Academic literature on the topic 'Welsh Prayer books and devotions'

ABSTRACTQueen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) was the first monarch whose Accession Day (17 November) became an occasion for celebration. Poetic tributes to the day frequently evoked images of singing, music-making and dancing, evidence of which can be found in extant single-sheet publications, manuscripts and prayer books, as well as records of now-lost songs in the Stationers’ Register. These songs for Elizabeth's Accession Day reveal how cheaply printed or orally circulated music could become a medium for royal propaganda. Such genres spanned diverse social classes and contexts: from the educated to the illiterate, from street to church; from private household devotions to civic festivities. This countrywide singing was officially encouraged by church and government, as well as fuelled by the local enthusiasm of civic or parish authorities, individual households and commercial printers. It both created an image of England as a harmonious kingdom and attempted to instil such unity in difficult times.

This paper is more concerned with posing questions than attempting to provide answers. I am principally interested in trying to establish whether there was a connection between the English Arminians’ emphasis on ritual and the beautification of churches in the 1620S and 1630S and the perception at the time that Roman Catholicism was gaining ground, especially in London and at the court. It has long been known that Charles I’s court was considered by contemporaries to have been rife with Catholic activity. Likewise, the embassy chapels in London provided a focus for Protestant discontent as a result of their attracting considerable congregations of English Catholics. The 1620s also saw the Arminian faction within the Church of England grow in influence, acquiring the patronage of the Duke of Buckingham and of King Charles himself. As has been demonstrated by Nicholas Tyacke, for example, this faction was very much orientated towards the court, and gained power by working within this milieu under the leadership of Laud and Neile. However, I am not concerned here with the politics of the Arminian rise to control of the Church of England hierarchy, but rather with their interest in ceremonial worship, their endeavour to place liturgy rather than the sermon at the centre of services. Was a leading Arminian such as John Cosin, for instance, reacting to what amounted to a Roman initiative? Furthermore, one needs to ask what part aesthetics played in attracting and retaining the allegiance of Catholics to what was, after all, an illegal form of worship. Even if the no longer faced the likelihood of physical martyrdom, financial penalties were severe, and the threat of imprisonment remained for priests and laity alike. Yet some twenty per cent of the titular nobility and many ordinary folk remained loyal to Rome. May not the very nature of Catholic worship provide a clue to explain this phenomenon? Clearly this is an extremely wide subject, which the time and space available does not permit me to explore in depth on this occasion. Therefore, I propose to focus on two specific areas: what attracted crowds of Londoners to the Catholic worship offered by the embassy chapels; and on one aspect of the Arminian response, namely, the field of devotional literature. I shall examine John Cosin’s A Collection of Private Devotions… Called the Hours of Prayer (1627) in the context of its being a reply to popular Catholic devotional books of the period, such as the Officium Beatae Mariae Virginis, commonly known as the Primer. Thus I shall address issues connected with both public and private devotions.

While scholarship often focuses on how early modern Italians used images in their devotions, particularly in the post-Tridentine era, little attention has been placed upon how laypeople engaged with devotional text during times of prayer and in their everyday lives. Studies of early modern devotional texts have explored their literary content, investigated their censorship by the Church, or concentrated upon an elite readership. This thesis, instead, investigates how ordinary devotees interacted with holy words in their material form, which I have termed ‘material prayers’. Since this thesis developed under the aegis of the interdisciplinary research project, Domestic Devotions: The Place of Piety in the Italian Renaissance Home, 1400-1600, it focuses primarily on engagement with these material prayers in domestic spaces. Using an interdisciplinary approach drawing from material culture studies, literary history, social and cultural history, and art history, it brings together objects, images and archival sources to illuminate how devotees from across the socio-economic and literacy spectrums accessed and employed devotional text in their prayers and daily life. From holy words, Biblical excerpts, and prayers to textual symbols like the Sacred Monogram of the Name of Jesus, this thesis explores how and why these material prayers were employed for spiritual, apotropaic and intercessory purposes. It analyses material prayers not only in traditional textual formats (printed books and manuscripts), but also those that were printed on single-sheets of paper, inscribed on jewellery, or etched into the structure of the home. To convey how devotees engaged with and relied upon these material prayers, it considers a variety of inscribed objects, including those sanctioned by the Church as well as those which might be questioned or deemed ‘superstitious’ by ecclesiastical authorities. Sermons, Inquisition trial records, and other archival documents have been consulted to further illuminate the material evidence. The first part of the thesis, ‘On the Body’, considers the how devotees came into personal contact with texts by wearing prayers on their bodies. It examines a range of objects including prayers with protective properties, known as brevi, that were meant to be sealed in a pouch and worn around the neck, and more luxurious items of physical adornment inscribed with devotional and apotropaic text, such as necklaces and rings. The second part of the thesis enters the home to explore how the spaces people inhabited and the objects that populated their homes were decorated with material prayers. ‘In the Home’ begins with texts inscribed over the entryways of early modern Italian homes, and then considers how devotees decorated their walls with holy words and how the objects of devotion and household life were imbued with religious significance through the addition of pious inscriptions. By analysing these personal objects and the textual domestic sphere, this thesis argues that these material prayers cut across socio-economic classes, genders, and ages to embody quotidian moments of domestic devotion as well as moments of fear, anxiety and change.

This study is a theoretical research concerning Ibn Arabi's Sufi experience and his philosophy of the "
unity of being"
(also his poetical talent). I therefore adopted the historical and analytical methodologies to analyse and reply on the questions and suggestions I have raised in this paper. Both of the methodologies reveal the actual status of the Sufism of Ibn Arabi who came with a challenging sufi doctrine. Also, in the theoretical methodology I attempt to define Sufism by giving a panoramic history of it. I have also researched Ibn Arabi's status amongst his contemporaries for example, Al-Hallaj and Ibn Al Farid, and how they influenced him as a Sufi thinker during this time.

In the analytical study I explore the poems "
Tarjuman al Ashwaq"
of Ibn Arabi, of which I have selected some poems to study analytically. Through this I discovered Ibn Arabi's Sufi inclinations and the criticisms of various literary scholars, theologians, philosophers and also sufi thinkers, both from the East and the West. In this analysis I have also focused on the artistic value of the poetry which he utilized to promote his own doctrine "
the unity of being."

For sixty-five years hardly anyone in the English-speaking world was aware of the anthropological theories of Marcel Jousse, a twentieth century Jesuit scholar. In 1990, Jousse's seminal work, Le style oral rythmique et mnemotechnique chez les verbo-moteurs. (The rhythmic and mnemotechnique oral style of the verbo-motors), was translated into English and given the name The Oral Style. His anthropologie du geste, called in this study the anthropology of geste, presented his discovery of the universal anthropological laws governing human expression: mimism, bilateralism and formulism. Jousse had sought to understand the anthropological roots of oral style, in particular the phenomenal memory of oral style peoples. In this dissertation, Jousse's theories are summarised and his anthropological laws are used to determine whether three eucharistic prayers of the Roman rite contain elements of oral style expression. The Roman Canon, Eucharistic Prayer 1 and Eucharistic Prayer for Children 1 are set out in binary and ternary balancings. An attempt is made to show that written style expression, an inheritance from the Greeks, houses in its extraordinary complexity the very oral style elements it appears to have superseded. The assertion made is that written style, with its predilection for subordination, actually conserves, preserves and perpetuates oral style balancings, not only in the simple sentence (what Jousse calls the propositional geste), but also in clauses, phrases, words, and sound devices. Support is given to T. J. Talley's view that the Jewish nodeh lekah (thanksgiving) and not the berakah (blessing) is the prayer source that influenced the structure of the early Christians' eucharist (thanksgiving in Greek). The expressions of thanksgiving that are a distinguishing feature of anaphoras from the 1st century AD onwards, continue to shape the eucharistic prayers today. This is offered as one reason why, in a reconstruction of Eucharistic Prayer for Children 1 presented at the end of Chapter 5, it is possible to balance one recitative with another, and the recitation of one prayer component with another. The dissertation concludes by recommending that oral studies of the Christian liturgies of East and West be pursued as they have much to contribute to the orality-literacy debate not only in the matter of liturgical language but also in gaining an appreciation of other gestes of worship.
Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1994.

Abstract The setting of Catholic liturgies in Britain and Ireland changed significantly between the 1740s and the 1820s, as population increase and a growing sense of toleration encouraged the construction of new chapels, although the pace of change varied considerably across the four nations. This ensured the continued use of irregular liturgical venues, frequently as a result of poverty and the attendant inadequate resources. Even in London, alongside the liturgically rich experience of the embassy chapels, Mass was still celebrated in garrets, and Catholics gathered in hired rooms at local inns to hear sermons until late in the eighteenth century. In many locations, the celebration of the sacraments moved out from their former domestic settings to larger and more public gatherings in local chapels. Prayer books were increasingly available; preaching and devotions like Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament became more common. The bishops, particularly in Ireland, attempted to regulate what they viewed as unseemly practices which had become attached to certain events like the burial of the dead and the celebration of local holy sites. In England, seigneurial Catholicism gave way to urban congregations swollen by Irish immigration. At the beginning of the industrial age, the Church, by the imposition of clerical dominance over the laity, had in its own way made a clear option for the poor: the clergy went out into the industrial slums administering spiritual and material comfort to the Catholic masses amidst the dire poverty and disease of the inner-city cellars, courts, and tenements in which they clustered.