The Order of St Gilbert was the only specifically English religious order founded in the Middle Ages. The edition gathers together fragments surviving in Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 115 (A.5.5); Cambridge, St John's College, MS N. 1; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 36 (SC 1678), f. 110v; Cambridge, Pembroke' College, MS 226. The second part is volume 60 of the present series.

Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe re-examines the alterations in Western European life that followed widespread conversion to Christianity-the phenomena traditionally termed "Christianization". It refocuses scholarly paradigms for Christianization around the development of mandatory rituals. One prominent ritual, Rogationtide supplies an ideal case study demonstrating a new paradigm of "Christianization without religion." Christianization in the Middle Ages was not a slow process through which a Christian system of religious beliefs and practices replaced an earlier pagan system. In the Middle Ages, religion did not exist in the sense of a fixed system of belief bounded off from other spheres of life. Rather, Christianization was primarily ritual performance. Being a Christian meant joining a local church community. After the fall of Rome, mandatory rituals such as Rogationtide arose to separate a Christian commonwealth from the pagans, heretics, and Jews outside it. A Latin West between the polis and the parish had its own institution-the Rogation procession-for organizing local communities. For medieval people, sectarian borders were often flexible and rituals served to demarcate these borders. Rogationtide is an ideal case study of this demarcation, because it was an emotionally powerful feast, which combined pageantry with doctrinal instruction, community formation, social ranking, devotional exercises, and bodily mortification. As a result, rival groups quarrelled over the holiday's meaning and procedure, sometimes violently, in order to reshape the local order and ban people and practices as non-Christian.

A star, a stable, angels, shepherds, kings, and at the heart of it all a mother and her baby. In The Art of Christmas Jane Williams' meditations on the birth of Jesus take you deep into the story of the original Christmas as depicted in some of the world's greatest paintings. A beautiful book for Advent 2021, these profoundly perceptive reflections on the different ways in which artists have imagined the Nativity will deepen and refresh your appreciation of the real meaning of Christmas, and the message of love, joy and peace that it speaks to all the world. Illustrated in stunning full colour, with famous and lesser-known Western masterpieces, and presented in a small, easily portable format, The Art of Christmas is ideal Advent reading for all art lovers, but also makes a wonderful Christmas gift. Jane Williams' insightful meditations will not only help you rediscover the spiritual heart of Christmas, but will also give you a deeper, expanded appreciation of the skill and mastery behind these masterful paintings. You'll gain a fuller and more spiritual understanding of Christian art, and see Christmas as never before.

Liturgical Subjects examines the history of the self in the Byzantine Empire, challenging narratives of Christian subjectivity that focus only on classical antiquity and the Western Middle Ages. As Derek Krueger demonstrates, Orthodox Christian interior life was profoundly shaped by patterns of worship introduced and disseminated by Byzantine clergy. Hymns, prayers, and sermons transmitted complex emotional responses to biblical stories, particularly during Lent. Religious services and religious art taught congregants who they were in relation to God and each other. Focusing on Christian practice in Constantinople from the sixth to eleventh centuries, Krueger charts the impact of the liturgical calendar, the eucharistic rite, hymns for vigils and festivals, and scenes from the life of Christ on the making of Christian selves. Exploring the verse of great Byzantine liturgical poets, including Romanos the Melodist, Andrew of Crete, Theodore the Stoudite, and Symeon the New Theologian, he demonstrates how their compositions offered templates for Christian self-regard and self-criticism, defining the Christian "I." Cantors, choirs, and congregations sang in the first person singular expressing guilt and repentence, while prayers and sermons defined the collective identity of the Christian community as sinners in need of salvation. By examining the way models of selfhood were formed, performed, and transmitted in the Byzantine Empire, Liturgical Subjects adds a vital dimension to the history of the self in Western culture.

The church's worship has always been shaped by its understanding of the gospel. Here the bestselling author of Christ-Centered Preaching brings biblical and historical perspective to discussions about worship, demonstrating that the gospel has shaped key worship traditions and should shape today's worship as well. This accessible and engaging book provides the church with a Christ-centered understanding of worship to help it transcend the traditional/contemporary worship debate and unite in ministry and mission priorities. Contemporary believers will learn how to shape their worship based on Christ's ministry to and through them. The book's insights and practical resources for worship planning will be useful to pastors, worship leaders, worship planning committees, missionaries, and worship and ministry students.

Delves into the ancient debate regarding the nature and purpose of the seven sacraments What are the sacraments? For centuries, this question has elicited a lively discussion and among theologians, and a variety of answers that do anything but outline a unified belief concerning these fundamental ritual structures. In this extremely cohesive and well-crafted volume, a group of renowned scholars map the theologies of sacraments offered by key Christian figures from the Early Church through the twenty-first century. Together, they provide a guide to the variety of views about sacraments found throughout Christianity, showcasing the variety of approaches to understanding the sacraments across the Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox faith traditions. Chapters explore the theologies of thinkers from Basil to Aquinas, Martin Luther to Gustavo Gutierrez. Rather than attempting to distill their voices into a single view, the book addresses many of the questions that theologians have tackled over the two thousand year history of Christianity. In doing so, it paves the way for developing theologies of sacraments for present and future contexts. The text places each theology of the sacraments into its proper sociohistorical context, illuminating how the church has used the sacraments to define itself and its congregations over time. The definitive resource on theologies of the sacraments, this volume is a must-read for students, theologians, and spiritually interested readers alike.

Purity, Community, and Ritual in Early Christian Literature investigates the meaning of purity, purification, defilement, and disgust for Christian writers, readers, and listeners from the first to third centuries. Anthropological and sociological works over the past decades have demonstrated how purity and defilement rituals, practices, and discourses harness the power of a raw emotion in order to shape and manipulate cultural structures. Moshe Blidstein builds on such theories to explain how early Christian writers drew on ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions on purity and defilement, using them to create new types of community, form Christian identity, and articulate the relationship between body, sin, and ritual. Blidstein discusses early Christian purity issues under several headings: dietary law, death defilement, purity of the heart, defilement of outsiders, and purity of the community. Analysis of the motivations shaping the development of each area of discourse reveals two major considerations: polemical and substantive. Thus, Christian writing on dietary law and death defilement is essentially polemical, constructing Christian identity by marking the purity practices and beliefs of others as false. Concerning the subjects of baptism, eucharist, and penance, however, the discourse turns inwards and becomes more substantive, seeking to create and maintain theories of ritual and human nature coherent with the theological principles of the new religion.

An unsurpassable, visual tour of the greatest pilgrimage sites of Europe, from North to South; East to West. Pilgrimage in Europe is currently thriving on a scale that simply could not have been envisaged just a few decades ago. Not only are greater numbers of people now emulating the medieval pilgrims who made their way on foot across Europe to the shrines of martyred apostles in Rome (SS Peter and Paul), Santiago de Compostela (St James) and Trondheim (St Olav), but international religious tourism is also thriving and millions each year are now travelling by air, rail and road to Europe's major pilgrimage churches and famous sites of Marian Apparition such as Lourdes (France) and Fatima (Portugal). This book covers those key pilgrimage sites as well as many lesser known ones such as the Marian Sanctuary of La Salette in the French Alps, the cave sanctuary of Covadonga in Northern Spain, the majestic twenty-first-century basilica of Our Lady of Lichen in Poland and the Chapel of Grace in Altoetting, Bavaria. It comprises an atmospheric and colourful portrayal of the pilgrimage churches and cathedrals adorned with sculpture, art and iconography associated not only with the Virgin Mary but also the national saints and Early Christian martyrs revered by both Catholic and Anglican faiths alike. En route the reader will see some of the world's most impressive examples of medieval art and architecture set amidst historic townscapes or spectacular landscapes. This volume will serve as both an enticement to take to the road, a treasured aide memoire for those who have visited at least some of these iconic places and hopefully, a source of comfort and inspiration for those unable to travel abroad from wherever they live in the world.

A people's lifestyle is one thing, their death-style another. The proximity or distance between such styles says much about a society, not least in Britain today. Mors Britannica takes up this style-issue in a society where cultural changes involve distinctions between traditional religion, secularisation, and emergent forms of spirituality, all of which involve emotions, where fear, longing, and a sense of loss rise in waves when death marks the root embodiment of our humanity. These world-orientations, evident in older and newer ritual practices, engage death in the hope and desire that love, relationships, community, and human identity be not rendered meaningless. Yet both emotions and ritual have an uneasiness to them because 'death' is a slippery topic as the twenty-first century gets under way in Britain. In this work, Douglas J. Davies draws from a largely anthropological-sociological perspective, with consideration of history, literature, philosophy, psychology, and theology, to provide a window into British life and insights into the foundation links between individuals and society, across the spectrum of traditionally religious views through to humanist and secular alternatives. He considers memorial sites (from churchyards to roadside memorials); forms of corporeal disposal (from cremation to composting); and death rites in a range of religious and secular traditions.

Many of the Christian festivals traditionally draw imagery and symbolism from the northern hemisphere seasons. Christmas is often described as a light in the darkness of winter, and Easter reflects the new life emerging in spring. Rudolf Steiner also offered various descriptions of the relation of the festivals to seasons. This has led some to suggest that Christian festivals in the southern hemisphere should be celebrated at opposite times of the year: for example, celebrating Christmas in June, or Easter in September. Is that really what Steiner was suggesting? This insightful book thoroughly reviews all of Steiner's words on the subject, as well as the writings of other anthroposophical thinkers. Steiner shared cosmic, spiritual imaginations for the northern hemisphere, and in this book Martin Samson develops a useful equivalent guide for the southern hemisphere, as well as closely studying the liturgy of The Christian Community and its seasonal prayers. From his research, he concludes that the essence of Christian festivals works at the same time for the whole earth, but take on subtly different nuances through the opposite seasons.