Leone Saints and Signs

A Semiotic Reading of Conversion in Early Modern Catholicism
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-3-11-022952-3
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 48, 663 Seiten

Reihe: Religion and SocietyISSN

s analyzes a corpus of hagiographies, paintings, and other materials related to four of the most prominent saints of early modern Catholicism: Ignatius of Loyola, Philip Neri, Francis Xavier, and Therese of Avila.
Verbal and visual documents – produced between the end of the Council of Trent (1563) and the beginning of the pontificate of Urban VIII (1623) – are placed in their historical context and analyzed through semiotics – the discipline that studies signification and communication – in order to answer the following questions: How did these four saints become signs of the renewal of Catholic spirituality after the Reformation? How did their verbal and visual representations promote new Catholic models of religious conversion? How did this huge effort of spiritual propaganda change the modern idea of communication?
The book is divided into four sections, focusing on the four saints and on the particular topics related to their hagiologic identity: early modern theological debates on grace (Ignatius of Loyola); cultural contaminations between Catholic internal and external missions (Philip Neri); the Christian identity in relation to non-Christian territories (Francis Xavier); the status of women in early modern Catholicism (Therese of Avila).

Zielgruppe

Academics, Institutes, Libraries

Autoren/Hrsg.

Leone, Massimo

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Künstlerische Stoffe, Motive, Themen Künstlerische Stoffe, Motive, Themen: Religiöse Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Christliche Kirchen, Konfessionen, Denominationen
• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Christentum/Christliche Theologie Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;Table of Contents;8
2;Acknowledgments;10
3;1. Introduction;14
4;2. Ignatius of Loyola as a sign: religious conversion between divine grace and human will;36
5;3. Philip Neri as a sign: religious conversion between internal and external missions;218
6;4. Francis Xavier as a sign: conversion between sameness and otherness;334
7;5. Therese of Avila as a sign: religious conversion between the cloister and the world;494
8;6. Conclusions;544
9;Bibliography;550
10;List of illustrations;598
11;Index of names;612
12;Index of topics;630
13;Color illustrations;648

Leseproben

This chapter will inquire about the way in which early modern Catholic sanctity was represented in relation to the new contexts explored by the religious expansion of Europe toward other continents starting from the sixteenth century. As in the previous chapter, comparisons between the Catholic culture of sanctity in internal and external missions will be systematically carried on. However, in this chapter the barycenter of such a comparison will be moved toward the cultural ‘elsewhere’ of Asia.

Missionary contexts are extremely relevant for both a historical and a semiotic study of sanctity as a spiritual medium of early modern Catholicism. Firstly, most representations of religious transformation produced and diffused after the Council of Trent circulated in these contexts; secondly, as a consequence of the linguistic difficulties that often characterized the evangelization of non-European natives, such contexts, even more strikingly than the European ones, allow one to realize the importance of images and other non-verbal artifacts in both eliciting and re-presenting religious conversions through the evocation of sanctity; third, from a broader, semiotic point of view, the study of early modern Catholic ‘external’ missions is particularly suitable in order to shed new light on the way in which the European religious culture of this period would describe cultural ‘otherness’ and, even more important, the way in which the elimination of this difference (i.e., from the Catholic perspective, evangelization) was sought.

Needless to say, such a study is full of obstacles. In most cases, representations of sanctity as a medium of spiritual change in missionary contexts, be such representations verbal or non-verbal, of conversion or for conversion, tend to be the result of a projection of the religious imaginaire of Catholic Europe over the ‘infidels of the Indies’. Therefore, it is important not to forget that analyzing these texts one learns more about the religious imaginaire of the missionaries (and about the way in which they conceived the ‘infidels’ and the mutation of their hearts) than about the imaginaire of the ‘missioned’ ones (that is, those who were the target of the activity of evangelization).
The semiotic analysis of images and other artifacts, meant to represent sanctity as a medium of religious transformation, will reveal many significant features about the ‘audience’ of these texts. Yet, the historical sources that would be the most enlightening in this regard, i.e., the documents that the missioned ones themselves produced in order to describe their own religious conversion or that of their companions, are scarce or difficult to interpret (mainly because of the language in which they are written, in most cases unknown to the author of the present book). Despite these difficulties, historical research in this field has considerably progressed in recent years. Moreover, it is exactly in relation to this kind of contexts that the semiotics of religious discourse can turn out to be an extremely useful methodology, enabling one to deduce certain features of the religious imaginaire of the ‘infidels’ from the efforts that European missionaries made in order to effectively bring about their spiritual change.

Über Autor(innen)

Massimo Leone, University of Torino, Italy.