 2015 - 2016 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 0621-2689-01 | Heresy and Sanctity in Early Modern Europe | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| FACULTY OF HUMANITIES | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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University credit hours: 4.0
Course description
This seminar focuses on religious movements that were condemned as heretical from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, on their spiritual leaders, and on the attitude of the ecclesiastical establishment towards them. In this context, we shall also examine the possible connection among the rise in the public standing of saintly women mystics and the persecution of dissenting religious groups in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, and the “invention” of the diabolic sect of witches in the fifteenth century. We will read and discuss primary sources including records form inquisitorial proceedings against heretics, the writings of men and women who were reputed for sanctity or heresy, hagiographic texts and inquisitorial manuals.