A late medieval pit at Westminster Abbey

1960 ◽  
Vol 40 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 188-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. G. Hurst
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One ◽  
Ancient Monuments ◽  
General Appearance

When the deanery of Westminster Abbey was being rebuilt in the autumn of 1951, as a result of war damage, a pit was found containing fourteen complete pots and fragments of nearly twenty others. The Ministry of Works was called in and the pottery was cleaned and restored in the Ancient Monuments Laboratory; it is now in the deanery. Unfortunately the pit was dug out by workmen before the find was reported to the Clerk of Works, but all the pottery was said to come from the one pit. The pit was about 5 × 3 ft. and was situated under a new flight of stairs in the new entrance hall (fig. I). It is not possible to tell exactly how this part of the building was arranged in late medieval times but the pit appears to have been inside the building. Although it has the general appearance of a latrine pit it may have been used for storage or some other purpose. The wall immediately to the east is twelfth century and the room in which the pit now is was probably the twelfth-century hall of the abbot's lodging. The whole building was reconstructed by Abbot Litlington in the late fourteenth century and Abbot Islip carried out further work in the early sixteenth century.

Kings and Knights at Play in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teofilo F. Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Courtly Culture ◽  
To Come

This chapter examines tournaments. The origins of tournaments in Western Europe can be traced back to classical sources and to a sparse number of references to events that looked like tournaments in the Central Middle Ages. While these early mentions provide interesting glimpses of the genealogy of fictitious combat, it was the twelfth century that truly saw the formal beginnings of these traditions of artificial warfare that would hold such a powerful grip on the European imagination for many centuries to come. Closely tied to courtly culture and in a symbiotic relationship with the great outburst of courtly literature that took place in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the tournament sank deep roots in England, France, the Low Countries, and parts of Germany during the twelfth century, and then developed elaborate rules of engagement and pageantry in succeeding centuries.

Emperor Charles IV (1346–1378) as the Architect of Local Religion in Prague

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 15-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Mengel
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Roman Emperor ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Local Religion ◽  
Guiding Principle

The idea of reform still supplies the guiding principle for most accounts of late medieval religion in Bohemia. Like a brightly colored thread, reform marks a trail leading forward from Jan Hus (d. 1415) to the leaders of the sixteenth-century Reformation, as well as backward to a series of precursors in the fourteenth century. This essay takes a different path through the religious culture of fourteenth-century Bohemia and of Prague, in particular. Rather than following the traditional historiography in identifying a handful of fourteenth-century Prague preachers as revolutionary forerunners of Jan Hus, this essay situates these and other figures within a more complicated and multivalent local religious culture, a culture that was carefully molded by Central Europe's most powerful authority. No one shaped Prague's local religion more dramatically than the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV (r. 1346–1378), as three examples offered here will illustrate. Like an architect, Charles IV designed much of Prague's vibrant local religion. Nevertheless, neither he nor anyone else completely controlled it.

Abelard’s Rib: Dialectics of a Twelfth-Century Monastic Marriage and the Historical Epistemology of Spirituality

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-89
Author(s):  
Babette S. Hellemans
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
History Of Christianity ◽  
Peter Abelard ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
To Come ◽  
Marital Love ◽  
The One

This article proposes to describe the oxymoronic aspect of twelfth-century ascetic life, as it is couched in the semantics of marital ‘love-talk.’ By extending Christian asceticism to the field of marital semantics, I hope to come closer to a more intellectual kind of spirituality, situated in the philosophical discourse of the ars dialectica. While it is commonplace to state that affective speech in the twelfth century is a constitutive element of Western ‘spirituality’—up to the point that this period is sometimes credited with being the founder of an individual love-talk—the nature of a ‘matrimonial’ love-speech firmly located within monastic walls is far from self-evident. Furthermore, there is the issue of physical desire in both Christian worship (hymns, liturgy) and reflective, religious language. This ‘incarnation’ of love inside the history of Christianity was coined by the twelfth-century reformer and intellectual Bernard of Clairvaux in the most tangible terms possible, especially in his Sermons on the Song of Songs and in his devotional texts on Mary. However, it is not a broad claim with regard to the status of ‘spirituality’ within history that dominates the present article. If anything, this contribution could be characterized as exploring the opposite of the common semantics of spirituality: the argumentative and dialectical speech on the one hand and the fragility of poetry on the other, glooming beneath the surface of a meandering Christian tradition. My analysis of the work of Peter Abelard (1079–1142)—a fierce opponent of Bernard—will demonstrate a rather radical view of ‘spirituality’ as a sometimes veiled (integementum) and sometimes shattered specimen of medieval love-talk.

Idleness

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kearney
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Human Labor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Thought

This essay examines the role that the specter of idleness played in the ongoing transformation of labor in England during the late medieval and early modern periods. It begins by tracing an historical shift in Christian conceptions of labor through a knotty genealogy of ideas about labor and idleness that extends from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The essay then turns to an early sixteenth-century text that is not often considered in either medieval or early modern histories of Christian thought about labor: Thomas More’sUtopia(1516). The essay contends thatUtopiais fundamentally shaped by More’s meditation on labor and idleness and that that meditation opens the utopian text out toward a vexed history of ideas concerning human work that extends forward from the fourteenth century. With its idiosyncratic but historically resonant meditation on human labor, More’sUtopiarepresents a particularly useful vantage point from which to address the ongoing transformation of Christian conceptions of work in late medieval and early modern England.

A Neglected Eucharistic Controversy: The Afterlife of John Wyclif's Eucharistic Thought in Bohemia in the Early Fifteenth Century

2015 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcela K. Perett
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Real Presence ◽  
The Subject ◽  
John Wyclif ◽  
Full Century

The renewed interest in John Wyclif (d. 1384) has brought this late medieval figure back into the spotlight of historians, giving rise to numerous studies evaluating his thought and its implications in the context of late fourteenth century England. However, it is not possible fully to appreciate Wyclif's importance in late medieval European culture without understanding the legacy of his ideas on the continent. According to the accepted narrative, John Wyclif's thought was mediated to the continent through the scholarly contacts between the universities in Oxford and in Prague, and re-emerged in the Latin writings of Jan Hus. This article argues that John Wyclif's thought, especially his critique of the church's doctrine of transubstantiation, found a larger audience among the rural clerics and laity in Bohemia, whom it reached through Peter Payne, who simplified and disseminated the works of the Oxford master. Wyclif's critique of transubstantiation sparked a nationwide debate about the nature of the Eucharist, generating numerous treatises, both in Latin and in the vernacular, on the subject of Christ's presence in the sacrament of the mass. This debate anticipated, a full century earlier, the famous debate between Luther and Zwingli and the Eucharistic debates of the sixteenth century Reformation more generally. The proliferation of vernacular Eucharistic tractates in Bohemia shows that Wyclif's critique of transubstantiation could be answered in a number of different ways that included both real presence (however defined) and figurative theologies—a fact, which, in turn, explains the doctrinal diversity among the Lollards in England.

scholarly journals Ikonografija romaničke katedrale u Dubrovniku

Ars Adriatica ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Pavuša Vežić
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Lateral Wall ◽  
Ground Plan ◽  
Architectural Features ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Archival Record ◽  
East End ◽  
The One

In order to deepen our contemporary knowledge about the Romanesque cathedral of Dubrovnik, it is of utmost importance to turn to the archaeological remains and the documented material evidence in order to establish its ground plan. On the basis of the ground plan and in combination with the way the Cathedral was depicted in the art works produced during the period from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, while also taking into account the contemporary written sources, we can propose a reconstruction of the Romanesque Cathedral together with a number of architectural features which have not been preserved. The Cathedral was an aisled basilica with a semi-circular apse which protruded at its east end. The nave was separated from the two aisles by means of arcades consisting of six piers resting on rectangular bases. The piers carried the vaults and these, in turn, supported the galleries above the aisles and the roof of the basilica. Such an arrangement was recorded by Diversis and Casola in the fifteenth century. In all likelihood, the two buttresses on the façade and eight more on each lateral wall were added later. At the top, the buttresses were connected by semi-circular arches and an exterior gallery existed above them. This gallery was connected to the one at the back of the church, creating thus an ambulatory which enabled the circumambulation of the basilica. This feature was mentioned by Casola and can be seen, to a certain degree, on the triptych painted by Nikola Božidarević. Most depictions show the Cathedral as having a dome on a round drum. However, the dome on the triptych painted by Pietro di Giovanni features a polygonal drum. The fact that the bases of the two piers situated under the dome are narrower compared to others, as can be seen on the ground plan recorded by Stošić, may have had something to do with that. The depictions of the dome regularly show exterior ribs which is a feature that requires further critical deliberation. At the same time, the dome does appear frequently in the architecture of Italian Romanesque churches. This can be seen in the architectural heritage of Apulia, Tuscany and Lombardy alike. When it comes to Dalmatia, however, only the cathedrals in its southern part, that is, at Dubrovnik and Kotor, were provided with a dome which is a phenomenon that points to the longevity of Byzantine tradition in these towns. The proposal put forward by Stošić, that the building of the Romanesque cathedral started during the last three decades of the twelfth century, when the Archbishop of Dubrovnik was Andrew of Lucca in Tuscany, seems convincing. Stošić also drew attention to the fact that the buttresses were added onto the exterior face of each lateral wall in order to carry the weight of the gallery in the upper part of the basilica. This may indicate that the initial concept was altered and it could be linked to an archival record of 1199 which mentions that a certain Eustace was required to carry out building works on the Cathedral. This Eustace was the son of Bernardo, a foreman (protomagister) in Trani in Apulia. This means that the twelfth century was not the time when the building works began, as Peković suggested, but the time when the building continued after the introduction of a new design with exterior galleries. Such galleries are found in Italian churches (in Apulia, Tuscany and Lombardy alike) as well as in some Dalmatian ones, for example on the lateral wall of Zadar Cathedral and on the wall of the semi-circular apse of the basilica of St Chrysogonus in the same town. On the other hand, fact remains that the exterior galleries in Apulian churches were supported by a series of robust buttresses which carried high vaults (Bari, Bitonto, Trani). These buttresses are much more solid in comparison to the narrow ones which were added onto the walls of Dubrovnik Cathedral. Perhaps this can be understood as a consequence of the change of design for the new cathedral which saw the replacing of what one might call a Tuscan project of the second half of the twelfth century with the Apulian one from the turn of the thirteenth. The building works continued long after this, well into the mid-fourteenth century, and in the process the cathedral acquired a number of Gothic elements. Its overall architectural composition was also imbued with the Gothic spatial articulation such as the testudines opere gothico. This makes it clear that during the thirteenth and fourteenth century, Dubrovnik experienced intense connections with Apulia.

scholarly journals Worlds of Difference

2003 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-149
Author(s):  
Charles E. Butterworth
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Detailed Explanation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Early Modern Times

This is an appealing and clearly written account of how European thinkersfrom late medieval to early modern times reflected upon and explored thequestion of what to do about people of different religions and cultures. Inother words, how should their divergent opinions be understood and, eventually,what practical dispositions should be taken toward them? CaryNederman devotes the introduction and first chapter to an excellent,detailed explanation of the book’s focus and goals. Simply put, he is intentupon challenging two currently dominant views: that toleration emerged inEurope only at the time of the Reformation, and that it is ineluctably linkedwith the kind of political liberalism usually associated with John Locke. Tothis end, he calls the reader’s attention to expressions of religious, and evensomewhat political, toleration that appear early in the twelfth century andcontinue well into the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, he does not succeedin this ambitious, even appealing, stratagem as fully as he would havewished, for he admits in passing that he is content to “offer illustrations,”instead of a “comprehensive account,” of this phenomenon ...

The “Calculatores” in Early Sixteenth-century Physics

1969 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Continuity Theory ◽  
Discontinuity Theory

The aim of this paper is to report some little-known aspects of sixteenth-century physics as these relate to the development of mechanics in the seventeenth century. The research herein reported grew out of a study on the mechanics of Domingo de Soto, a sixteenth-century Spanish scholastic,1 which has been concerned, in part, with examining critically Pierre Duhem's thesis that the English “Calculatores” of the fourteenth century were a primary source for Galileo's science.2 The conclusion to which this has come, thus far, is that Duhem had important insights into the late medieval preparation for the modern science of mechanics, but that he left out many of the steps. And the steps are important, whether one holds for a continuity theory or a discontinuity theoryvis-à-visthe connection between late medieval and early modern science.

scholarly journals Doubting John?

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 17-48
Author(s):  
Frances Andrews
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Patron Saint ◽  
John The Baptist ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One ◽  
Counter Argument ◽  
The Way

This essay focuses on the figure of John the Baptist in prison and the question he sent his disciples to ask Christ: was he ‘the one who is to come’ (Matthew 11: 2–3)? Having observed how the Fathers strove to distance John from the perils of doubt in their readings of this passage, it traces the way their arguments were picked up by twelfth- and thirteenth-century biblical exegetes and then by authors of anti-heretical dispute texts in urban Italy, where the Baptist was a popular patron saint. So as to give force to their own counter-arguments, learned polemicists, clerical and lay, made much of heretics’ hostility to John, powerfully ventriloquizing a doubting, sceptical standpoint. One counter-argument was to assign any doubts to John's disciples, for whose benefit he therefore sent to ask for confirmation of the means of Christ's return, neatly moving doubt from questions of faith to epistemology. Such ideas may have seeped beyond the bounds of a university-trained elite, as is perhaps visible in a fourteenth-century fresco representing John in prison engaging with anxious disciples. But place, audience and genre determined where doubt was energetically debated and where it was more usually avoided, as in sermons for the laity on the feast of a popular saint.

Venice and the Knights Hospitallers of Rhodes in the Fourteenth Century

1958 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 195-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. T. Luttrell
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church ◽  
Strong Contrast

In Gentile Bellini's painting of a Venetian festa a knight of the Order of St. John stands alone in the Piazza of San Marco. He is dressed in a black cloak adorned with the eight-pointed cross of the Hospitallers and is attended by a single page. The ecclesiastical and lay dignitaries of the Republic file solemnly past; but he has no part in the ceremony and his posture suggests an awareness that the presence of the Order was resented. For two centuries both Venice and the Hospitallers were among the foremost opponents of the Turks in the Mediterranean, but a deep antipathy existed between them. Allies by force of circumstance, their attitudes towards the infidels were in strong contrast and united action often became impossible. On the one side, were traditional elements in Venetian policy, the pre-eminence of trading interests, independence of the church and an opportunist exploitation of crusading ideals; on the other, the Hospitallers' alliance with Venice's greatest rival, Genoa.The Hospital's Priory of Venice was founded in the twelfth century and by the fourteenth included houses in many parts of Emilia and the Romagna, mostly outside Venetian territory.

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