Medieval Inquisition

God” and “the life which aims at union with God”, while present in almost every religious tradition, the practice of mysticism found itself flourishing in western Christianity in the middle ages and in doing so seemed to have a profound effect on medieval society. With growing tensions between Church and Crown hanging heavy in the air and the Great Schism of the papacy in 1378, the European populace found itself disappointed with the general and traditional organization of religion as…

Religion is tied to war in many ways. The bible has depicted many wars in its scriptures, but is it telling us to fight for religion, or warning us to steer away from war? The wars that we see fought for religion could've been fought for land, money, or concurring of both. George Carlin once said to his audience, " more people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason," and most people think this to be true. From a list of 1,763 wars, only 123 have been classified as to…

Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570 is centered around three Spaniards and their approach to Maya in the Yucatan Peninsula. Clendinnen weaves a tale of forced conversion, colonial power struggles, and mass torture, but she contextualized these horrors in a way that the rationales of the Spaniards do not get lost. However, the Maya side of the story gets lost with only one Maya figure, the resistance leader Nachi Cocom, emerges as an individual. The Catholic religion…

conflict during the Renaissance period because of their mass christian belief. “The Mongols after about 1240 held Russia in subjugation for 200 years. The Ottoman Turks, who had originated in central Asia, penetrated the Byzantine Empire, crushed the medieval Serbian Kingdom at the battle of Kosovo in 1389, and spread over the Balkans. They took Constantinople itself in 1453” (Palmer Colton Kramer 47). In the fourteenth century, nearly half of the European population were killed by an incurable…

The crusades were military campaigns first inaugurated and sanctioned by Pope Urban 2 at Clermont-Ferrand in November 1095 to wrestle the Holy Land from Muslim control. The desire for access to shrines associated with life and ministry of Jesus was a driving force for crusaders. In addition, the promise to gain to gain land and wealth in the East acted as motivation to the crusaders who also had absolution from sin and eternal glory promised to them. The church was more centralized and stronger…

The term Gothicism in its literary meaning does not necessarily come from the Goths, an ancient Germanic tribe, but from the sense of Gothic as medieval (Gale par. 1). The movement is seen as a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Gothic literature also shares some characteristics with Romanticism (par. 1). For example, Gothic works embraced imagination, as did Romantic literature…

Additionally, the legal code restricted women’s individual agency in exchange for protection and certain freedoms. For example, women could engage in trade and would be protected from public seizure of their goods. According to “Etiquette for Women” by Ibn Habin, an Andalusian legal expert of the ninth century, to be a good Muslim women during this time meant to be submissive and obedient to the legal hierarchy (Coope, 2013). This hierarchy was the same one that prohibited women from freely…

The composition of the scenes in which religious figures appear, also serve as a visual technique to portray religion as powerful and include it as part of the nationalistic project. In Salón México, there is a scene that shows an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe at Mercedes’ rooms. When the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe is first shot, the camera focuses on a small flower from a low angle view; later, the camera zooms out and moves the frame from left to right. The juxtaposition of the small…

Progress is delicious Genetically Modified food has gotten a lot of grief over the years. All through the ages of man, progress has been initially resisted. The world is round no matter what any tribunal, inquisition, or critic said. In the same way GMOs are actually good for us. We have been developing our plants to be what we want through crossbreeding since man first put a Plow to the dirt. I’m not sure you could find a plant in its original state anymore, and even if you could, why would…

This is a period that I knew very little about, both theologically and politically. However, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, in Late Medieval Italy, proved to be extremely helpful in approaching the complexity of the events of the Reformation. From keeping Dante’s epic poem in mind, I approached this period with a knowledge of how the political element can cohere with the theological element, and with some knowledge of the continent’s deep concern with Purgatory, even though that concern was…