Communities of Discourse: Religious Authority and the Role of Holy Women in the Later Middle Ages
This essay considers the teachings of Angela of Foligno, Clare of Montefalco, and Margaret of Faenza, and how these pedagogical endeavors were both negatively and positively received by their male contemporaries.
Gentile of Foligno Interprets the Prophecy “Woe to the World,” with an Edition and English Translation
If a diary of a prominent late-medieval religious figure were to be discovered that revealed his thoughts about the present and the future, such a discovery would seem to be too good to be true. But if labeled differently, such a document does exist: not a diary, but a prophetic commentary. The commentary by the fourteenth-century Augustinian friar Gentile of Foligno on the prophecy “Ve mundo in centum annis,” has never been the subject of sustained attention. Consequently the following presentation aims to examine it carefully within the context of the author's career and to show how it reveals some intriguing working habits as well as Gentile's firm hopes for the advent of angelic popes and ecclesiastical renewal.
Kitchen Conversations: Democracy in Action at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum
Abstract This article describes the Lower East Side Tenement Museum9s ongoing public dialogue on immigration, the first in the United States. As she joins facilitators in reflecting on the importance of dialogue in a democracy, museum president Ruth J. Abram explains how and why the program was initiated, the obstacles that had to be overcome, and the public reaction to it. Kitchen Conversations represents the museum9s commitment to the proposition that historic sites must function as places of civic engagement, using the history they interpret as a starting place for dialogue on related contemporary issues.