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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.
One of the best-loved saints of all time, Francis of Assisi is often depicted today as a kind of proto-hippie or early environmentalist. This book, the most comprehensive study in English of Francis's view of nature in the context of medieval tradition, debunks modern anachronistic interpretations, arguing convincingly that Francis's ideas can only be understood in their 13th-century context. Through close analysis of Francis's writings, particularly the Canticle of the Sun, Sorrell shows that many of Francis's beliefs concerning the proper relation of humanity to the natural world have their antecedents in scripture and the medieval monastic orders, while other ideas and practices--his nature mysticism, his concept of familial relationships with created things, and his extension of chivalric conceptions to interactions with creatures--are entirely his own. Sorrell insists, however, that only by seeing Francis in terms of the Western traditions from which he arose can we appreciate the true originality of this extraordinary figure and the relevance of his thought to modern religious and environmental concerns.
The predominant “stewardship model” of creation is the result of an intentional effort to correct approaches that reinforce human sovereignty and the resulting environmental degradation. However, as All God’s Creatures argues, the stewardship model actually does not offer a correction but rather reinscribes many of the very same pitfalls. After close analysis of the stewardship model, this book identifies scriptural, theological, and philosophical sources to support the adoption of a “community of creation” paradigm. Drawing on postcolonial theory, this book proposes the concept of “planetarity” as a framework for conceiving the relationship between human and nonhuman creation, and the Creator, in a new way. This theoretical framework is grounded by a retrieval of the medieval Franciscan theological and philosophical tradition. The result is what can be called a postcolonial Franciscan theology of creation imagined in terms of planetarity, providing a constructive and nonanthropocentric response to the need for a new conceptualization of the doctrine of creation.
Brazilian Leonardo Boff explores the relevance of St. Francis to contemporary spirituality and to the construction of a new church. Boff shows how "Il Poverello," the "Little Poor Man" of the 12th century embodies the Church's preferential option for the poor" As a "model of gentleness and care," Francis exemplifies how the spiritual and the social are never separate, but intimately bound together.
Written with both passion and precision, God's Spies is a work that will be welcomed by anyone interested in the vital interplay between poetry and religion. The authors represented, including poets such as Michelangelo, St Francis of Assisi, Charles Péguy, Dante and Shakespeare, all possess one great and surprising quality in common: audacity. All of them in their work offer fresh and unforeseen perspectives on life and literature. Some of these authors are religious in the strict meaning of the word, their work indicating a devout turning away from the distractions of the world to focus on God. Others, in contrast, are poets whose work is distinguished by a remarkable visionary focus on the many small and great dramas of life, attending with bright, imaginative genius to what Shakespeare calls 'the mystery of things'.
A redefinition of the animal's relationship to sound and language in French texts from medieval England. The barks, hoots and howls of animals and birds pierce through the experience of medieval texts. In captivating episodes of communication between species, a mandrake shrieks when uprooted from the ground, a saint preaches to the animals, and a cuckoo causes turmoil at the parliament of birds with his familiar call. This book considers a range of such episodes in Old French verse texts, including bestiaries, treatises on language, the Life of Saint Francis of Assisi and the Fables by Marie de France, aiming to reconceptualize and reinterpret animal soundscapes. It argues that they draw on sound to produce competing perspectives, forms of life, and linguistic subjectivities, suggesting that humans owe more to animal sounds than we are disposed to believe. Texts inviting readers to listen and learn animal noises, to seek spiritual consolation in the jargon of birds, or to identify with the speaking wolf, create the conditions for an assertion of human exceptionalism even as they simultaneously invite readers to question such forms of control. By asking what it means for an animal to cry, make noise, or speak in French, this book provides an important resource for theorizing sound and animality in multilingual medieval contexts, and for understanding the animal's role in the interpretation of the natural world.
Arthur Boyd (1920-1999) produced numerous artworks based on the life and legends of St Francis of Assisi. This volume examines each of the artworks in detail, and each is reproduced (the pastels and tapestries in full colour). It also includes a discussion of the significance of St Francis in Italy and key Italian artistic renderings of the saint.