Cracking the Code: the Warden Abbey Morses, Luxury Metalwork and Patronage at a Cistercian Abbey in the Late Middle Ages

2011 ◽  
Vol 91 ◽  
pp. 175-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Carter
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Cistercian Order

AbstractThe three copper-gilt and enamel plaques from Warden Abbey are the most important examples of late medieval metalwork from an English Cistercian abbey. They are currently exhibited at the British Museum and dated to the mid-fifteenth century. A reinterpretation of the monograms decorating the plaques allows their patron to be identified as Abbot Walter Clifton (c1377–97). An analysis of the plaques’ style and iconography also suggests a late fourteenth-century date. Clifton's personal devotions and an unusual aspect of the plaques’ iconography can be explained by reference to the spirituality of the Cistercian Order. The plaques’ closest parallel is a roundel decorated with the badge of Richardii. Evidence from inventories and comparison with Continental material suggests that the Warden plaques were, in all probability, morses, used to fasten a cope.

Knights, Cooks, Monks and Tourists: Elite and Popular Experience of the Late-Medieval Jerusalem Pilgrimage

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 99-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryne Beebe
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Popular Interest ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
The Church

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the late Middle Ages was the centre of a range of pilgrimage activity in which elite and popular beliefs and practices overlapped and complicated each other in exciting ways. The Jerusalem pilgrimage, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in particular, abounded in multiple levels of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ experience. Through the pilgrimage writings of a fifteenth-century Dominican pilgrim named Felix Fabri, this paper will explore two specific levels: the distinction between noble and lower-class experiences of the Jerusalem pilgrimage (both physical and spiritual), and the distinction between spiritually ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ conceptions of pilgrimage itself – that uneasy balance between the spiritually-sophisticated, contemplative experience of pilgrimage promoted by St Jerome and the more ‘popular’ interest in traditional ‘tourist’ activities, such as gathering indulgences or stocking up on holy souvenirs and relics to take home. However, as we will see, even these tourist acts were grounded in the orthodox spirituality of late-medieval piety, and the elite and popular experiences of pilgrimage, whether social or spiritual, were not so distinct as they may first appear.

Astrology and the Sibyls: John of Legnano's De adventu Christi and the Natural Theology of the Later Middle Ages

2007 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Ackerman Smoller
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Virgin Birth ◽  
Positive Light

ArgumentMedieval authors adopted a range of postures when writing about the role of reason in matters of faith. At one extreme, the phrase “natural theology” (theologia naturalis) was used, largely pejoratively, to connote something clearly inferior to revealed theology. At the other end, there was also a long tradition of what one might term “the impulse to natural theology,” manifested perhaps most notably in the embrace of Nature by certain twelfth-century authors associated with the school of Chartres. Only in the fifteenth century does one find authors using natural reason to investigate religious truths who also employ the term “natural theology,” now in a positive light, for their activities. Among such thinkers, astrology and eschatology frequently played an important role. In that respect, the writings of fourteenth-century Bolognese jurist John of Legnano offer an important example of the place of astrological, prophetic, and apocalyptic material in late medieval natural theology. In his 1375 treatise De adventu Christi, Legnano demonstrated that ancient poets, pagan seers such as the Sibyls, and non-Christian astrologers had all predicted, like Old Testament prophets, the virgin birth of Christ. For Legnano, not simply was Creation part of God's revelation, but, equally importantly, the very categories of reason and revelation blur in a way that points toward the works of Renaissance humanists and lays a foundation for a model of natural vaticination that showed reason's capability to reach fundamental religious truths.

scholarly journals A STRAIN OF SENEQUISMO IN LATE-MEDIEVAL LITERATURE OF THE CATALAN DOMAIN: THE CASE OF FRA FRANCESC MONER (1463-1492)

2006 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 229-261
Author(s):  
Peter Cocozzella
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Late Medieval Literature ◽  
Points Of Coincidence ◽  
The Moment

This essay is an exploration of Seneca’s influence on the bilingual (Catalan and Castilian) production, including poems and prose works, of Fra Francesc Moner, an extraordinarily talented Catalan writer of the late Middle Ages. After sampling Moner’s pithy renditions of Seneca’s sententious rhetoric, this essay delves into Moner’s assimilation of the salient topics and motifs that distinguish the Stoic philosophical system of Senecan vintage. The essay takes into account, particularly, some points of coincidence between Moner’s senequismo and that of Ausiàs March, the incomparable Valencian poet of the first half of the fifteenth century. An analysis of these coincidences suggests that Moner inherits from March a keen sensitivity to the metaphysical bond between the literary text as an icon of subjectivity and the moment-to-moment unfolding of human existence.

Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church

2008 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Van Engen
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Church History ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Past Generation ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The World ◽  
Before And After

Any historical period called “late” is headed for interpretive trouble, and one called “late medieval” is probably doomed. Periodization is an artifice, as we know, yet also an art. Historians have entirely reconceived “late antiquity” over the past generation, transforming Roman decadence into an imperial and Christian culture three centuries long embracing the whole Mediterranean world, creative in its culture and foundational for societies that followed. But what of “late medieval”? In most textbooks the term comes paired still with “decline.” Humanists and Reformers first created the artifice of a “middle time,” a dismissive gesture toward the thousand years that separated them from the golden ages of antiquity and/or the early church. Nineteenth-century scientific historians introduced art into this artifice by dividing that amorphous millennium into semi-coherent sub-periods: “early” (400–1000), “high” (1000–1300), and a rump called “late” (1300–1500). Church history entered importantly into the characterizations, with the “late” period traditionally told as a series of catastrophes beginning with destructive confrontations between Pope Boniface VIII (d. 1303) and King Philip the Fair. The storyline for the two centuries that followed, whether treated as deepening darkness (traditional) or as an overripe autumn (Huizinga), depended on what came before and after. Early in the twentieth century, church historians introduced ecumenical and even ironic reversals: Catholic scholars, looking to their own reforms, conceded late medieval deviance and the need sometimes for reform; Protestant scholars, looking to a reform born of strength rather than decline, found a late Middle Ages full of flourishing religiosity and even modernizing initiatives. Others, skeptical of the Reformation as marking any decisive turn toward modernity (vs. Hegel), delighted in finding all manner of cults, relics, prophecies, and zealots still among these new Protestants. Oberman and McGinn by contrast have reconceived the fields of theology and mysticism, Huizinga's autumnal evanescence becoming a golden harvest. All the same—and this only a bit overstated—many Reformation histories still essentially start the world anew in the 1520s, now speaking German, and too many medieval histories still close their story with fourteenth-century “decline,” an apocalyptic onslaught of plague, revolt, schism, and war.

scholarly journals Arbor Praedicandi. Some Remarks on Dispositio in Mediaeval Sermons (on the Example of Sermo 39 “Semen Est Verbum Dei” by Mikołaj of Błonie)

Terminus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (Special Issue 2) ◽  
pp. 169-195
Author(s):  
Lidia Grzybowska
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Paper Briefly ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Middle Ages

The main aim of this paper is to present the motif of a tree-shaped compositional scheme called arbor picta (arbor praedicandi) and to show it against the field of rhetorical elements such as dispositio and memoria as found in mediaeval sermons. The basic sources for the analysis of this question are two fourteenth-century theoretical treatises on the art of preaching (manuals: Libellus artis preadicatorie by Jacobus de Fusignano and Tractatulus solennis de arte et vero modo praedicandi by Pseudo-Thomas Aquinas), and one of the sermons from the collection de tempore of a fifteenth-century Polish preacher, Mikołaj of Błonie (Dominica sexagesime: sermo 39 “Semen est verbum Dei”). The problems of arbor praedicandi, which are part of a broader field of study on the structure of sermons, editorial methods of texts and mnemonics, were the subject of interest of many researchers such as H. Caplan, O.A. Dieter, S. Khan, S. Wenzel. In Poland, this issue has not yet become a subject of proper study. In order to analyse this scheme in the treatises of Jacobus de Fusignano and Pseudo-Thomas Aquinas, as well as in the exemplary sermon, the paper briefly outlines the existence of topics and images of the tree in the writings of the Middle Ages (e.g. lignum vitae, arbor sapientiae, arbor amoris). Then fragments from the manuals of Jacobus de Fusignano and Pseudo-Thomas Aquinas are presented in which the authors discussed the scheme in question and explained its importance for the practice of preaching. An analysis of a practical example—here: sermo 39 from Mikołaj of Błonie’s collection de tempore—shows the creative use of the tree scheme in the sermon by the Polish preacher (with the speculative assumption that Mikołaj of Błonie knew Jacobus’s theory of preaching). Particular attention is also paid to the circumstances of the development of the art of preaching in the late Middle Ages in Poland. Finally, the importance of the concept of the sermon as a tree for the elements of rhetoric such as dispositio/divisio/partito and memoria is emphasised. In this study, it is shown that the use of the tree scheme in presenting abstract concepts and structuring texts allowed preachers and their audiences to visualise vague and often difficult ideas, as well as to describe their relationship within the subjects of the sermons. Therefore, the use of the scheme in the Middle Ages had great significance for ars memorativa and the didactic dimensions.

Domina Paupertas: the praise of voluntary poverty by St. Francis of Assisi and its reflection in late medieval Spanish painting

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
José María Salvador González
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Large Set ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Perfect Model ◽  
Material Goods ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
Francis Of Assisi

As is well known, St. Francis of Assisi heroically embraced evangelical poverty, renouncing material goods and living in abject poverty, in imitation of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, through his writings and oral testimonies collected by his disciples, the saint fervently urged Christians to live to some degree voluntary poverty , of which Christ was the perfect model. By basing this reading on some Poverello’s quotations, this paper intends to show the potential impact that these exhortations from San Francisco to poverty may have had in the late medieval Spanish painting, in some iconographic themes so significantly Franciscan as the Nativity and the Passion of the Redeemer. Through the analysis of a large set of paintings representing both issues, we will attempt to put into light if the teachings of St. Francis on evangelical poverty are reflected somehow in Spanish painting of the late Middle Ages.

A Crooked Mirror for Princes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavlína Rychterová
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
Mirrors For Princes

This chapter examines the growing importance of the vernacular languages during the later Middle Ages in shaping the form, content, and audiences of political discourse. It presents a famously wicked king of the late Middle Ages, Wenceslas IV (1361–1419), as a case study and traces the origins of his bad reputation to a group of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writings. These have often been dismissed as fictions or studied solely as literature, but in fact they represent new modes of articulating good and bad kingship. The chapter shows that, in the context of an increasingly literate bourgeois culture, especially in university cities, these vernacular works transformed Latin theological approaches to monarchy, while rendering mirrors for princes and related literatures accessible to an unprecedented audience.

Time and the Testator, 1370–1540

2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 133-144
Author(s):  
Judith Middleton-Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Perception Of Time ◽  
Limited Duration ◽  
At Will

There were many ways in which the late medieval testator could acknowledge time. Behind each testator lay a lifetime of memories and experiences on which he or she drew, recalling the names of those ‘they had fared the better for’, those they wished to remember and by whom they wished to be remembered. Their present time was of limited duration, for at will making they had to assemble their thoughts and their intentions, make decisions and appoint stewards, as they prepared for their time ahead; but as they spent present time arranging the past, so they spent present time laying plans for the future. Some testators had more to bequeath, more time to spare: others had less to leave, less time to plan. Were they aware of time? How did they control the future? In an intriguing essay, A. G. Rigg asserts that ‘one of the greatest revolutions in man’s perception of the world around him was caused by the invention, sometime in the late thirteenth century, of the mechanical weight-driven clock.’ It is the intention of this paper to see how men’s (and women’s) perception of time in the late Middle Ages was reflected in their wills, the most personal papers left by ordinary men and women of the period.

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