John Wyclif and the Eucharistic Words of Institution: Context and Aftermath

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-44
Author(s):  
Ian Christopher Levy
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Eucharistic Theology ◽  
Correct Understanding ◽  
John Wyclif

In matters of eucharistic theology, John Wyclif (d. 1384) is best known for his rejection of the scholastic doctrine of transubstantiation. There were many reasons why Wyclif came to regard this doctrine as fundamentally untenable, such as the impossibility of substantial annihilation and the illogicality of accidents existing apart from subjects, but chief among them was his deep dissatisfaction with the prevailing interpretation of Christ's words, “Hoc est corpus meum,” the words of institution required to confect the sacrament in the Mass. Wyclif insisted that getting this proposition right was essential for a correct understanding of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. This article presents Wyclif's position on this matter within the context of later medieval scholastic discussions in an effort to lend clarity to his larger understanding of eucharistic presence. The article will then trace the reception of Wyclif's ideas to Bohemia at the turn of the fifteenth century, with special attention given to the Prague master Jakoubek of Stříbro. One finds that Wyclif, and then later Jakoubek, developed new and effective means of conceptualizing the conversion of the eucharistic elements, thereby expanding the ways in which one can affirm Christ's presence in the consecrated host and the salvific effects of that presence for faithful communicants.

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.

Was John Wyclif's Theology of the Eucharist Donatistic?

2000 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Christopher Levy
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Eucharistic Theology ◽  
John Wyclif ◽  
Determining Factor ◽  
Power Of God ◽  
Medieval Canon Law

The heresy of Donatism has often been associated with the fourteenth-century theologian John Wyclif. This study focuses on whether or not Wyclif's eucharistic theology had in fact lapsed into this heresy. For if Wyclif was guilty of Donatism it is certainly no small matter. Donatism violates one of the most fundamental tenets of Catholic Christianity, viz. that the validity of the sacraments is not dependent upon the personal sanctity of the human beings who administer them. Medieval canon law dealt at some length with the issue of sacramental administration, upholding the Augustinian position that the determining factor in the proper administration of the sacraments is not the merit of the celebrant, but rather the power of God operating through him. Indeed, such a principle would have to be maintained if the foundation of the Church's sacramental system, and the ecclesiastical structure as a whole, was to be preserved from the prospect of disintegration.

Wyclif and the Independence of the Church in England

1923 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 131-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Alva Gifford
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Society ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Right ◽  
John Wyclif ◽  
The Church ◽  
Better Than

I was moved to investigate the subject of this study by an admiration of long standing for John Wyclif, and by the feeling that James Gairdner, the latest historian of Lollardy, had done scant justice to the religious movement that began with Wyclif, and that survived through a century and a half to lend powerful aid to Henry VIII, when the hour struck for the rejection of the Roman jurisdiction. When the work was finished, I found myself at a goal not far removed from that of Dr. Gairdner, although I had reached it with less reluctant feet. Dr. Gairdner had the spirit of the true archivist.1 He had no aversion to dust; he could endure even dirt; but disorder, never. And Lollardy, in English society in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, was a source of disorder. I do not revolt at disorder when great changes are necessary. Unlike Dr. Gairdner, I can find great uses for the man who “refused to recant or bow to the opinion of trained judges,” even though they “presumably understood such questions better than himself.” I cannot view the literature of Lollardy, admittedly crude, as “poisonous.” And I respectfully dissent from the view that an admission of the right of sects to exist is “fatal to the essence of Christianity itself.” But I have found ever increasing reason to concur in the conclusion to which Dr. Gairdner's unrivalled knowledge led him, viz., that Lollardy survived through the troubled days of the fifteenth century to “help Henry VIII put down the Pope,” that Henry's reformation of the Church was “precisely on Lollard lines,” and that “Lollardy affected the Church more and more after his death.”

Nicholas Love as an Ecclesiastical Reformer

2016 ◽  
Vol 96 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 40-64
Author(s):  
Michael G. Sargent
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Nicholas Love ◽  
Blessed Virgin Mary ◽  
General Chapter ◽  
John Wyclif

Nicholas Love was the prior of the Carthusian house of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Mount Grace from its incorporation into the Order at the General Chapter of 1410 until shortly before his death, which occurred between 15 March and 28 July, 1423. He is most commonly known to present-day scholarship as the author of The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ and because of the licensing of the Mirror by Archbishop Thomas Arundel in accordance with the stipulations of the Lambeth Constitutions of 1409, as an agent in the archbishop's campaign against the followers of John Wyclif, and against Wycliffite translation of the scriptures into the vernacular. It would be better, however, to see him as an actor in his own right, a promoter, like his continental European Carthusian confrères, of the reform of the western Church in the fifteenth century.

Viator ducens ad celestia Eucharistic Piety, Papal Politics, and an Early Fifteenth-Century Motet

2003 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-284
Author(s):  
Benjamin Brand Brand
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
General Statement ◽  
Eucharistic Theology ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The Face ◽  
Musical Institutions ◽  
And Performance

Fifteenth-century Italy witnessed the marked expansion of the patron's role in the composition and performance of music. Despite the concern and resources that Renaissance princes and ecclesiastics devoted to their musical institutions, however, instances of actual collaboration between patrons and composers are quite rare. This essay considers just such an instance, Matteo da Perugia's Ave sancta mundi / Agnus Dei. A careful examination of this early 15th-century Eucharistic motet reveals that the composer's patron, the cardinal and friar Peter of Candia, likely played a crucial role in selecting the motet text, and was very possibly its author. Read within the context of the enduring and influential works of St. Bonaventure and other Franciscan luminaries, Ave sancta mundi appears to be not simply a general statement of Eucharistic theology, but rather an articulation of Franciscan piety. The most likely impetus for such an articulation was Peter's election to the papacy in 1409 at the Council of Pisa. As heard at the council, not only would the motet have alluded to Peter's status as a prominent member of the Friars Minor, it would have functioned as a forceful plea for ecclesiastical unity in the face of the Great Schism. Matteo's setting employs several musical strategies, including genre blending and chromaticism, which inflect Peter's text in such a way as to amplify these associations. Through a variety of literary allusions and musical processes, then, patron and composer joined in the creative process, fashioning a work that spoke to Peter's deeply held Franciscan beliefs and the aspirations of his fledgling papacy.

scholarly journals The Orbital Elements of Venus in Medieval Islamic Astronomy: Interaction Between Traditions and the Accuracy of Observations

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Mohammad Mozaffari
Keyword(s):  
Solar System ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Solar Model ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Orbital Elements ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Correct Understanding ◽  
Better Than ◽  
Ecliptic Longitude

The orbital elements of each planet are the eccentricity and the direction of the apsidal line of its orbit defined by the ecliptic longitude of either of its apses, i.e., the two points on its orbit where the planet is either furthest from or closest to the Earth, which are called the planet’s apogee and perigee. In the geocentric view of the solar system, the eccentricity of Venus is a bit less than half of the solar one, and its apogee is located behind that of the Sun. Ptolemy correctly found that the apogee of Venus is behind that of the Sun, but determined the eccentricity of Venus to be exactly half the solar one. In the Indian Midnight System of Āryabhaṭa (b. ad 476), the eccentricity of Venus is assumed to be half the solar one, and also the longitudes of their apogees are assumed to be the same. This hypothesis became prevalent in early medieval Middle Eastern astronomy (ad 800–1000), where its adoption resulted in large errors of more than 10° in the values for the longitude of the apogee of Venus adopted by Yaḥyā b. Abī Manṣūr (d. ad 830), al-Battānī (d. ad 929), and Ibn Yūnus (d. ad 1007). In Western Islamic astronomy, it was used in combination with Ibn al-Zarqālluh’s (d. ad 1100) solar model with variable eccentricity, which only by coincidence resulted in accurate values for the eccentricity of Venus. In late Islamic Middle Eastern astronomy (from ad 1000 onwards), Āryabhaṭa’s hypothesis gradually lost its dominance. Ibn al-A‘lam (d. ad 985) seems to have been the first Islamic astronomer who rejected it. Late Eastern Islamic astronomers from the middle of the thirteenth century onwards arrived at the correct understanding that the eccentricity of Venus should be somewhat less than half of the solar one. Its most accurate medieval value was measured in the Samarqand observatory in the fifteenth century. Also, the values for the longitude of the apogee of Venus show a significant improvement in late Middle Eastern Islamic works, reaching an accuracy better than a degree in Khāzinī’s Mu‘tabar zīj, Ibn al-Fahhād’s ‘Alā’ī zīj, the Īlkhānī zīj, and Ulugh Beg’s Sulṭānī zīj.

On Compositional Process in the Fifteenth Century

1987 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonnie J. Blackburn
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Current View ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Musica Poetica ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ultimate Result ◽  
Harmonic Composition ◽  
Correct Understanding ◽  
Inner Voices

The change from "successive composition" to "simultaneous conception" is one of the great turning points in the history of music. The latter term, derived from Pietro Aaron's allusion to the method of composition used by modern composers, does not correctly convey Aaron's meaning. He said that modern composers "take all the parts into consideration at once," disposing them in different ranges and thus allowing the avoidance of awkward clashes between the inner voices. This more harmonic orientation finds confirmation in the writings of Giovanni Spataro, whose theory of harmony, later developed by Zarlino, contradicts a current view of fifteenth-century music as purely intervallic counterpoint founded on a superius-tenor framework in which the bass is nonstructural and nonessential. The theory is grounded in the functional role of dissonance, adumbrated a century earlier in the treatise by Goscalcus. Discussion of the new compositional process can already be found fifty years earlier in the writings of Johannes Tinctoris. That this has not been recognized is due to persistent confusion over the term res facta. The key to comprehending this term lies in a correct understanding of what Tinctoris meant by counterpoint: it is not what we today call counterpoint but successive composition. Res facta differs from counterpoint in that each voice must be related to every other voice so that no improper dissonances appear between them. This method, "harmonic composition," could be quasi-simultaneous or successive; the criterion is the ultimate result-the finished work of art. Res facta is both a method of composition and a term that denotes a work composed in this manner, analogous to Listenius's opus perfectum et absolutum. The musica poetica of the sixteenth century is the legacy of res facta, and the two terms are indirectly connected. The new process of composition is the foundation for Tinctoris's delineation of an ars nova beginning about 1437, a date that may have been chosen in recognition of its first great representation in Dufay's Nuper rosarum flores.

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