provides an analysis of Scruton’s approach to the theme. In tune with the traditional discourse on revelation, his general aim was to demonstrate that there are ways of revealing important truths about the supernatural, of the world “beyond the window”, that do not require words to be pronounced. He calls our experiences of such phenomena moments of revelation and identifies four different transitory sources of revelation. This study deals with them one by one, after considering whether it is right to label such a revelation transcendental. The four sources of Scruton’s moments of revelation are natural beauty, the beauty of painting, the beauty of music, and personal encounters. The first three examples are connected to his thoughts on art and beauty as a substitute of divine revelation. Perhaps the most surprising of these is the last ones, moments of intersubjective human relationships, “our knowledge of each other”. Relying on both Buber and Levinas, Scruton makes the strong claim that it is in the other that we can experience that world “beyond the window”. His phenomenological exploration of human encounters sheds light on concepts like grace, shekhinah, or real presence and gift. He explains the Christian understanding of the human–divine relationship as well along the lines of the nature of interpersonal human relationship, both of them being in a certain sense, he claims, transcendental. From grace, his account moves forward to self-sacrifice and finally arrives at his idiosyncratic understanding of gratefulness for life. His moments of revelation in art and interpersonal exchange turn out to be, indeed, late and secular versions of the Christian understanding of revelation. In its summary, this study claims that revelation, understood by Scruton as a form of general human experience, allows to catch a glimpse of that which is beyond the window, by the direct, sensually based experience of either the existence of another person or of the beauty of nature and art. Full article

In medieval bestiaries, knowledge about animals and their behavior is regularly given a Christian moral interpretation. This article explores the use of imagery related to the bestiary tradition in three Hebrew books made around the year 1300, focusing especially on the richly decorated Rothschild Pentateuch (Los Angeles, Getty Museum MS 116). These Hebrew books signal how bestiary knowledge and its visual expression could be adapted to enrich the experience of medieval Jewish reader-viewers, adding to our understanding of Jewish-Christian interactions in medieval Europe. Full article

The story of the patriarch Joseph is a very recurring theme in medieval visual artistic Christian tradition. Joseph, Jacob’s beloved son, is a prefiguration of Christ. The story in Genesis 41, 37–44 fosters the creation of two iconographic types: Joseph’s investiture and Joseph on the Pharaoh’s chariot. The narrative places patriarch Joseph in the court of the Pharaoh of Egypt. However, Christian visuality was created according to the iconic criteria for the representation of political power, contemporary to the configuration of both iconographic types. The aim of this paper is to study the visual mechanisms used in the iconic configuration of the iconographic types of Joseph’s investiture and Joseph on the Pharaoh’s chariot, when the monarch bestows upon Joseph the privilege of his trust. The iconographic analysis of some early and medieval examples of the artistic visuality of Joseph’s story, in Eastern and Western traditions, confirms that they refer back to late ancient and medieval Byzantine tradition. Likewise, it was detected that the resources used in the visual configuration of both iconographic types are linked to the conventionalised mechanisms of the symbolic construction of power. Full article