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Founded in 1421, the Collegiate Church of Manchester, which became a cathedral in 1847, is of outstanding historical and architectural importance. But until now it has not been the subject of a comprehensive study. Appearing on the 600th anniversary of the Cathedral’s inception by Henry V, this book explores the building’s past and its place at the heart of the world's first industrial city, touching on everything from architecture and music to misericords and stained glass. Written by a team of renowned experts and beautifully illustrated with more than 100 photographs, this history of the ‘Collegiate Church’ is at the same time a history of the English church in miniature.
balance a theological approbation of the reality of evil spiritual forces in general, and the practical concerns about typical ways of proceeding against accused witches (which Bernard had observed at the trial). 30 Moreover, the heavy reference to a physician was significant. Witch prosecutions often revolved around illnesses, and physicians were often called as expert witnesses
remained in Parliament about challenging the advice and learning of the Westminster assembly on matters of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. 15 Parliament had, after all, convened the assembly to give it expert advice and in May had even consulted with the London ministers on how the presbyterian system should be structured in the city. 16 However, persuasive support for Selden’s arguments was provided by the assembly divine and London minister Thomas Coleman. On 30 July 1645 Coleman preached a sermon before the Commons advising it
figures opened up rhetorical spaces in which state authority entered into contest with the spiritual charisma of the victim. 87 Lake has shown how the godly clergy were expert in preparing the condemned to be living, public representations of the saint assured of the crown of grace. 88 Love, of course, needed no such coaching, but it is clear that his brethren offered him every opportunity to prepare for the scaffold. In a series of letters published shortly after his death, Love was assured that he would ascend to his heavenly rest
This book is a major study of England's biggest and best-known witch trial, which took place in 1612, when ten witches were arraigned and hanged in the village of Pendle in Lancashire. In it, 11 experts from a variety of fields offer surveys of these events and their meanings for contemporaries, for later generations, and for the present day. Chapters look at the politics and ideology of witch-hunting, the conduct of the trial, the social and economic contexts, the religious background, and the local and family details of the episode.
maidservant into witchcraft in 1673. The range of suspects was so broad because witchcraft was understood primarily as an art taught by older experts to people younger than themselves or with whom they lived in close proximity: technically anyone – men and children included – could learn and practise it. The range of alleged witches was also broad because suspicions of witchcraft could arise in many different situations of social conflict. They also sprang chiefly from the anxieties and fantasies of those individuals who accused others of witchcraft. Again these anxieties
Between 1598 and 1800, an estimated 3, 271 Catholic women left England to enter convents on the Continent. This study focuses more particularly upon those who became Benedictines in the seventeenth century, choosing exile in order to pursue their vocation for an enclosed life. Through the study of a wide variety of original manuscripts, including chronicles, death notices, clerical instructions, texts of spiritual guidance, but also the nuns’ own collections of notes, this book highlights the tensions between the contemplative ideal and the nuns’ personal experiences. Its first four chapters adopt a traditional historical approach to illustrate the tensions between theory and practice in the ideal of being dead to the world. They offer a prosopographical study of Benedictine convents in exile, and show how those houses were both cut-off and enclosed yet very much in touch with the religious and political developments at home. The next fur chapters propose a different point of entry into the history of nuns, with a study of emotions and the senses in the cloister, delving into the textual analysis of the nuns’ personal and communal documents to explore aspect of a lived spirituality, when the body, which so often hindered the spirit, at times enabled spiritual experience.
constituted the first of its kind in the history of the Rothenburg witch-trials, was thus extremely harmful to Margaretha because it gave the councillors expert confirmation of what they seem to have thought about the fleas all along. The physicians also condemned the act of ritual Shrove Tuesday magic to which Margaretha Horn had already confessed, thereby implying that it might have been the cause of the flea-swarm.14 Both theologians and physicians recommended that the council seek further advice on how to proceed against Margaretha from legal experts, although the
I am not arguing that all that changed over this period was the popularity of this or that kind of story. Real changes can be traced – for example the profound shift in the status of the ‘expert’ in the eyes of the court and of the public in the courtroom. 4 My point is that such changes can be traced and largely explained through the changes in the stories the courts heard: as the contrasting styles of the various witnesses’ narratives examined
incomplete process of surrendering abstract and technical terms that can be exclusive and objectifying. For any kind of dialogical process to be possible, I needed to find an inclusive language capable of opening up conversations (Seidler 2007a; Sennett 2012). This is a process that I find to be in some tension with the genre of an academic ethnography, as the demands of initiation into the academy can encourage ‘early career’ researchers in particular towards adopting an authoritative, expert tone (Marcus 1986; Rabinow 1986). Yet, there are also more personal obstacles as