Dreams, Visions, and Spiritual Authority in Merovingian GaulCornell University Press, 2000 - 262 pages In early medieval Europe, dreams and visions were believed to reveal divine information about Christian life and the hereafter. No consensus existed, however, as to whether all Christians, or only a spiritual elite, were entitled to have a relationship of this sort with the supernatural. Drawing on a rich variety of sources--histories, hagiographies, ascetic literature, and records of dreams at saints' shrines--Isabel Moreira provides insight into a society struggling to understand and negotiate its religious visions. Moreira analyzes changing attitudes toward dreams and visionary experiences beginning in late antiquity, when the church hierarchy considered lay dreamers a threat to its claims of spiritual authority. Moreira describes how, over the course of the Merovingian period, the clergy came to accept the visions of ordinary folk--peasants, women, and children--as authentic. Dream literature and accounts of visionary experiences infiltrated all aspects of medieval culture by the eighth century, and the dreams of ordinary Christians became central to the clergy's pastoral concerns. Written in clear and inviting prose, this book enables readers to understand how the clerics of Merovingian Gaul allowed a Christian culture of dreaming to develop and flourish without compromising the religious orthodoxy of the community or the primacy of their own authority. |
From inside the book
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... Bishop 81 4. Dreams and Visions at the Shrines of the Saints 5. Visionary Journeys to the Otherworld 108 136 Part 3 Dreams and Visions in Merovingian Hagiography 6. Visions and the Hagiographer in Merovingian Sources 7. No Ordinary ...
... bishops of the fourth century was the per- sistence within the orthodox church of a Christian charismatic tradition of dreaming which pushed against the institutionalizing tendencies of clerical authority . Yet even in the fourth ...
... bishops powerful enough to overshadow any other bearers of the holy , " in " Eastern and Western Christendom in Late Antiquity : A Parting of the Ways , " Society and the Holy , pp . 166-95 . visions reflected positively on the clergy ...
... bishops to keep them at the margins . 10 In the second sec- tion of the book ( Chapters 3-5 ) I approach the question of clerical attitudes toward dreams and visions from the perspective of clerical constructions of spiritual and ...
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