Épisodes

  • Peter Murray Jones, "The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)

    Peter Murray Jones, "The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)
    Jun 30 2024
    Friars are often overlooked in the picture of health care in late mediaeval England. Physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, barbers, midwives - these are the people we think of immediately as agents of healing; whilst we identify university teachers as authorities on medical writings. Yet from their first appearance in England in the 1220s to the dispersal of the friaries in the 1530s, four orders of friars were active as healers of every type. Their care extended beyond the circle of their own brethren: patients included royalty, nobles and bishops, and they also provided charitable aid and relief to the poor. They wrote about medicine too. Bartholomew the Englishman and Roger Bacon were arguably the most influential authors, alongside the Dominican Henry Daniel. Nor should we forget the anonymous Franciscan compilers of the Tabula medicine, a handbook of cures, which, amongst other items, contains case histories of friars practising medicine. Even after the Reformation, these texts continued to circulate and find new readers amongst practitioners and householders. The Medicine of the Friars in Medieval England (Boydell & Brewer, 2024) by Peter Murray Jones restores friars to their rightful place in the history of English health care, exploring the complex, productive entanglement between care of the soul and healing of the body, in both theoretical and practical terms. Drawing upon the surprising wealth of evidence found in the surviving manuscripts, it brings to light individuals such as William Holme (c. 1400), and his patient the duke of York (d. 1402), who suffered from swollen legs. Holme also wrote about medicinal simples and gave instructions for dealing with eye and voice problems experienced by his brother Franciscans. Friars from the thirteenth century onwards wrote their medicine differently, reflecting their religious vocation as preachers and confessors. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    53 min
  • Denva Gallant, "Illuminating the Vitae Patrum: The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy" (Penn State UP, 2024)

    Denva Gallant, "Illuminating the Vitae Patrum: The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy" (Penn State UP, 2024)
    Jun 29 2024
    During the fourteenth century in Western Europe, there was a growing interest in imitating the practices of a group of hermits known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Laypeople and religious alike learned about their rituals not only through readings from the Vitae Patrum (Lives of the Desert Fathers) and sermons but also through the images that brought their stories to life. In Illuminating the Vitae Patrum: The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Penn State University Press, 2024), Dr. Denva Gallant examines the Morgan Library’s richly illustrated manuscript of the Vitae Patrum (MS M.626), whose extraordinary artworks witness the rise of the eremitic ideal and its impact on the visual culture of late mediaeval Italy. Drawing upon scholarship on the history of psychology, eastern monasticism, gender, and hagiography, Dr. Gallant deepens our understanding of the centrality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers to late mediaeval piety. She provides important insights into the role of images in making the practices of the desert saints both compelling and accessible to fourteenth-century city dwellers, who were just beginning to cultivate the habit of private devotion on a wide scale. By focusing on the most extensively illuminated manuscript of the Vitae Patrum to emerge during the trecento, this book sheds new light on the ways in which images communicated and reinforced modes of piety. It will be of interest to art historians, religious historians, and students focusing on this period in Italian history. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    53 min
  • Matthew Goldmark, "Forms of Relation: Composing Kinship in Colonial Spanish America" (U Virginia Press, 2023)

    Matthew Goldmark, "Forms of Relation: Composing Kinship in Colonial Spanish America" (U Virginia Press, 2023)
    Jun 28 2024
    Drawing on literary texts, conversion manuals, and colonial correspondence from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and Peru, Forms of Relation: Composing Kinship in Colonial Spanish America (University of Virginia, 2023) shows the importance of textual, religious, and bureaucratic ties to struggles over colonial governance and identities. Dr. Matthew Goldmark analyses these ties as forms of kinship forged outside of the well-studied paradigms of sex, biology, and procreation. He demonstrates how colonial actors—Spanish and Indigenous—vied for power when they argued that identity could be shaped by spiritual fatherhood, standardised education, or the regulation of doctrine. Forms of Relation illustrates why we must interrogate the dominant paradigms of mestizaje, heterosexuality, and biology that are too often left unchallenged in studies of Spanish colonialism, demonstrating how non-procreative kinships shaped the Spanish colonial regime. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    40 min
  • Hank Willenbrink, "Performing for the Don: Theatres of Faith in the Age of Trump" (Routledge, 2024)

    Hank Willenbrink, "Performing for the Don: Theatres of Faith in the Age of Trump" (Routledge, 2024)
    Jun 23 2024
    From his overwhelming embrace by evangelicals and other people of faith to his championing of policies and conservative judicial candidates long sought by right-wing Christians, Donald Trump’s candidacy, campaign, and presidency were empowered by believers of many stripes who employed different methods of rationalizing or Christianizing Trump and his administration. In Performing for the Don: Theatres of Faith in the Trump Era (Routledge, 2024), Hank Willenbrink examines this intersection of political power and religion through the lens of performance studies, in part via Trump’s own expressions but predominantly through mass media performances of his Christian supporters. From Trump’s affiliation with his “court evangelicals” and televangelists to the 2018 film The Trump Prophecy and other prophetic/apostolic movements latching onto Trump’s ascension in service of dominionistic ends, and from his support among very conservative Catholics to the “cult” of Trump that has coalesced in conspiratorial online spaces advocating QAnon beliefs, the last decade has witnessed a mainstreaming of theology and ideology ripe for an interdisciplinary analysis of the performative aspects of Trump’s faith-based support. Dr. Willenbrink joined the New Books Network to discuss all these subjects as well as Christian nationalism in the present American political climate. Hank Willenbrink (Ph.D. in Dramatic Art from the University of California, Santa Barbara) is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Theatre at The University of Scranton in Pennsylvania. A scholar and theatre artist, Hank has published on a range of topics like Hell Houses, the playwright Naomi Iizuka, the intersections of playwriting and nature writing, and the use of music in HBO’s Girls. With his wife, Dr. Yamile Silva, he co-edited an anthology of contemporary Spanish and Portuguese writing. Hank’s play, The Boat in the Tiger Suit, premiered in New York and is published by Original Works Publishing. He’s developed theatrical work internationally, including at Sala Beckett in Barcelona. Hank has also led several interdisciplinary, community-engaged projects that bring together students and community members of diverse backgrounds and disciplines to engage in deeper and more intentional ways through collectively created theatrical performance. Hank played in a number of questionable bands, co-founded the music blog We Listen for You, and hails from Toad Suck, Arkansas. He is currently continuing the research that he discusses on today’s podcast episode on his Substack: performingforthedon.substack.com. Rob Heaton (Ph.D., University of Denver, 2019) primarily hosts Biblical Studies conversations for New Books in Religion and teaches New Testament, Christian origins, and early Christianity at Anderson University in Indiana. He recently authored The Shepherd of Hermas as Scriptura Non Grata: From Popularity in Early Christianity to Exclusion from the New Testament Canon (Lexington Books, 2023). For more about Rob and his work, or to offer feedback related to this episode, please visit his website at https://www.robheaton.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h et 30 min
  • Genji Yasuhira, "Catholic Survival in the Dutch Republic: Agency in Coexistence and the Public Sphere in Utrecht, 1620-1672" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)

    Genji Yasuhira, "Catholic Survival in the Dutch Republic: Agency in Coexistence and the Public Sphere in Utrecht, 1620-1672" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)
    Jun 21 2024
    Even in adversity, Catholics exercised considerable agency in post-Reformation Utrecht. Through the political practices of repression and toleration, Utrecht’s magistrates, under constant pressure from the Reformed Church, attempted to exclude Catholics from the urban public sphere. However, by mobilising their social status and networks, Catholic Utrechters created room to live as pious Catholics and honourable citizens, claiming more rights in the public sphere through their spatial practices and in discourses of self-representation. Catholic Survival in the Dutch Republic: Agency in Coexistence and the Public Sphere in Utrecht, 1620-1672 (Amsterdam University Press, 2024) by Dr. Genji Yasuhira explores how Catholic priests and laypeople cooperated and managed to survive the Reformed regime by participating in a communal process of delimiting the public, continuing to rely on the mediaeval legacy and adapting to early modern religious diversity. Deploying their own understandings of publicness, Catholic Utrechters not only enabled their survival in the city and the Catholic revival in the Dutch Republic but also contributed to shaping a multi-religious society in the Northern Netherlands. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h et 5 min
  • Carlos M. N. Eire, "They Flew: A History of the Impossible" (Yale UP, 2023)

    Carlos M. N. Eire, "They Flew: A History of the Impossible" (Yale UP, 2023)
    Jun 16 2024
    In the early modern era, seemingly impossible stories of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft were common and believable. The important question of the time was not if these things happened, but why. This was particularly true as the rise of Protestantism began to challenge Catholic beliefs in miracles and continued to be the case even after scientific research began to supplant religious belief in these phenomena. In They Flew: A History of the Impossible (Yale UP, 2023), Carlos Eire shows how these events were an accepted component of early modern life. Based on firsthand accounts, Eire explores the stories of St. Teresa of Avila, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the Venerable María de Ágreda, and others, to describe a world animated by a different understanding of the natural and supernatural. Eire examines why and how cultural, historical, religious, and scientific contexts plays a role in defining both the possible and the impossible. Recommended reading: Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred & How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else both by Jeffrey J. Kripal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    54 min
  • Laurence M. Geary, "The Land War in Ireland: Famine, Philanthropy and Moonlighting" (Cork UP, 2023)

    Laurence M. Geary, "The Land War in Ireland: Famine, Philanthropy and Moonlighting" (Cork UP, 2023)
    Jun 15 2024
    In this interview, he discusses his new book The Land War in Ireland: Famine, Philanthropy and Moonlighting (Cork UP, 2023), a collection of interconnected essays on different aspects of agrarian agitation in 1870s and 1880s Ireland. The Land War in Ireland addresses perceived lacunae in the historiography of the Land War in late nineteenth-century Ireland, particularly deficiencies or omissions relating to the themes of the title: famine, humanitarianism, and the activities of agrarian secret societies, commonly referred to as Moonlighting. The famine that afflicted the country in 1879–80, one generation removed from the catastrophic Great Famine of the 1840s, prompted different social responses. The wealthier sectors of society, their consciousness and humanitarianism awakened, provided the bulk of the financial and administrative support for the famine-stricken peasantry. Others, drawn from the same broad social stratum as the latter, vented their anger and frustration on the government and the landlords, whom they blamed for the crisis. The concern of marginal men and women for the welfare of their less fortunate brethren was not so much the antithesis of altruism, as a different, more rudimentary way of expressing it.The volume’s opening chapter introduces the famine that tormented Ireland’s Atlantic seaboard counties in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The four chapters that follow develop the famine theme, concentrating on the role of civic and religious relief agencies, and the local and international humanitarian response to appeals for assistance. The 1879–80 famine kindled benevolence among the diasporic Irish and the charitable worldwide, but it also provoked a more primal reaction, and the book’s two closing chapters are devoted to the activities of secret societies. The first features the incongruously named Royal Irish Republic, a neo-Fenian combination in north-west County Cork. The volume’s concluding essay links history and literature, positing a connection between agrarian secret society activity during the Land War years and the Kerry playwright George Fitzmaurice’s neglected 1914 drama The Moonlighter. This original and engaging work makes a significant contribution to our understanding of modern Irish history and literature. Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in history at Carnegie Mellon University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    28 min
  • Timothy Morton, "Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology" (Columbia UP, 2024)

    Timothy Morton, "Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology" (Columbia UP, 2024)
    Jun 12 2024
    Hell on earth is real. The toxic fusion of big oil, Evangelical Christianity, and white supremacy has ignited a worldwide inferno, more phantasmagoric than anything William Blake could dream up and more cataclysmic than we can fathom. Escaping global warming hell, this revelatory book shows, requires a radical, mystical marriage of Christianity and biology that awakens a future beyond white male savagery. In Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2024) Dr. Timothy Morton argues that there is an unexpected yet profound relationship between religion and ecology that can guide a planet-scale response to the climate crisis. Spiritual and mystical feelings have a deep resonance with ecological thinking, and together they provide the resources environmentalism desperately needs in this time of climate emergency. Morton finds solutions in a radical revaluation of Christianity, furnishing ecological politics with a language of mercy and forgiveness that draws from Christian traditions without bringing along their baggage. They call for a global environmental movement that fuses ecology and mysticism and puts race and gender front and centre. This nonviolent resistance can stage an all-out assault on the ultimate Satanic mill: the concept of master and slave, manifesting today in white supremacy, patriarchy, and environmental destruction. Passionate, erudite, and playful, Hell takes readers on a full-colour journey into the contemporary underworld—and offers a surprising vision of salvation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h et 7 min