Archbishop John Morton and the Province of Canterbury, 1486–1500

1978 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Harper-Bill
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Personal Nature ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Foster Father ◽  
The Church

The episcopate of John Morton has received little attention from historians, possibly because it falls in time between the traditional interests of medievalists and of reformation specialists. Previous treatments, notably that of dean Hook in his Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury and the biography by Woodhouse, published in 1895 and heavily reliant on Hook, have concentrated on Morton's political role as ‘foster father of the Tudors’, and while Professor Claude Jenkins provided an excellent survey of the Canterbury register, he was more concerned with the evidence which it provides for die condition of the Church in die late fifteenth century than widi the archbishop himself. The purpose of this paper is to outline the salient characteristics of the episcopate and to examine the ecclesiastical policies pursued by Morton. Two qualifications must immediately be added. First, despite the wealth of material in the archiepiscopal register, supplemented by the records of the cathedral priory, there is almost nothing of a personal nature, and as always it is more difficult to estimate the character or sentiments of a fifteenth-century bishop than of his twelfth-century counterpart Secondly, it has been remarked how a hard and fresh look has upgraded the reputation of Hubert Walter, ‘that old model of secular prelacy’.

Art, Allegory and the Rise of Shi'ism in Iran, 1487-1565

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad Kia
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Narrative Poetry ◽  
Illustrated Text ◽  
Significant Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrative Subject ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Interdisciplinary Study

Some of the world’s most exquisite medieval paintings, from late fifteenth-century Herat and the early Safavid workshops, illustrate well-known episodes of popular romances––like Leyla & Majnun––that give prominence to depictions of unrelated figures such as a milkmaid or a spinner at the scene of the hero Majnun’s death. This interdisciplinary study aims to uncover the significance of this enigmatic, century-long trend from its genesis at the Timurid court to its continued development into the Safavid era. The analysis of iconography in several luxury manuscript paintings within the context of contemporary cultural trends, especially the ubiquitous mystical and messianic movements in the post-Mongol Turco-Persian world, reveals the meaning of many of these obscure figures and scenes and links this extraordinary innovation in the iconography of Persian painting to one of the most significant events in the history of Islam: the takeover of Iran by the Safavids in 1501. The apparently inscrutable figures, which initially appeared in illustrations of didactic Sufi narrative poetry, allude to metaphors and verbal expressions of Sufi discourse going back to the twelfth century. These “emblematic” figure-types served to emphasize the moral lessons of the narrative subject of the illustrated text by deploying familiar tropes from an intertextual Sufi literary discourse conveyed through verses by poets like Rumi, Attar and Jami, and ended up complementing and expressing Safavid political power at its greatest extent: the conversion of Iran to Shiism.

‘Ista est Jerusalem’. Intertextuality and Visual Exegesis in Peter of Poitiers’ Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi and Werner Rolevinck’s Fasciculus temporum

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Worm
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Visual Exegesis ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Church ◽  
Different Sources

This chapter analyses the circular plan of Jerusalem in Peter of Poitiers' Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi, a synopsis of history widely disseminated and frequently adapted. The plan of Jerusalem reveals how Peter of Poitiers modified and fused different sources, including Peter Comestor's Historia scholastica, to create a visually persuasive image of perfect formal and social order, with six gates foreshadowing the twelve gates of the Heavenly Jerusalem. The visual alignment of the plan of Jerusalem and other diagrams in the Compendium prompts the beholder to reflect on analogies of structures and events, and thus on the order and meaning of history. This argument extends to the late fifteenth-century diagram of the heavenly Jerusalem in Werner Rolewinck's Fasciculus temporum, which functions at the same time as a visualization of the Creed and as an allegorical image of the church, predetermined and eternal.

Terra Has Standing

Exterranean ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 24-40
Author(s):  
Phillip John Usher
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Latin Text ◽  
Vital Force ◽  
Legal Standing ◽  
Ecological Thought ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter offers a reading of a late fifteenth-century Latin text, Paulus Niavis’s Judicium Jovis(Judgment of Jupiter), which grants Terra legal standing, a right it uses to enter Jupiter’s court and accuse a miner of matricide. Situating Niavis’s Terra in a tradition going from Greek Gaia to Roman Terra up through the twelfth-century Terra of Alain de Lille in his De planctu naturae and finally reaching forward to Anthropocene-era debates over the relationship between humans and the Gaia of Lovelock and Latour, the chapter teases out how the Judicium Jovis fashions a sense of the exterranean in which Terra is neither just a body (or globe) nor a vital force (i.e., Earth’s systems), but both at the same time, such that the text’s final locking together of Terra and human activity serves as an argument against forms of ecological thought that depend upon seeing totalities from afar.

Public Theology in the Market State

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-222
Author(s):  
Dean Drayton
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Public Theology ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
New Public ◽  
Market State ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Public Church ◽  
The Church

AbstractThe accepted view that the modern state arose out of the 'wars of religion' is countered with evidence that the late fifteenth century reification of the state used a new category of religion as a human universal impulse to disempower the church and contain the church within the bounds of the state. As a further five successive forms of the state have come into existence new forms of communal and religious life have emerged: first, religious toleration; secondly, the development of a new 'public' realm; thirdly, the denominational form of church; fourthly, the appearance of mass media; fifthly, the embedding of the private citizen in a media world. In this last context either the church opts to reify the denominational church emphasizing individual democratic religious experience, or it realizes that an eschatological view of the gospel calls it to be a public church with a public theology.

“In the Church and in the Chapel”

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni Zanovello
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Spatial Features ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church ◽  
Musical Activities

Detailed payment records and notes preserved in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze allow us to reconstruct the relationship of music and space in the Florentine church of Santissima Annunziata. In the late fifteenth century different musical styles and repertories came to define ritually the composite space of the church, one of the main houses belonging to the mendicant order of the Servants of Mary. This special role of music came into focus in the early 1470s and even more in the 1480s, when subsequent priors increased the musical activities, possibly to negotiate the new spatial features of the church after a consequential remodeling. Music thus helped organize key areas that had undergone architectural transformations, linking each part of the building to the specific rituals performed there through special sounds directed at the likely participants. The remodeling also involved a shift in the balance of power, with private patrons coming to control the virtual totality of the church. Music helped address this problem as well, by acoustically marking and reclaiming certain spaces as the friars' dedicated ritual sites, but also creating in its variety a nuanced representation of the community—both ordained and lay—that frequented the building.

The Rise of Secular Drama in the Renaissance

1956 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 7-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leicester Bradner
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Considerable Degree ◽  
Dramatic Effect ◽  
The Church

The revival of the drama was not one of the accomplishments of the Renaissance. This revival had already taken place during the later Middle Ages, and by the twelfth century the plays connected with the festivals of the church had reached a considerable degree of complexity and dramatic effect. By the end of the fourteenth century the cycles of Biblical plays were well established, and in the fifteenth century they reached their greatest development. The rise of the moralities—those plays in which personified virtues and vices struggle for the possession of man's soul—also took place in the later Middle Ages, although the earliest references to them go back no further than the last quarter of the fourteenth century.

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