Pride

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  (No matter that in the film she played some kind of weirdly generic cartoonish Arab character.) I made penne in fresh pomodoro sauce, preceded by woody but welcome steamed white asparagus. My knife was sure as I filleted perfectly acceptable plum tomatoes and slivered slightly older than vintage garlic. I picked fresh basil leaves, cracked a can of Italian plums, another can of paste, sweated, swirled, simmered, and seasoned, all without a moment's seasickness, the kitchen behaving brilliantly. It had everything, didn't it? A microwave with broiler, a food disposal that could have handled Jimmy Hoffa, a dishwasher, all the appliances and doodads one could hope for, including vertical slicer/grater, blender, food processor, manual juicer, and blending wand. And so clean! Always clean! How could it not be? The whole place was scrubbed down, polished, and tidied twice a day, first in the morning while we drank and sweated by the pool, and again later, by a hurrying duo of charming yet focused Scandinavian girls, cute as buttons but with the work ethic of Sherpas, who'd arrive at six bearing chocolates, towels, and replacement staple items and give the whole place a quick going over. Fredy's had been, on balance, very good to me, managing to come up with everything on my provisions list but fresh chives. For chicken stock, I received a fresh batch from The World's kitchens. A "small amount of flour" arrived portioned in a paper cup, sparing me the burden of a five-pound bag. The kitchen was pretty damn stylish too. Recessed lighting, elegantly concealed washer and dryer, shiny new refrigerator with ice-maker. I cooked al dente penne in one of the heavy-bottomed sauce pots, drained it quickly into a colander, and dragged it, still leaking a little of the starchy pasta water, into the waiting sauce. A few tosses, that magic moment when the pasta took in the sauce, a last glorious shot of extra-virgin olive oil, and onto the plates. No one alive could have cooked better pasta that day. I was sure of it. As we ate, the sea moving by outside our long expanse of windows, the sun setting on the horizon, I felt like Emperor of the Sea. Not wanting this alcohol-inspired sense of mastery to end, when I finished my penne, I diced up the complementary platter of tropical fruit, tossed the mix in balsamic with a little fresh mint and sugar, and served macerated fruit salad for dessert.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The charismatic Dorothy Hassard of Bristol set up a meeting separate from the nearby parish church at which her Puritan clerical husband ministered: hers survives to the present day as Broadmead Baptist Church, while his church has long vanished. It is clear that such activism had begun in the decades before the Civil War broke out, but now it was able to flourish freely. [123] All this culminated in the radicalism of Spirit-inspired groups such as the early Society of Friends, who began gathering in the early 1650s: opponents called them ‘Quakers’, and, as often in Christian history, they defiantly borrowed the sneer as a self-identification. Quaker women in this period followed Psalm 68.11 to enjoy prophetic roles reminiscent of women in the early days of radicalism in central Europe during the 1520s and 1530s. Often as a result they met horrified repression from males in mainstream religion, particularly when they crossed to the Puritan English colonies across the Atlantic; a woman was among the four Quakers executed in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1661. [124] Just as in the sixteenth-century radical groups, over subsequent decades male Quaker leadership steadily moved to restrict women’s activism, but that was part of a general disciplining of life in the Society away from its first inclination noisily to shock wider society into listening to the message; now Quaker gatherings were programmatically quiet but still obstinately distinctive. The Friends preserved an itinerant ministry whose members were as often female as male. When Dr Johnson made his famous sneer against a woman preaching as being ‘like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs’, it was about a Quaker preacher that he was trying to be funny. [125] By the early eighteenth century, much of the appeal of the Friends to women may have become the way in which Quaker worship resonated with that more traditional and distinctively female form of spirituality, the outwardly silent waiting on the Lord. At the same time as the consolidation of the Quakers in the 1670s, there developed within the official Lutheran Churches of northern Europe an intimately devotional renewal movement that came to be known (again at first abusively by its opponents) as Pietism: small private groups developed a spirituality which likewise emphasized an inner personal encounter with the divine, although in that case, the devotional group took its place alongside the public worship of the Lutheran Church. It is interesting that these Pietists were among the few people to interest themselves in the writings of women activists from the earliest days of the Lutheran Reformation. [126] Thus were emerging various female challenges to the male Reformation noise of polemical texts, sermons and massed congregational singing. Some Protestant women took notice of their Catholic counterparts who had chosen monastic enclosure and contemplation in its many Counter- Reformation variants, and they considered that their own Reformation had suffered significant losses.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  About the Author Diarmaid MacCulloch is a fellow of both St Cross College and Campion Hall, Oxford, and emeritus professor of the history of the church at Oxford University. His books include Thomas Cranmer: A Life , which won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, and the Duff Cooper Prize and Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years , a New York Times bestseller that won the Cundill Prize in History. He has presented many highly celebrated documentaries for television and radio, and was knighted in 2012 for his services to scholarship. He is an ordained deacon of the Church of England. He lives in Oxford, England. What’s next on your reading list? Discover your next great read! Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author. Sign up now. _150871060_

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The odd name ‘Beguine’ still defies certain explanation, but it seems to be a term of ridicule verging on hostility, like the later description of English heretics as ‘Lollard’, meaning mumbler of possibly dubious prayers. That says something about the obscurity of the movement’s origins, and possibly about male suspicion and surprise that it should exist at all. Its recent historian has commented that it is ‘the only movement in medieval monastic history that was created by women and for women – and not affiliated with, or supervised by, a male order’. He points out some of the Beguines’ unusual characteristics: ‘a lack of overarching governmental structures, a low level of internal hierarchy, a tendency toward the sacralization of routine work, the use of dance and ecstasy in worship, and an emphasis on the continuity between female existence before and after entrance into the community’. [77] Despite all this informality, the Beguines won papal approval during the thirteenth century, in step with the various Orders of friars, while keeping their distinctiveness. It was a remarkable exemption from the effects of Periculoso , which must have been the result of benevolent and deliberately untidy thinking by some senior clergy, aware of the sheer usefulness of the Beguines in their urban settings. Not least among their oddities was the size of some of the communities (‘Beguinages’): several hundred strong in some places, and thus little female towns within a town, often surrounded by their own moat and walls, but readily welcoming visitors. One can still enjoyably tour some of the surviving examples and notice how different their informal clusters of cosy domestic buildings are from the classic monastery layout. Beguinages were home to the range of craft skills deployed by women, especially textile production on an almost industrial scale: very different from the delicate embroidery that became the speciality of many nunneries in the wake of their isolation from higher education. The Beguines nevertheless also provided education for both girls and boys in surroundings permeated with worship and spiritual exploration. Among the ranks of the Beguines in their expansion across central Europe was the excitable Viennese mystic Agnes Blannbekin, joyfully contemplating her celestial nudity. Their communal life went on to inspire further female initiatives in celibate life during the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation (below, Chapter 14). Without having to think much about it, the institutional Church had discovered one civilizing force amid the streets of its great cities – although not everywhere in Europe since, rather puzzlingly, the Atlantic Isles showed little interest in the Beguine movement, despite England’s close involvement with the Low Countries’ textile trade, and southern Europeans may have found the Beguines’ female assertiveness too much to handle. * More universal was the adoption of a new mode of conceiving the Christian family in Western Christianity, so that the copulating laity could take a decorous place alongside a well-regulated celibate clergy.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  In Catholic Europe after 1815, where secular political authority took its cue from the Code Napoléon and emphasized the superiority and agency of a man as paterfamilias , it proved to be the Church that gave more space for women to seize initiatives for themselves. In that frequent paradox of Western Christianity since the Reformation, as for instance in British Methodism, French Catholicism became an organization run by (clerical) men for the benefit of women. The institutional component of female Catholic life was led by a quite astonishing proliferation of convents and female Orders, a process heralded in pre-Revolutionary France but now spreading elsewhere, as both Enlightenment and Revolution cut a swathe through comfortably funded male monasteries. Belgium, for instance, was a new country on the European map from 1830, forged in a national revolt based on Catholic resentment of the Protestant Dutch monarchy imposed on the former Habsburg Netherlands in the international peace settlement of Vienna in 1815. Belgium became a laboratory for the new shapes of European Catholicism. Between 1780 and 1860, the proportion of Belgian women religious to men reversed, from 40/60 to 60/40, and latterly, in a decided rebuff to what the Council of Trent had decreed, only 10 per cent of Belgian nuns were in contemplative Orders: the vast majority devoted themselves to working out in the world in teaching, health care and help for the poor. [14] In nineteenth-century Ireland, as in Belgium, Catholicism became the prime vehicle of national identity against external rule, and statistics for nuns compared with clergy are equally striking. There were a mere 120 nuns in the whole island in 1800, but 8,000 in 1900 – nuns outnumbered priests and male religious in the Irish Church two to one, with the numbers still rising. [15] That growth had a worldwide effect because of the remarkable scale of Irish emigration across the anglophone world, especially to the United States and Australia. A persistent feature of Irish migration, unique amid the various streams of nineteenth-century European migrants overseas, was the high proportion of women participating; that helped to spread Irish patterns of convent life across the globe. In the rapidly growing Catholic population of the United States (of course not all Irish in origin), more than two hundred women’s Orders were operating by the early twentieth century, and nuns then outnumbered priests four to one. A common feature of convent life in all these situations was a rhetoric of female subservience to male clerical authority combined with a sturdy independence of action in testing circumstances, often of dire social deprivation that demanded heroic initiative. One might call it a manifestation of Catholic feminism, though the rapid rise in numbers of nuns in relation to monks and other male clergy can be strikingly paralleled in the Orthodox Church in tsarist Russia in the same period.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘You see,’ she would tell him,’ it’s very important to develop the brain as well as the muscles; I’m now doing both—stand still, will you, Raftery! Never mind that old corn-bin, stop rolling your eye round—it’s very important to develop the brain because that gives you an advantage over people, it makes you more able to do as you like in this world, to conquer conditions, Raftery.’ And Raftery, who was not really thinking of the corn-bin, but rolling his eye in an effort to answer, would want to say something too big for his language, which at best must consist of small sounds and small movements; would want to say something about a strong feeling he had that Stephen was missing the truth. But how could he hope to make her understand the age-old wisdom of all the dumb creatures? The wisdom of plains and primeval forests, the wisdom come down from the youth of the world. CHAPTER 81A t seventeen Stephen was taller than Anna, who had used to be considered quite tall for a woman, but Stephen was nearly as tall as her father—not a beauty this, in the eyes of the neighbours. Colonel Antrim would shake his head and remark: ‘I like ’em plump and compact, it’s more taking.’ Then his wife, who was certainly plump and compact, so compact in her stays that she felt rather breathless, would say: But then Stephen is very unusual, almost—well, almost a wee bit unnatural—such a pity, poor child, it’s a terrible drawback; young men do hate that sort of thing, don’t they?’ But in spite of all this Stephen’s figure was handsome in a flat, broad-shouldered and slim flanked fashion; and her movements were purposeful, having fine poise, she moved with the easy assurance of the athlete. Her hands, although large for a woman, were slender and meticulously tended; she was proud of her hands. In face she had changed very little since childhood, still having Sir Philip’s wide, tolerant expression. What change there was only tended to strengthen the extraordinary likeness between father and daughter, for now that the bones of her face showed more clearly, as the childish fullness had gradually diminished, the formation of the resolute jaw was Sir Philip’s. His too the strong chin with its shade of a cleft; the well modelled, sensitive lips were his also. A fine face, very pleasing, yet with something about it that went ill with the hats on which Anna insisted—large hats trimmed with ribbons or roses or daisies, and supposed to be softening to the features. Staring at her own reflection in the glass, Stephen would feel just a little uneasy: ‘Am I queer looking or not?’ she would wonder, ‘Suppose I wore my hair more like Mother’s?’ and then she would undo her splendid, thick hair, and would part it in the middle and draw it back loosely.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Devotion to icons wherever they may be found remains a form of sacred democracy in Orthodoxy, undergirding it against the powerful who would like to monopolize Christian allegiance. * The ninth century witnessed a momentous development for the Orthodox Church as the iconophiles emerged triumphant from a century of savage conflict. Photios, an especially energetic and creative Patriarch of Constantinople (reigned 858–67, 877–86), launched missions westward and northward beyond Byzantine frontiers, first into the territories of Khan Boris of the Bulgars (reigned 853–89). Boris was a shrewd and successful monarch who had been weighing up whether to entrust his proposed conversion to Christianity to the guidance of Latin Western or of Greek Eastern Christians. Pope Nicholas I (reigned 858–67) was exceptionally assertive in advancing the Roman Papacy’s historic claims, and he was furious that Boris eventually opted for Constantinople. A war of words escalated into full-blown schism between East and West and anticipated later unhappy divisions. One of the issues on which the Pope seized was that the Byzantine missionaries were insisting that their converts among Boris’s people should receive ecclesiastical blessing for their marriages to be valid: a reflection of the distinctive developments on marriage in Orthodoxy over the previous century. Interestingly, when in 867 Patriarch Photios penned a comprehensive counter-attack on Rome that spelled out many of the future contentious theological issues between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, he failed to make any riposte to this particular charge in Nicholas’s battery of complaints. Photios must have been aware that in this era before Emperor Leo VI’s Novella , his missionaries were on shaky legal ground. [42] The ninth-century initiatives in mission launched by Photios to Slavic peoples north and west beyond the Byzantine frontier were one symptom of the recovery in the Church and secular commonwealth. Partly that was because there was now an exceptionally capable ‘Macedonian’ dynasty of emperors, named from the origins of the first in the line, Basil I (reigned 867–86), and continuing thereafter for almost two centuries. Beyond immediate politics, in the wake of the Triumph of Orthodoxy during the later ninth century there was a new coherence in the theology of the Byzantine missions. A mark of Orthodox self-confidence was that the missionaries encouraged their Slavic converts to celebrate the Orthodox liturgy in their own language, not in Greek: a flexibility that stands in contrast to the Western Church’s insistence on the continued use of Latin, and piquant in view of modern Orthodoxy’s frequent insistence on its never-changing character. Photios’s missionaries even devised new alphabets to suit the sounds of these Slavic languages, and when a first effort, the Glagolitic alphabet created by the priest-brothers Constantine and Methodius, proved not to be a great success, a Bulgarian scholar created another system. It has entirely supplanted Glagolitic, though it has become tactfully known as ‘Cyrillic’ – Cyril was the monastic name adopted by the pioneer Constantine – and it has seen off later northern Orthodox efforts to supplant it.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Mary Astell was an English gentlewoman whose life spanned the Stuart and Georgian eras: a Church of England Tory of ‘High Church’ or sacramental outlook. Witty as well as devout, she was satirical about the liberal Whig politicians who had spearheaded the ‘Glorious Revolution’ that had brought William and Mary to the thrones of the Atlantic Isles; they talked loudly of freedom, but ignored women’s rights just as much as they ignored the rights of slaves. Choosing to remain unmarried (an unexpectedly common state in late seventeenth-century England, embracing around one in four of all adults), Astell published in 1694 A serious proposal to the Ladies , a programme for a Church of England community of celibate women – a convent, no less. Mansplaining gentlemen, Whig and Tory alike, were scathing: the journalist Daniel Defoe sneered that ‘nothing but the height of bigotry can keep up a nunnery: women are extravagantly desirous of going to heaven, and will punish their pretty bodies to get thither.’ Others, including some thoughtful men, sympathized with Astell’s perception that the celibate life of a convent was not confining, but liberating. [127] A welter of different circumstances was converging on a single phenomenon, that of female religiosity. It is worth noting one contemporary explanation of the high proportion of women in Massachusetts churches provided by the leading late seventeenth-century Massachusetts minister Cotton Mather: he felt

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  In a word, she woke up in Paris one morning to find herself, for the moment, quite famous. Valérie, Brockett, indeed all her friends were whole-hearted in their congratulations; and David’s tail kept up a great wagging. He knew well that something pleasant had happened: the whole atmosphere of the house was enough to inform a sagacious person like David. Even Mary’s little bright-coloured birds seemed to take a firmer hold on existence; while out in the garden there was much ado on the part of the proudly parental pigeons—fledglings with huge heads and bleary eyes had arrived to contribute to the general celebration. Adèle went singing about her work, for Jean had recently been promised promotion, which meant that his savings, perhaps in a year, might have grown large enough for them to marry. Pierre bragged to his friend, the neighbouring baker, anent Stephen’s great eminence as a writer, and even Pauline cheered up a little. When Mary impressively ordered the meals, ordered this or that delicacy for Stephen, Pauline would actually say with a smile: ‘Mais oui, un grand génie doit nourrir le cerveau! ’ Mademoiselle Duphot gained a passing importance in the eyes of her pupils through having taught Stephen. She would nod her head and remark very wisely: ‘I always declare she become a great author.’ Then because she was truthful she would hastily add: ‘I mean that I knowed she was someone unusual.’ Buisson admitted that perhaps, after all, it was well that Stephen had stuck to her writing. The book had been bought for translation into French, a fact which had deeply impressed Monsieur Buisson. From Puddle came a long and triumphant letter: ‘What did I tell you? I knew you’d do it! . . .’ Anna also wrote at some length to her daughter. And wonder of wonders, from Violet Peacock there arrived an embarrassingly gushing epistle. She would look Stephen up when next she was in Paris; she was longing, so she said, to renew their old friendship—after all, they two had been children together. Gazing at Mary with very bright eyes, Stephen’s thoughts must rush forward into the future. Puddle had been right, it was work that counted—clever, hard-headed, understanding old Puddle! Then putting an arm round Mary’s shoulder: ‘Nothing shall ever hurt you,’ she would promise, feeling wonderfully self-sufficient and strong, wonderfully capable of protecting. 2 That summer they drove into Italy with David sitting up proudly beside Burton. David barked at the peasants and challenged the dogs and generally assumed a grand air of importance. They decided to spend two months on Lake Como, and went to the Hotel Florence at Bellagio. The hotel gardens ran down to the lake—it was all very sunny and soothing and peaceful. Their days were passed in making excursions, their evenings in drifting about on the water in a little boat with a gaily striped awning, which latter seemed a strange form of pleasure to David.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  VALUES AND IMPERIAL CULTURES As nineteenth-century Britain built up an increasingly vast empire on the back of generally successful achievements by its army and navy, so it evolved a masculine ethos similar to that of the citizen armies of mainland Europe in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. There were important differences: this was a patriotism of deference, shaped by British pride in its constitutional monarchy and attendant aristocracy, both of which had been strengthened after previous humiliations in the American War of Independence by their epic achievements contributing to Napoleon’s defeat. All that was framed from 1837 by the long reign of Queen Victoria, who by 1901 had managed to outlive any previous ruler in the Atlantic Isles, and who learned over time how to play the role of grandmotherly figurehead for her subjects worldwide. British territorial reach continued to expand into the 1920s (its largest nominal extent came with its acquisition of a League of Nations’ mandate over the former Ottoman territories of Palestine in 1923). By that time its real power was beginning to cede to that of the United States, but in the intervening century the imperial achievements of a modestly sized north Atlantic archipelago were impressive, even considering its temporary industrial and technological advantages. Out of Britain’s relatively small population, there needed to be a means of selecting and training enough men to govern and administer a dauntingly varied spread of formal territories, as well as to staff the organization of the informal British empire beyond. This required an educational revolution to transform Hanoverian England’s miscellaneous and often ramshackle provision of schools. Certainly, Victorians sought to spread popular literacy generally throughout the United Kingdom, which they did mostly through often acrimoniously competing efforts from Britain’s various religious denominations; but, within that wider programme, they created a leadership cadre on the basis of a class-stratified and hierarchical society. This was achieved through a system of ‘public schools’ – an English rather than Scots or Irish phenomenon. The name was misleading, since these schools were the reverse of public, being aimed at the landed elite and the large number of middle-class parents anxious to model their families on elite patterns of behaviour. Schools which in the medieval and Tudor period had been founded to provide opportunities for boys of exceptional talent from a humble background, such as Eton or Winchester Colleges, were now hijacked for an imperial governing class. By 1900 there were around 150 members of the ‘Headmasters’ Conference’ of public schools. Reflecting the ethos of the English landed gentry and nobility, they were predominantly Anglican (and indeed largely low-temperature Evangelical), with some outliers from what had been a parallel world of upper-class Roman Catholic recusancy, and there were even a handful of public schools that were Methodist. For around a decade of a boy’s life from about the age of seven, he was taken away from his family and boarded with his peers in an inward-looking, single-sex world that emphasized physical fitness, team sport and participation in the Officer Training Corps, alongside frequent chapel attendance and a Classical academic curriculum that provided a reference framework of imperial experience from the Roman Empire. In the mordant words of one eminent modern historian who endured it all, ‘[t]he English upper classes traditionally made up for the comfort of their background and the privileges of their station by ten years of misery at boarding- school.’ [28] The British Empire has long gone, but the public school system survives into the twenty-first century, not as yet doing much to question its reason for a continued existence.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Amulets as emblems of magic power were especially associated with pre-Christian female graves in England, but they were succeeded in Christian interments with a new crop of amulets with cross designs, or little bags likely to have contained sacred relics. These graves are another notable feature of Anglo-Saxon Christianity; contrary to the general custom in most Christian societies, richly furnished burials continued after Augustine’s arrival and even revived around 660, and the majority are female. [30] This local individuality overlaps with other special features of the early Anglo-Saxon ‘conversion’ that reflect the reality that Christianity spread through the decisions of Christianized monarchs: having opted for the new religion, they ordered their people to accept it in place of previous polytheistic cults. First came a brief vogue for male royal holiness: some kings deserted their realms to undertake long pilgrimages to Rome from which they did not return. At least four Anglo-Saxon Christian monarchs even voluntarily renounced their thrones and retired to monasteries, beginning with King Sigebert of the East Angles sometime after his accession as king in 630/31. This was a most unusual impulse among the Germanic kingdoms of Europe, and it was accompanied by the promotion of saintly cults for further monarchs who died defending their Christian faith, such as King Oswald of Northumbria, killed in battle against the non-Christian King Penda of Mercia in 642. Associated with particular royal families, these were the first native Christian cults created by the Anglo-Saxons. There may be a connection with local pre-Christian traditions of honouring kings who sacrificially defended their people in battle; later monarchs who died violently, such as young Edmund of East Anglia butchered by non-Christian Danes in 869, also joined the saintly club of royal martyrs. [31] The seventh century nevertheless saw a change of direction for royal activity in the Anglo-Saxon Church. Elsewhere, in both Latin and Byzantine Christianity, when monarchs became monks it was done under duress and was a sign of personal failure. Perhaps with that in mind, and maybe accompanied by a certain restiveness among their subjects at what might be viewed as royal malingering, the Anglo-Saxons swiftly reconfigured their own thoughts on royal holiness. In place of kings becoming ascetics, female members of the various royal dynasties acted on recent precedents that they might have noted among their relatives in northern Francia. Royal ladies founded lavishly funded monastic communities and presided over them as abbesses, ruling over both men and women; over several generations an appropriate female member of the dynasty would then succeed as abbess. The women involved were princesses or queens who were either widowed or had effectively made a decision to declare themselves single, such as the celebrated Æthelthryth, who insisted on guarding her virginity through two royal marriages.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The crucial figure in enriching the options within asceticism was Jerome, who in terms of Eastern Christian asceticism can be described as a failed monk: after a couple of solitary years in the mid-370s, he fled his effort at eremitical life in a rural area south of Antioch (not quite so much of a wilderness as he later liked to make out) and returned to Rome and to what proved a much more congenial role as secretary to Pope Damasus and chaplain to the ultra-rich. [72] As we have seen, his career in Rome also came to an abrupt, unplanned end, at which point he relocated to Jerusalem, alongside a number of Roman self-exiles in Palestine led by such exalted figures as his friend the Lady Paula (mother of the late Blesilla), who now presided over a distinctly aristocratic Latin-speaking monastery in Bethlehem. Jerome joined Paula’s community (despite his rudeness towards her); it was a perfect setting for continuing the biblical research that had already begun to fascinate him during his unhappy Syrian venture. Jerome was a pioneer in suggesting that the demands that scholarship made on him and like-minded monks – those congenial hours spent in his chamber sifting words to craft his great new version of the Bible – were just as much a sacrifice of self as the spiritual athleticism of a pillar-saint. This self-serving thought was the spark and justification for subsequent centuries of monastic scholarship that had not previously been a significant part of ascetic life. Henceforth the monastery was a vital conduit for conveying the imperial knowledge and culture of the Mediterranean forward to transformed societies. The sheer variety of ascetic experience that so proliferated between the fourth and sixth centuries has continued to give it vitality and appeal amid the choices

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Since he had a shrewd head on his shoulders, Canigiano quickly saw what was to be done, and explained his plan to Salabaetto, who, thinking it an excellent idea, set about putting it into effect. He still had a little money of his own, and supplementing this with a loan from Canigiano, he ordered a number of bales of merchandise to be packed and tightly corded up, and having purchased and filled about a score of oil-casks, he loaded the entire consignment aboard a ship and returned to Palermo. There he presented the invoice for the bales to the officers of the dogana, to whom he also declared the value of the casks, and having made sure that they had registered everything under his own name, he placed the goods in store, saying that he wished to leave them there until the arrival of a further consignment of merchandise he was expecting. On learning of his return and hearing that the goods he had brought were worth two thousand gold florins at the very least, without counting the goods still to come, which were valued at more than three thousand, Madonna Jancofiore, thinking she had set her sights too low, decided to repay him the five hundred florins so that she could get her claws on the greater portion of the five thousand, and sent word that she would like to see him. When Salabaetto called upon her, she pretended to know nothing of the merchandise he had brought and gave him the warmest of welcomes, saying: ‘Listen, my love; in case you were angry with me for not paying you back that money of yours punctually–’ But Salabaetto, having profited from his earlier mistakes, laughed and said: ‘To tell the truth, my lady, I was very little displeased, for I would pluck the very heart from my body and give it to you, if I thought it would make you happy. But I should like you to judge for yourself how angry I am with you. So great and so particular is the love I bear you, that I have sold the greater part of my possessions, and now I have brought with me to Palermo a consignment of goods worth over two thousand florins. Moreover, I am expecting a further consignment from the West worth more than three thousand, and I intend to start a business in Palermo and settle here for good, for I consider myself more fortunate in loving you than any other lover in the world.’

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  122 Lecture 17: The Emergence of Patriarchal Centers o Each of these cities had its own claims to importance within Christian history, and each was eager to emphasize that importance. The practice of competition among Greek and Roman cities was common, as attested by the orations of Dio Chrysostom to the cities of Asia Minor, which fought to be “number one” in their region. The Primacy of Rome • After the loss of the symbolic first city of Jerusalem—the place where the Christian movement started—the primacy of Rome (and the bishop of Rome) was broadly recognized in the early centuries, though this primacy did not at first bear the sense of administrative authority. Jerusalem itself was recognized as one of the patriarchates, but its position was strictly honorary, and it was not a player in subsequent rivalries. • An important dimension of Rome’s primacy was the position ascribed to Peter in the New Testament compositions and Peter’s connection to Rome. o In the Gospels, Peter is the chief spokesman among the disciples, the one who recognized something of Jesus’s identity before the others. The “confession of Peter” is found in all the Gospels in one form or another and is most elaborated by Matthew, which has Jesus respond with the declaration that he will build his church on the rock who is Peter. Although he betrayed Jesus before his death—also reported by all the Gospels—Peter is the primary witness of the Resurrection, both in the Gospel narratives and as listed by Paul. The “confession of Peter” (“You are the messiah”) is found in all the Gospels; in the Gospel of matthew, Jesus responds by declaring that Peter is the rock on which he will build his church. © iStockphoto/Thinkstock.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Up onstage, Monique ignored the noise from the crowd as she did her nasty thang like she’d been born with a golden pole wedged between her legs. She slipped her hips and popped her spine the way she had practiced a thousand times before in the mirror, and it was that kind of dedication to her grind that had made her the Spot’s top moneymaker for the last two years. Monique didn’t mind the fact that all kinds of niggahs wanted to fuck her. She was proud to be the kind of freak that men just couldn’t resist. And yeah, her body was simply fuckin’ stunning. Damn right they was feenin’ for her, because what good was having the best shit on the shelf if you couldn’t make a niggah cry for it? Tonight Monique was doing one of her new ill na-na routines. She had about thirty dance acts she worked, switching the moves up every other night, and every last one of her routines kept niggahs digging deep in their pocket stash, producing guaranteed cash results each time. Some long-legged hustler sitting right up front screeched like a bitch as Monique squeezed her firm cantaloupe-sized breasts in her hands and let her red-polished fingernails flick her inch-long nipples seductively. He screamed again as she lowered her head and licked that stiff little nipple that sat smack in the middle of her upper chest, the one protruding from her tiny third breast that was round and perfect, but sat up closer to her neck than her normal breasts did, and was much, much smaller, like a twelve-year-old’s. Yeah, she thought as niggahs started whistling and wildin’ at the sight of her tongue swirling around that little tiny titty. Everybody loved a freak. And of all the things Monique could claim to be, she was a true freak-a-leek above all else. She turned her back on the crowd and popped her hips, letting her chips dip and her backbone slip. Ya’ll niggahs take a good fuckin’ look at all this chocolate birthday cake, Monique thought, clapping her thick booty cheeks and showing them flashing bits of her pink pussy and her sweet asshole. ’Cause a bitch is gonna be off this stage and paid in a minute. Straight fuckin’ paid. Niggahs moaned out loud and nutted in their drawers, but Monique couldn’t care less about their sexual satisfaction. She had thoughts of retirement on her mind, and if shit went down the way she and Pluto planned, she was about to give up the poles and become the number-one bitch at her very own strip club down in B-More.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  184 Lecture 25: From Roman Empire to Holy Roman Empire • “Popes and Franks” may sound like ballpark food, but the phrase sums up precisely the two power sources that worked to create the catholic world of the Middle Ages. Political Context: 9 th to 15th Centuries • The second stage in the medieval political context begins with Charles the Great (Charlemagne, 742–814), the son of Pepin III, who is one of the most significant figures in the political and religious history of the West. • Charles was anointed as king of the Franks by Pope Stephen III in 754 and became sole heir of the kingdom in 771. He immediately engaged in a path of conquest and consolidation under his authority. o Between 771 and 799, he conquered Lombardy, the Saxons, Bavaria, the Avars, Pannonia, and Italy. o In 778, he crossed the Pyrenees to conquer Spain, which was in the hands of the Muslims, and was defeated at the Battle of Roncevalles. Thirteen years later, in 801, he conquered Barcelona and made it the center of the Spanish March (a buffer zone separating the Muslim and Frankish kingdoms). • In view of these triumphs, Pope Leo III, on Christmas Day, 800, in the city of Rome, crowned Charlemagne as emperor. It was an extraordinary act, and its implication (that the Franks were the approved continuation of the Roman heritage) was not appreciated by the Byzantines. Eventually, the emperor of the West would claim the formal title of Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne’s military triumphs established his authority firmly over the West; he was crowned emperor in the year 800 by Pope Leo III in Rome. © Hemera/Thinkstock.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  The Crusades Lecture 31 It can be argued that the 11th through 13th centuries represent the high water mark of the European civilization called Christendom, shaped by specifically Christian values and institutions. As much as in the monasteries with their schools and the cathedrals with their chapters, and as much as in the universities that we will talk about in the next lecture, the vibrancy and vision of this Christian society is expressed by the series of military expeditions against the Muslim occupiers of the Holy Land. The Crusades—part popular movement, part political calculation, part religious fervor—began in 1095 and extended, both literally and symbolically, for centuries. Backdrop to the Crusades • Like the building projects described in the previous lecture, the expeditions known as the Crusades expressed a new sense of power and self-confidence in “Christendom”—that is, European Christianity. In the 8th century, Europe as a whole had barely escaped o coming under Muslim rule during the great expansion of Islam that had swallowed all of the East (except Byzantium), North Africa, and Spain. Charles Martel had stopped the advance of Muslim armies at o the Battle of Tours in 732. His victory was the foundation, as we have seen, of the Frankish kingdom, the prominence of the papacy, and the feudal system that structured medieval society. • In the 11th century, the time seemed right for payback—to reverse the conquests of Islam and take back at least the places that Christians regarded as especially holy and worthy of pilgrimage. • As for an armed expedition, Christianity had long since grown comfortable with the notion of “holy war”; recall that Charlemagne, 223

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  It is possible that the office of rector goes back as far as 1200, when an official was called "the head of the Paris scholars."1292 As early as 1245 the title appears distinctly and the rector is distinguished from the proctors.1293 At a later time it was the proper custom, in communicating with the university, to address the "rector and the masters." The question of precedence as between the rector and other high dignitaries, such as the bishop and chancellor of Paris, was one which led to much dispute and elbowing. Du Boulay, himself an ex-rector, takes pride in giving instances of the rector’s outranking archbishops, cardinals, papal nuncios, peers of France, and other lesser noteworthies at public functions.1294 The faculties came to be presided over by deans, the nations by proctors. In the management of the general affairs of the university, the vote was taken by faculties. The liberties, which the university enjoyed in its earlier history, were greatly curtailed by Louis XI. and by his successors in the latter half of the fifteenth century. The university was treated to sharp rebukes for attempting to interfere with matters that did not belong to it. The right of cessation was withdrawn and the free election of the rectors denied.1295 The police of the city were invested with larger jurisdiction, and the sovereign’s will was made a controlling element. The fame of the University of Paris came from its schools of arts and theology. The college of the Sorbonne, originally a bursary for poor students of theology, afterwards gave its name to the theological department. It was founded by Robert of Sorbon, the chaplain of St. Louis, the king himself giving part of the site for its building. In the course of time, its halls came to be used for disputations, and the decisions of the faculty obtained a European reputation. Theological students of twenty-five years of age, who had studied six years, and passed an examination, were eligible for licensure as bachelors. For the first three years they read on the Bible and then on the Sentences of the Lombard. These readers were distinguished as Biblici and Sententiarii. The age limit for the doctorate was thirty-five. One of the most interesting chapters in the history of the university is the struggle over the admission of the mendicant friars in the middle of the thirteenth century. The papacy secured victory for the friars. And the unwilling university was obliged to recognize them as a part of its teaching force.

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  246 Lecture 34: The Great Plague bishops, although they still relied on secular authorities to carry out their decisions. o Even more extreme, Innocent IV’s Ad extirpanda in 1252 authorized the use of torture by the inquisition, although there is no evidence of its use in the 13 th century. Those found to be heretics who repented received the same sorts of penances (fasting, pilgrimages) that other sinners would receive after confession. Serious offenders could be confined in the inquisition’s prisons and burned at the stake by secular authority; perhaps three people a year, on average, were thus executed. o The inquisition was turned against the Knights Templar by Philip IV of France in 1307 and was even used by Pope John XXII against Franciscan “spirituals” in 1318. o In the late 15 th century, Spanish rulers received permission from Sixtus IV to organize the inquisition against “Christianized Jews.” After an auto-de-fé (“act of faith”) confessing their crime, those convicted were executed. • The hostility toward, and persecution of, Jewish communities that began with the First Crusade and was expressed in the controlling laws of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215)— and the burning of the Talmud in Paris (1242)—exploded in unparalleled violence in response to the great plague: Jews became a handy scapegoat for the sudden and unexplained deaths. o Fear and hysteria were fomented by rumors of Jews’ poisoning wells or causing the plague by sacrificing Christian children. o In 1349, the Jewish communities of Mainz and Cologne were wiped out; in the same year, 2,000 Jews were murdered in Strasbourg. In all, some 60 major Jewish centers and 150 smaller settlements were destroyed during these irrational and violent outbursts. 247 The Rise of Mysticism • Perhaps not surprising in an age of such external turmoil, the 14 th

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  58 Lecture 8: Forms of Witness—martyrdom and apologetic circa 165; his trial before the Roman prefect was recorded and is extant. When the prefect orders him a final time to offer sacrifice to the gods, Justin refuses, saying, “Through prayer we can be saved on account of our Lord Jesus Christ.” • Evidence also exists for the arrest, imprisonment, and execution of relatively unknown Christians. o A letter from the churches of Vienne and Lyons attests—shortly after the event—to the suffering and death of a considerable number of Christians in Gaul under Marcus Aurelius in 178. o Later in the 2 nd century, the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs likewise provides evidence of North African martyrs. o The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity is an account, close to the events, of the imprisonment and death of Christians in North Africa in 203. • The most passionate statement concerning the ideal of martyrdom is found in Origen of Alexandria’s Exhortation to Martyrdom in 235: The death of the martyr is the closest possible conformity to the witness of Christ. Origen speaks of the inducements to turn away from the pain of suffering and says, “if turning from all of these we give ourselves entirely to God ... with a view to sharing union with his only begotten son and those who have a share in him, then we can say that we have filled up the measure of bearing witness” (3.11). Apologetic Literature • A second response to persecution is the composition of apologetic literature. Such literature also had its roots in Judaism and in the New Testament. • Apologetic literature arose among Diaspora Jews, such as Philo and Josephus, who responded to anti-Semitic charges of misanthropy with histories and philosophical treatises that demonstrated that the Jewish Law and manner of life were actually philanthropic. 59 • Although supposedly directed to outsiders, such apologetic literature played an important role in shaping Jewish identity, by portraying the tradition in terms understandable to the wider world. • In the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles has many of the elements of apologetic literature: “The way” is portrayed as benevolent and nonthreatening to the social order. Luke tries to show that the Christian movement is continuous with Israel and is philanthropic in character. • The Christian literature termed “apologetic” in the 2 nd and 3 rd