Christianities Before Modernity
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Edited by:
Rabia Gregory
Challenging the perception of Christianity as a unified and European religion before the sixteenth century, this series interrogates the traditional chronological, geographical, social and institutional boundaries of premodern Christianity. Books in this series seek to rebuild the lived experiences and religious worlds of understudied people as well as landmark disputes and iconic figures by recovering underappreciated vernacular sources, situating localized problems and mundane practices within broader social contexts and addressing questions framed by contemporary theoretical and methodological conversations. Christianities Before Modernity embraces an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, publishing on history, literature, music, theater, classics, folklore, art history, archaeology, religious studies, philosophy, gender studies, anthropology, sociology, and other areas. Grounded in original sources and informed by ongoing disciplinary disputes, this series demonstrates how premodern Christians comprised diverse and conflicted communities embedded in a religiously diverse world.
The series’ Advisory Board comprises:
- Rabia Gregory, University of Missouri, Columbia, USA, Series Editor
- Kathleen E. Kennedy, University of Bristol, England, Series Editor
- Charlene Villaseñor, UCLA, USA, Series Editor
- Adnan A. Husain, Queen’s University, Canada
- István Perczel, Central European University, Hungary
- Eyal Poleg, Queen Mary University of London, England
- Carl S. Watkins, Magdalene College, Cambridge, England
Submissions
Proposals or completed manuscripts to be considered for publication in this series should be sent to Tyler Cloherty (tylercloherty44@gmail.com) or Emily Winkler (emily.winkler@history.ox.ac.uk), the acquisitions editors for the series.
Topics
Unlike much of early medieval Europe, the early English converted to Christianity through missional efforts, not martial conquest. Thus early English converts had freedom to construct their Christian identity, producing a religious subjectivity that differed from the Latinate perspective of the missionaries who converted them. This book investigates lay texts to undermine monolithic conceptions of medieval Christianity by revealing a uniquely English religious subjectivity evident in Old English wisdom literature.
Powerful religious elements for living in the aftermath of trauma are embedded within North African Christian hagiographies. The texts of (1) The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, (2) The Account of Montanus, Lucius, and their Companions, and (3) The Life of Cyprian of Carthage are stories that offered post traumatic pathways to recovery for its historical readership. These recovery-oriented beliefs and behaviors promoted positive religious coping strategies that revolved around a sense of safety, re-establishing community relationships, an integrated sense of self, and a hopeful story beyond trauma. This book vividly demonstrates that hagiographies played a vital therapeutic role in helping early Christian trauma survivors recover and flourish in the aftermath of disastrous persecutions.
Vernacular writers of late medieval England were engaged in global conversations about orthodoxy and heresy. Entering these conversations with a developing vernacular required lexical innovation. The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature examines the way in which these writers complemented seemingly straightforward terms, like heretic, with a range of synonyms that complicated the definitions of both those words and orthodoxy itself. This text proposes four specific terms that become collated with heretic in the parlance of medieval English writers of the 14th and 15th centuries: jangler, Jew, Saracen, and witch. These four labels are especially important insofar as they represent the way in which medieval Christianity appropriated and subverted marginalized or vulnerable identities to promote a false image of unassailable authority.
