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At first glance, considering Bede’s creativity and the sharpness of his critical mind in relation to miracle stories may seem to be a doomed endeavour. Thinking of ‘creativity’ in hagiographical contexts has sometimes led to concerns about fictionalising. 1 Paul Meyvaert pointed out as early as 1976 that Bede ‘accepted as true facts all the miraculous events described in
First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. (Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, 1983) To the blood of San Gennaro that protects us from famine, war, plague, and the fire of Vesuvius. (Dedicatory inscription on the gateway to the Treasury Chapel) The miraculous liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro is at the heart of the Treasury Chapel ( Fig. 1 ). The transformative and productive blood in the miracle is akin to the transformative and productive chapel. Since desire to house Gennaro’s relics appropriately, and since the design of
intercessors, and provided miracles; their shrines were the focus of aspirations, and of pilgrimages. 6 A key feature of the late Middle Ages in England was also the development of a multiplicity of shrines centred on images of the Virgin, and of a plethora of wayside crosses. Both were foci for offerings, and thus for pilgrimage and miracles. Pilgrimage might also
106 Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis 6 On the miracles in Bacon’s New Atlantis JERRY WEINBERGER Bacon’s New Atlantis depicts the world to be produced by his famous project for modern science and technology and the consequent mastery of nature and ‘relief of man’s estate’. The sailors who come upon the island leave a world where they are buffeted by the destructive forces of nature – wind, calm, famine, and disease – and enter one where the weather is controlled, needs met, and sickness cured. The key element of Bensalemite history is the founding by King Solamona
In place of linear historicism, this book offers a new approach to architecture by examining the matter of the miracle in relation to baroque architecture through an interrogation of the relationship between architecture and the sacred in the economy of the relic. It considers the Treasury Chapel as the interaction of movement and sanctity in relation to matter and affect, particularly the transport of salvation. The rituals of the Treasury Chapel made visible the new cartographies and choreographies of spiritual authority that fed it and that it espoused and generated. The book focuses on the miracle of San Gennaro, the blood that courses through the chapel and its telling. It focuses on the Renaissance Succorpo chapel below the main altar of Naples Cathedral as the principal precursor to the Treasury Chapel. The book explores how the enclosed aristocratic convent of Santa Patrizia used its relics of St Patricia to vault its enclosure walls and to intervene in the Treasury Chapel, quite beyond its own confines, to secure and extend its own spiritual authority in Naples. It investigates the relationships between silver and salvation activated and opened by the Treasury Chapel's many splendid reliquaries. The book examines the implications of the wider politics of silver from its mining to its sustenance of Spanish monarchy and Spanish rule in Naples to its surfacing in those reliquaries. It addresses the question of how and why silver affords a peculiarly Neapolitan bridge between the brutality of the mines and the saints' whispers in heaven.
Perhaps this is the case, but perhaps that was not the point of the text. Jean Dunbabin has argued that the innovative part of Robert’s text was not his fusion of Old Testament kingly qualities with a modern example, but rather ‘making David [the second King of Israel] a saint of the church’. 21 Through the text, Helgaud describes Robert as a miracle worker. In one case, water that had been used to wash the King’s hands cured the blindness of the poor man. 22 In another instance, Robert was able to heal the sick by performing the sign of the cross with his hands. 23
97 5 Irish industrialisation and the German ‘economic miracle’ The remarkable growth in Western Europe, and particularly Germany, during the 1950s contrasted starkly with the dismal Irish performance. Ireland’s economy was hitched to the lethargic British one (relative to Western Europe) and heavily reliant on live cattle exports. Lacking an efficient manufacturing sector Ireland was unable to develop foreign markets for its limited industrial products, which were generally poor quality and overpriced by international standards. By 1955 the principal Irish non
This article offers the first comprehensive study of Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Latin 182, a twelfth-century codex formerly belonging to (and possibly produced at) the Benedictine Abbey of (Mönchen-)Gladbach in Germany. I begin with a full codicological and palaeographical analysis of the entire manuscript, before moving on to a discussion of its contents. These include the Venerable Bede‘s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum and the Continuatio Bedae, as well as two hagiographical works copied at the end of the manuscript. I then propose a new possible context of reception for Bede‘s Historia ecclesiastica during the twelfth century, one that interlinked with the prevalent discourses on secular ecclesiastical lordship and monastic reform at Gladbach, as well as, perhaps, in Germany more widely. In doing so, I essentially argue for the possibility that the Gladbach scribes and their audiences may have used and understood the Historia ecclesiastica not only in the conventional context of history and historiography, but also (and perhaps equally important) as an example of the golden age of monasticism which during the later twelfth century was re-framed and re-contextualised as both a spiritual guide and a source of miracle stories.