<p>The Carmelite friars were the last of the major mendicant orders to be established in Italy. Originally an eremitical order, they arrived from the Holy Land in the 1240s, decades after other mendicant orders, such as the Franciscans and Dominicans, had constructed churches and cultivated patrons in the burgeoning urban centers of central Italy. In a religious market already saturated with friars, the Carmelites distinguished themselves by promoting their Holy Land provenance, eremitical values, and by developing an institutional history claiming to be descendants of the Old Testament prophet Elijah. By the end of the 13th century the order had constructed thriving churches and convents and leveraged itself into a prominent position in the religious community. My dissertation analyzes these early Carmelite churches and convents, as well as the friars’ interactions with patrons, civic governments, and the urban space they occupied. Through three primary case studies – the churches and convents of Pisa, Siena and Florence – I examine the Carmelites’ approach to art, architecture, and urban space as the order transformed its mission from one of solitary prayer to one of active ministry.</p><p>My central questions are these: To what degree did the Carmelites’ Holy Land provenance inform the art and architecture they created for their central Italian churches? And to what degree was their visual culture instead a reflection of the mendicant norms of the time?</p><p>I have sought to analyze the Carmelites at the institutional level, to determine how the order viewed itself and how it wanted its legacy to develop. I then seek to determine how and if the institutional model was utilized in the artistic and architectural production of the individual convents. The understanding of Carmelite art as a promotional tool for the identity of the order is not a new one, however my work is the first to consider deeply the order’s architectural aspirations. I also consider the order’s relationships with its de facto founding saint, the prophet Elijah, and its patron, the Virgin Mary, in a more comprehensive manner that situates the resultant visual culture into the contemporary theological and historical contexts.</p> / Dissertation

The eleven illuminated missals at the core of this thesis share a distinctive scale that sets them apart from the majority of other decorated missals. Their scale was a key factor in the visual and ritual experiences they offered their patrons and their earliest users. Missals made in the later fourteenth century and the early fifteenth century included some of the physically largest examples of this genre of book ever made. Containing the text of the late medieval Mass, and read by its priest during the ritual’s performance, they were essential components of the ritual that resulted in the physical embodiment of Christ in the Eucharist. Large missals were a distinctive variation of the Mass book. However, existing scholarship has not offered sufficient reasons for a wide-ranging phenomenon of large missal patronage and manufacture. This thesis argues that the scale of these books was a central rhetorical device that magnified their significance and reception. At the heart of this adoption of the large-scale format was the aggrandisement of the Mass itself, reaffirming its place as the central rite of the Christian Church and contemporary devotions about the ritual. Study of these eleven manuscripts suggests that their exceptional size and the treatment of their interior designs supporting their visuality were issues for this particular period. Explanations for the adoption of large Mass books are given by examining their visibility in the Mass, as part of what is termed here the ‘altarscape’. Having established this, this thesis offers reasons for why patrons and clerics used a cumbersome large format for the text of the ritual. The missals unmistakeably reasserted orthodox values in the face of challenges to conventional understanding of the Eucharist from those holding non-conforming views. Simultaneously, the emphasis on expanded proportions arguably reflects contemporary practices of commemoration where being remembered was an essential part of dying well. And finally, the interior and exterior scale of these books was used for new devotional themes, including the Virgin.

The practice of contemplative silence, in its manifestation as a mode of capable being, is a self-consciously spiritual and ethical activity that aims at a transformation of reflexive consciousness. I assert that contemplative silence manifests a mode of capable being in which we have an awareness of the awareness of the awareness of being with being whereby we can constitute and create a shared world of meaning(s) through poetically presencing our being as being with others. The doubling and tripling of the term "awareness" refers to five contextual levels of awareness, which are analyzed, including immediate self-awareness, immediate objective awareness, reflective awareness, reflexive awareness, and contemplative awareness. The analysis culminates with the claim that contemplative silence manifests a mode of capable being, one which creates the conditions of the possibility for contemplative awareness. A hermeneutics of contemplative silence manifests a deeper level of awareness--contemplative awareness--as a poetics of presencing our human solidarity. Contemplative awareness includes both an experience and an understanding of the proper ordering of our relational realities. My claim is that contemplative awareness can and should accompany the practice of contemplative silence in order to appropriate the meaning of a silence embodied in the here and now, through the hermeneutical endeavor. Contemplative awareness elicits movement in thinking, and involves the ongoing exercise of rethinking our relational realities in and for the world. I join three moments in the hermeneutical process--description, explanation, and interpretation--with the three moments in the traditional religious journey to spiritual and ethical maturity--the purgative, the illuminative, and the unitive. I present a conceptual framework that opens to hermeneutics, and a way to think about ongoing appropriation of a mode of capable being as growth in the human capacity to make and carry meaning. The threefold way, as it is interpreted in this study, is a heuristic model of the invariant elements of the tradition of contemplative silence. There is reflexivity to the structure, because a study of the practice is an exemplification of the practice, which produces the very practice that it is talking about.

Thesis (M.A.P.S.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [63]-64).

Thesis (M.A.P.S.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [63]-64).

Saint Teresa of Jesus, the Spanish mystic of 16th century and the Carmelite order reformer presents the doctrine of internal prayer and all its stages in her works based on own personal experience of life with the God. The intention of this work is to analyze Teresa's mystical path as a process of spiritual life with various stages of transformation. It will deal with what it means to be united with the God for the human life in Teresa's conception. It will also submit how Teresa's doctrine of mystical path has been reflected in the Czech environment since 1900 to the present, respectively by Czech authors and by foreign authors of whose works were translated into the Czech language. The work will be based on the concrete text of Interior Castle, in which Teresa represents the soul with number of dwelling places. The structure will be defined by single dwelling places, which are considered the ascetic and mystical stages of the prayer. The work itself, the Interior Castle, will be introduced together with the first to third ascetic dwelling places which had been the subject of previous bachelor's work. The mystical stages of the prayer, which are represented by fourth to seventh dwelling places, will create the main part of the thesis. The reflections of various authors are considered as the...

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The master thesis "Roman baroque building elements on St. Joseph church compared to other churches in Central Europe" deals with Roman buildings features in the Carmelite nuns church of St. Joseph in the Lesser Town of Prague. It elucidates the main architectural theme, which is using the architectonic elements of the dome of St. Peter's basilica in the interior of the church of St. Joseph. The thesis sums facts about Abraham Paris - the most probable author of the ground plan. Apart from the detailed description St. Joseph church, the chapters devoted to architecture describe also some Roman churches which might have served as models for St. Joseph church. The thesis further mentions the influence of contemporary philosophical views on emerging baroque buildings in Rome and in Bohemia. The thesis also includes examples of using architectonic elements from famous Roman buildings understood as a way to communicate certain ideological intentions. Keywords Discalced Carmelite nuns, St. Joseph's church, baroque architecture in the Netherlands, Roman influence in Central Europe, oval ground plan

Madeleine duBois de Fontaines (1578-1637) was the first French prioress of the Teresian Carmelites in France. During a period of over thirty years as a Carmelite nun, Mere Madeleine de Saint-Joseph served as mistress of novices and was elected prioress for two tenns in the Carmel of the Incarnation, faubourg St. Jacques in Paris. She established and was elected prioress of a second Parisian Cannel nt the rue Chapon; and helped to establish and stabilise the Carmels in Lyon and Tours. Madeleine de Saint-Joseph's contribution to the development ofCannclitc life and French spirituality was a significant one due to many factors. Among these were: her leadership of the Carmelite community in Paris; her association with Pierre de Berulle; her influence on the members of the French aristocracy; and her deftness at spiritual direction. Within the corpus of her writings, there is significant evidence of what may be called theistic mystical experience. An analysis of the writings of Madeleine de Saint-Joseph also indicates mystical practice and doctrine that Mere Madeleine developed during the course of her lite. The present study introduces the study and presents a survey of relevant literature written by or about Madeleine de Saint-Joseph. Secondly, it explores the notions of mystical consciousness, knowledge, experience, offers a working definition of mysticism, relating these to Lonergan's cognition theory and work on religious experience, and to the feminist critique of philosophy of religion. Thirdly, the study contextualises the life and work of Madeleine du Bois de Fontaincs within sixteenth and seventeenth century french civil and ecclesiastical society. Fourthly, it determines by theological, phenomenological, and philosophical analysis that Mere Madeleine de Saint-Joseph is a true mystic; and finally, it presents the mystical doctrine and teachings of Madeleine de Saint-Joseph within a theological context. Thereby, it is hoped that this study recognises the valuable contribution to mystical literature of this relatively unknown and unreCQgnised woman. / Christian Spirituality, Church History & Missiology / D.Th. (Christian Spirituality)

This thesis aims to establish Jessica Powers (1905 – 1988) as a metaphysical poet, to augment the composite definition of metaphysical poetry, and to add two emphases to Christian literary theory. A comprehensive library search on Powers reveals that no scholarly work has been written on her poetry since 2005. A meta-analysis of existing work on Powers demonstrates that the metaphysical aspect of her poetry has not yet been comprehensively examined. Though Powers wrote in a time commonly called ‘post-modern’, my contention is that it would be more accurate to describe her as a metaphysical poet in the traditional sense of that term, as used, for example, of George Herbert (1593 – 1633). I endorse the view that the central theme of all metaphysical poetry is the relation between body and soul (Tanenbaum 2002: 211). It will be seen that this relation is the central concern of Powers’ metaphysical poetry. My close reading of Powers’ work as metaphysical is according to a Christian literary theory which agrees with Hass ‘that the study of the text and textual hermeneutics in the twenty-first century will continue because of a particular resurgence of religion’ (2007: 856). It is augmented by two emphases, a scientific (based on Gallagher’s 2009 study of the neurophysiology of attention), and a philosophical (based on Fromm’s 1976 analysis of the ‘being mode’, and on Buber’s 1947 analysis of attentiveness to the present moment). My study thereby contributes to Christian literary theory. There are one hundred and eighty two poems in The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers. This thesis refers, to greater or lesser extents, to one hundred and seventy six of the poems, and comprehensive examination of their metaphysical aspect is the primary focus of the thesis. My examination of the poems demonstrates that Powers’ poetry can justly be described as metaphysical, which definition of her work serves to highlight an important and hitherto neglected aspect of her work, that she is a metaphysical poet of the finest calibre, and that renewed attention to her work is timely. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English studies)