Join us for our Centre for Theology, Philosophy, and Religion Seminars of 2024.
The speakers for this week are Henry Parkes from University of Nottingham
The Night Sky, Sung and Surveyed, in the Medieval Cult of Saint Benedict
and Rob Lutton from University of Nottingham.
The Cult of the Holy Name in Late Medieval England
Abstract:
For a wide range of medieval people, ‘Jesus’, Christ’s human name, provided an almost bottomless reservoir of meaning and spawned an evolving multiplicity of practice. In the West, devotion to the name of Jesus began c.1100 as part of an affective turn to Christ as suffering saviour. No name was higher, and it was called upon for salvation, healing, and protection. In England, by c.1350, rhythmic invocation and mental contemplation of the Name were used to attain ecstatic states of enlightenment. Over the next 150 years, practices of Holy-Name personal prayer, meditation, and talismanic invocation and inscription, spread from religious houses and hermits to the wider population. By the sixteenth century, the Name was inscribed in the form of the ‘IHS’ monogram on everything from the margins of devotional books to mass-produced broaches, and was celebrated in a national liturgical Feast and by Jesus guilds in weekly Masses in hundreds of parish churches. With this cultic popularity came controversy, not least because the many forms of the devotion traversed contradictory impulses in medieval religion, around which swirled longstanding debates, charges of heresy and redefinitions of orthodoxy. For some, the veneration of the Name was idolatrous, and claims that only those who loved the Holy Name truly loved God and would gain privileged access to the divine in this life and the next, threatened the Church’s monopoly on salvation. While the Name was widely adopted as a talisman against sickness, death, and demonic attack, others viewed such practices as superstitious and instead cautiously promoted it as a tool for personal moral and spiritual renewal. This paper discusses the theoretical and methodological challenges of writing a monograph on the cult of the Holy Name in late medieval England. My book asks why this single word, ‘Jesus’, captured so much attention and remained so malleable to interpretation and my paper aims both to give a sense of the range of evidence of the devotion as well as how I am trying to uncover the many meanings and practices that might have constituted the ‘cult’.
All are welcome. The seminars will take place Wednesdays at 1pm-2.30pm in Humanities Building.
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