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Essays about the middle ages religion
Religion in the middle ages
Religion in the middle ages
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Summary and Analysis of The Prioress' Tale (The Canterbury Tales)
The Prioress' Tale:
The Prioress tells a tale set in an Asian town dominated by the Jewry in which usury and other things hateful to Christ occurred. The Christian minority in the town opened a school for their children in this city. Among these children was a widow's son, an angelic seven year old who was, even at his young age, deeply devoted to his faith. At school he learned a song in Latin, the Alma redemptoris, and asked the meaning of it. According to an older student, this song was meant to praise the Virgin Mary. As he was walking home from school one day singing this song, he provoked the anger of the Jews of the city, whose hearts were possessed by Satan. They hired a murderer who slit the boys' throat and threw the body into a cesspool. The widow searched for her missing child, begging the Jews to tell her where her child might be found, but they refuse to help. When she found him, although his throat was slit, he began to sing the Alma redemptoris. The other Christians of the city rushed to the child and carried him to the abbey. The local provost cursed the Jews who knew of this murder and ordered their death by hanging. Before the child was buried, he began to speak. The Virgin Mary had placed a pearl on his tongue that allowed him to speak, despite his fatal wound, but when the pearl was removed he would finally pass on to heaven. The story ends with a lament for the young child and a curse on the Jews who perpetrated this crime.
Analysis
The Prioress' Tale is overtly a religious tale centered around Christian principles and a devotion to the Virgin Mary, but within the warm affection that the Prioress shows for her Christian faith is a disquieting anti-Semitism that will be immediately obvious to the modern reader. The tale is an overwrought melodrama, replete with scenes of such banal sentimentalism and simplistic moral instruction. The tale is an unabashed celebration of motherhood. The guiding figure of the tale is the Virgin Mary, who serves as the exemplar for Christian values and the intervening spirit who sustains the murdered child before he passes on to heaven. Her mortal parallel is the mother of the murdered boy, who dearly loves her son and struggles to find the boy when he is lost.
...ography book. But had been from one end of the country to another. One wholly dependent on money for life, the other indifferent to it. But those were the meaningless things. Their similarities were profound. Both were vitally interested in Macon Dead’s son, and both had close and supportive posthumous communication with their fathers” (139). They are very different in personality, but they both want Milkman, Pilate wishes to teach him love and culture, and Ruth wishes to keep Milkman at her side. These characteristics lead Milkman along his journey, both as hindrances and as salvation, and without these juxtaposed mother-figures in Milkman’s life he would not have a well-rounded character and growth which is brought from his struggles brought by his mother, and his triumphs from Pilate.
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At this point in time, scientists and doctors have yet to discover the specific causes for breast cancer. However, what is known are the different risk factors that may trigger or put women more at danger of acquiring this disease. Aged women who have experienced menopause are more vulnerable at containing this disease. Women are also more at risk if breast cancer is common within their family because it is hereditary. In addition, smoking and drinking are other factors that can put women at risk as well (Stephan, 2010). Obesity in particular is a huge risk factor. Women who are overweight, especially those who have a thicker upper body, are more likely to develop malignant cancers in the breast than a healthy woman (Vona-Davis and Rose, 2009).
... sins, but she can’t take back what she did so she will forever have blood on her hands. This guilt and all of the lies she has told is giving her true trepidation and in the end she decided to end her terror by taking her life.
Each year more offenders are sentenced to probation than to any other sanction in the criminal justice system. There are more offenders on probation than in prisons and jails combined. The reasons for the increasing use of probation are clear enough: probation can be provided at more than five times less cost than jail and nearly 19 times less cost than state prison. Probation can offer a cost-effective
In the United States, starting from the first breast cancer case in 1930s to today, a woman's lifetime risk of breast cancer increases to one eighth (Gray et al.). Continuously increasing breast cancer rate has caused a lot of concerns among not only ordinary people but also scientists. For decades, scientists have been working on the causes of breast cancer in order to find the corresponding methods of treatment. However, only about 25% of the breast cancer cases got explained (Brody et al.); till today, heredity, lifetime exposure to environmental estrogen (the female sex hormone), and the dietary fat are the only major known causes (“Cover Story: Breast Cancer and Environment”). For the 75% unexplained breast cancers cases, scientists, through various of researches, have come up with several hypothetical breast cancer causes, in which synthetic chemicals and environmental radiations are the major ones.
The risks of getting cancer in this day and age has been increasing at a rate that could be detrimental to the human race if we do not act now. It is scary to think that you or someone you love and care about will get some type of cancer in their life time. Although there are many different types of cancer that is in existence today, the main focus is breast cancer. We are going to explore the causes breast cancer, the stages, how we can treat it and what precautions that can be taken to help lower ones risk of getting breast cancer. In America a baby girl born today has a 1 in 8 chance of getting breast cancer sometime in her life. These statistics do not seem so scary until they are put into perspective. Every three minute a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer and one will die every 13 minutes in a given day. If these rates of breast cancer continue to rise there will soon be a one in one baby girl born that will et diagnosed with breast cancer. This is the future of our world that we are talking about here and no one seems to be changing the main factors that contribute to breast cancer. There are many different suspicious causes but one thing that is clear is that an unhealthy environment has an enormous impact on women and their development from babies to women.
In the Civil War, the cavalry flourished due to the various types of mounted forces they established, their skilled tactics, and their outstanding selection of horse breeds to accomplish their military tasks. Although the cavalry of World War 1 tried to implement the same effective tactics and also used exceptional horse breeds, the new inventions of modern artillery surpassed these mounted forces. Even though cavalry might not have been as successful in World War 1 as it was in the Civil War, it still proves to be as significant part of history today.
Breast cancer can be caused by a variety of factors. Up until recently, many doctors believed breast cancer was strictly related to heredities. Research has shown that a woman whose mother, sister, or daughter has had breast cancer is two to three times more likely to develop the disease (“Breast Cancer Causes…”). Inherited genes mutations can be passed from parents to children, but they don’t make cancer inevitable. The majority of women diagnosed with breast cancer have no family history (Mayo Clinic Staff). Researchers have found a link between breast cancer and a woman’s amount of exposure to estrogen and progesterone over her lifetime. Women who began their period before age 12 or started menopause at an older age are more likely to develop breast cancer (Mayo Clinic Staff). Women who have never had children or had children after age thirty-five are also at greater risk (Mayo Clinic Staff). Any of these situations will alter the hormone levels of a woman’s body. In relation to this risk factor, doctors believe that growing older is one fac...
Marie, who is a product of an abusive family, is influenced by her past, as she perceives the relationship between Callie and her son, Bo. Saunders writes, describing Marie’s childhood experiences, “At least she’d [Marie] never locked on of them [her children] in a closet while entertaining a literal gravedigger in the parlor” (174). Marie’s mother did not embody the traditional traits of a maternal fig...
As a girl, she had an extremely difficult childhood as an orphan and was passed around from orphanage to orphanage. The author has absolute admiration for how his mother overcame her upbringing. He opens the third chapter by saying, “She was whatever the opposite of a juvenile delinquent is, and this was not due to her upbringing in a Catholic orphanage, since whatever it was in her that was the opposite of a juvenile delinquent was too strong to have been due to the effect of any environment…the life where life had thrown her was deep and dirty” (40). By saying that she was ‘the opposite of a juvenile delinquent’, he makes her appear as almost a saintly figure, as he looks up to her with profound admiration. He defends his views on his mother’s saintly status as not being an effect of being in a Catholic orphanage, rather, due to her own strong will. O’Connor acknowledges to the extent that her childhood was difficult through his diction of life ‘throwing’ her rather than her being in control of it. As a result, she ended up in unsanitary and uncomfortable orphanages, a ‘deep and dirty’ circumstance that was out of her control. Because of this, the author recognizes that although his childhood was troublesome, his mother’s was much worse. She was still able to overcome it, and because of it, he can overcome
The Prioress steps in with the next tale, and takes a much different view. The Prioress herself is a very humble and well-mannered woman, as she is described in the General Prologue. She is also extremely compassionate towards all of God's creatures. Her tale is a tribute to the greatest woman of all, the Virgin Mary. While it is a tribute to the Virgin, the focus of the story is more on the little boy and his widowed mother. The mother is greatly distressed at her son's disappearance, and is eventually led by Jesus himself to the place where her son has been tossed. The idea that Jesus himself was consorting with this woman and answering her prayers makes a strong statement. Jesus certainly would not aid an evil person, so this widow must have been virtuous and humble.