Word: miesel
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...church at New York City's Fordham University, "Joseph was not a popular saint." That's an understatement. His name did not pop up on any Western saints lists until 1000. The Koran, which dates from the 600s, dedicates a chapter to Mary but omits Joseph. According to Sandra Miesel, a Catholic journalist with a specialty in medieval history, a list of 30,000 Florentine men of the officeholding class before 1530 contained precisely one "Giuseppe...
...Aristotelian "prime of life." In contrast to earlier descriptions of a distant and alienated parent, Gerson portrayed (in a 2,957-line poem, among other vehicles) an adoring father to Jesus: "Joseph leads him," he wrote. "Joseph soothes him with kisses." Meanwhile, Bernardine of Siena, a powerhouse preacher whom Miesel describes as "the Billy Graham of his day," scored points with the Italian merchant class by pointing out that in Egypt and back in the Nazareth carpentry shop, Joseph would have had to have been "a diligent administrator...
...look changed. In 1570 Johannes Molanus, the Counter-Reformation's religious-art czar, banned the old, bald Joseph and stipulated a younger model. Artists like Murillo responded, resulting in, as Miesel puts it, "a vigorous, really studly Joseph." His saintly portfolio became extraordinarily diverse. (He now enjoys 24 "patronages.") Jerome's old notion had turned him into the patron of virgins, even as his paternal status made him the patron of families. The apocryphal scene of his death surrounded by Mary and Jesus was translated into his patronage of good deaths. ("When I was a little Catholic girl," recalls Anne...
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