| Catholic Converts: Culture and Conversation During Perestroika Contributor(s): Allitt, Patrick (Author) |
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ISBN: 0801486637 ISBN-13: 9780801486630 Publisher: Cornell University Press OUR PRICE: $29.66 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: April 2000 Annotation: This lavishly illustrated book looks at the art and architecture of episcopal palaces as expressions of power and ideology. Tracing the history of the bishop's residence in the urban centers of northern Italy over the Middle Ages, Maureen C. Miller asks why this once rudimentary and highly fortified structure called a domus became a complex and elegant "palace" (palatium) by the late twelfth century. Miller argues that the change reflects both the emergence of a distinct clerical culture and the attempts of bishops to maintain authority in public life. She relates both to the Gregorian reform movement, which set new standards for clerical deportment and at the same time undercut to secular power. As bishops lost temporal authority in their cities to emerging communal governments, they compensated architecturally and competed with the communes for visual and spatial dominance in the urban center. This rivalry left indelible marks on the layout and character of Italian cities. Moreover, Miller contends, this struggle for power had highly significant, but mixed, results for western Christianity. On the one hand, as bishops lost direct governing their cities, they devised ways to retain status, influence, and power through cultural practices. This response to loss was highly, creative. On the other hand, their loss of secular control led bishops to emphasize their spiritual powers and to use them to obtain temporal ends. The coercive use of spiritual authority contributed to the emergence of a "persecuting society" in the central Middle Ages. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Religion | Christianity - History - Religion | Christianity - Catholic |
| Dewey: 248.242 |
| Lexile Measure: 1460 |
| Physical Information: 0.8" H x 6" W x 9" (1.16 lbs) 360 pages |
| Themes: - Religious Orientation - Catholic - Religious Orientation - Christian - Theometrics - Academic |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: From the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, an impressive group of English speaking intellectuals converted to Catholicism. Outspoken and gifted, they intended to show the fallacies of religious skeptics and place Catholicism, once again, at the center of western intellectual life. The lives of individual converts--such as John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day--have been well documented, but Patrick Allitt has written the first account of converts' collective impact on Catholic intellectual life. His book is also the first to characterize the distinctive style of Catholicism they helped to create and the first to investigate the extensive contacts among Catholic convert writers in the United States and Britain.Allitt explains how, despite the Church's dogmatic style and hierarchical structure, converts working in the areas of history, science, literature, and philosophy maintained that Catholicism was intellectually liberating. British and American converts followed each other's progress closely, visiting each other and sending work back and forth across the Atlantic. The outcome of their labors was not what the converts had hoped. Although they influenced the Catholic Church for three or four generations, they were unable to restore it to the central place in Western intellectual life that it had enjoyed before the Reformation. |
Contributor Bio(s): Allitt, Patrick: - Patrick Allitt is Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University. He is the author of Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-1985 and Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome, both from Cornell University Press. |