Fencing Bear at Prayer

Learn how medieval Christians said the Ave Maria along with the secret of Mary’s name! Read  here ! To unlock the mystery further, you can buy my book here or here .

My book passes! Read how here .

We will no longer cower in terror at the threat of name-calling or reputational damage or having our family-friendly names besmirched in some way. We will run headlong into the fire and emerge stronger than before. We will be Daenerys Targaryen. We won’t just come out unscathed. We’ll come out unscathed with f*cking dragons!  — Milo Yiannopoulos

Chapter 1: The Hours of the Virgin This chapter provides a history of the introduction of the practice of saying the Hours or Office of the Virgin Mary from the late tenth century through the early sixteenth century. It surveys the different groups who adopted this practice over time, beginning with Benedictine monks and nuns in the tenth and eleventh centuries and including by the end of the Middle Ages every major religious order (canons, friars, beguines) as well as the laity and their confraternities. It introduces the Book of Hours as a novel codicological development brought about by this devotional practice and situates the devotion in the history of printing. The second part of the chapter gives a history of the development of the liturgical hours of the day according to which the Hours of the Virgin were structured, along with the symbolism of the hours. It also treats the variety of Uses of the Hours of the Virgin and explains why a single version of the Office was never in

1. This book is the first historical study to offer a close reading of the texts of the Hours of the Virgin , particularly the antiphons and psalms, as they would have been understood by Mary’s medieval devotees. 2. This book contains a close reading of three of the major Marian summae of the thirteenth century as sources for understanding medieval Marian devotion: Richard of Saint-Laurent’s De laudibus beatae Mariae virginis ; Conrad of Saxony’s Speculum beatae Mariae; and pseudo-Albert the Great’s Mariale sive CCXXX Quaestiones super Evangelium “Missus est Angelus Gabriel” . 3. This book suggests a complete revision of the history of Marian devotion from its beginnings in the New Testament through to the modern era based on Margaret Barker’s reconstruction of the Old Testament temple theology, according to which Mary becomes critical for the history of Christianity: without Mary as seen through the temple tradition, there would have been no Christianity because no Incarnation

This book is intended as a kind of handbook showing the way medieval Christians prayed to Mary, the Virgin Mother of God. Its subject-matter is the complex of psalms, chants, and other prayers known as the Hours of the Virgin with which Christians in medieval Europe served Mary, the Mother of the One whom they recognized as the Lord worshipped in the psalms of the Old Testament. Its purpose is to provide a history of this service, while at the same time suggesting what it would have been like for medieval Christians to imagine Mary in this way. It is intended to be useful to students of history, devotion, prayer, theology, liturgy, and exegesis who are interested in not only the structures of medieval religious thought but also its experience as an exercise of affect, intellect, and imagination. Its author writes as an historian and believing Christian, but she is not a theologian, although she would argue that in writing about the history of devotion to Mary it is impossible n

Would you like to learn to pray like a medieval Christian? Here’s how ! Pre-order here .

Remember the Good Old Days, when the worst thing you could be called was a white supremacist ? That was so  last season! Yesterday, The Daily Caller  published what was supposed to be the first article in a weekly op-ed column by a well-known journalist. The author, himself a victim of abuse at the hands ::ahem:: of older men when he was a young teenager, talked about the accusations coming out against Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey and excoriated the star for his (Spacey’s) attempt to cover himself in the cloak of his newly-acknowledged identity as a gay man. The author went on to cite the recent CATO Institute Free Speech and Tolerance Survey , which reports , among other things, that 58 per cent of Americans, including 73 per cent of Republicans and 58 per cent of independents “believe the political climate today prevents them from saying things they believe.” (Conversely, 53 per cent of Democrats “do not feel the need to self-censor.”) The author then gave two examples of the k

My academic colleague and long-time friend Carol Symes (Associate Professor of History, University of Illinois; PhD, Harvard 1999) posted this article on the American Historical Association website this morning: She, of course, mentions me. Once published in  Breitbart To date, the only tenured historian of medieval Europe to have found an audience for her views on these issues is Rachel Fulton Brown (Univ. of Chicago), a columnist for Breitbart who has used her privileged position and powerful allies to deride, bully, and persecute a junior, untenured medievalist of color. In a blog post published in mid-September, and in subsequent interviews, she has explicitly justified these attacks by invoking her authority as a historian (PhD, Columbia 1994). “If you teach the history,” Fulton Brown told Inside Higher Ed , “everybody basically learns that it’s a very complicated story, and there’s nothing to support the white supremacist argument in it.” According to her, proving tha