A thorough account of the “engine rooms of medieval society.”
Not simply solitary figures.
Jotischky, professor of medieval history at the University of London, author of A Hermit’s Cookbook: Monks, Food and Fasting in the Middle Ages, writes that at the height of their influence (c. 800-1300), “monasteries provided intellectual leadership for the institutions of Church and civil government, innovation in religious thought and practice, pastoral care, medical provision, education, visual culture and agricultural development” while providing alms for the poor, hospitality for travelers, and schooling for local people. Almost as soon as Roman Emperor Constantine adopted Christianity in 312, pious individuals began devoting their lives to serving God. Avoiding individuals (“mendicants,” “anchorites”), he focuses on enclosed communities that first appeared in the eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century, most likely in Egypt. They quickly spread, becoming an indispensable feature of Christian society by the sixth century. By the 12th century, monasteries were fixed and immutable points in political culture. They were found in towns and cities as well as remote areas. Abbots and even abbesses were regular attenders at royal and aristocratic courts. Possession of property brought responsibilities and obligations to the running of political society as well as quarrels. As businesses, they were employers and sources of labor and purchasers of goods. Monks themselves were used as representatives of governments at a time when professional diplomacy did not exist. World history, from the fall of Rome to the Enlightenment, makes its appearance, but Jotischky sticks closely to his specialty. The result is perhaps more than the average reader wants to know about the founding and influence of individual monasteries as well as the origin, philosophy, and controversies of the various schools: Cistercians, Cluniacs, Augustinians, Benedictines, Dominicans, Franciscans.
A thorough account of the “engine rooms of medieval society.”Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780300208566
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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