One Church and Two Nations: a Uniquely Irish Phenomenon?

1990 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 81-98
Author(s):  
Katherine Walsh

The Reformation in the sixteenth century brought with it the complex and—for contemporary religious and political groupings—unacceptable phenomenon of religious plurality. In the Middle Ages citizenship as an independent concept scarcely existed, and tacit assumptions about the function of Church-State relations rested on the view that all inhabitants of the polity were members of the Christian respublica. There were, of course, some specific, necessary, and therefore tolerable exceptions, such as Jews in many, but not in all countries. Heretics and infidels, who did not conform to these specifications, were therefore regarded as legitimate targets for repression, even for physical violence, in the complex machinery of the Inquisition and in the ideology of the crusades. The Reformation brought about a reversal of this monolithic thinking about the nature of the Christian polity. Faced with plurality of religious ideas and organizations, various solutions were attempted. The earliest, and that which was to have the most widespread and long-lasting effect in pre-Enlightenment and pre-Emancipation Europe, was that formulated in the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555). Here the decree of cuius regio, ejus religio—with a deliberate retrospect to the Emperor Constantine—guaranteed the continuation of the medieval principle, whereby the good and loyal citizen was one who conformed in religious as well as political sentiment with the ruling authority.

1965 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert D. Linder

Historians for some time now have tried to solve the extremely complex and very interesting problem of whether or not the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth-century represented a reaction against or an extension of Renaissance attitudes and ideas. Debate over whether or not the Reformation was essentially medieval or modern has taken several forms. One of the methods used to approach the problem has been that of studying in detail the life and thought of certain leaders of the Protestant movement in order to ascertain whether they were basically men of the Middle Ages or individuals who contributed substantially to the making of the modern world. Pierre Viret was one of those early champions of the Protestant drive for reform, in particular of that branch of the Protestant Reformation later known as Calvinism. This study represents an attempt to demonstrate to what extent he was influenced by Renaissance attitudes and ideas.


1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Jensen

One of the most remarkable changes to take place at German Protestant universities during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first twenty years of the seventeenth century was the return of metaphysics after more than halfa century of absence. University metaphysics has acquired a reputation for sterile aridity which was strengthened rather than diminished by its survival in early modern times, when such disciplines are supposed deservedly to have vanished with the end of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, this survival has attracted some attention this century. For a long urne it was assumed that German Protestants needed a metaphysical defence against the intellectual vigour of the Jesuits. Lewalter has shown, however, that this was not the case.


2019 ◽  
pp. 244-272
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ferriss-Hill

This epilogue traces the themes and concerns of the previous chapters throughout the Ars Poetica's considerable reception history. If the Ars Poetica's poetic qualities have not always been clear to scholars of literature, they seem to have been more evident to the practicing writers who, inspired by Horace's poem, wrote artes poeticae of their own. Indeed, practicing poets have long discerned what many literary scholars have not: that the poem's value lies not so much in its stated contents as in its fine-spun internal unity; in its interest in human nature and the onward march of time; in the importance of criticism—both giving and receiving it—to the artistic process; and in the essential sameness of writing, of making art, and of living, loving, being, and even dying. The argument made in this study for reading the Ars Poetica as a literary achievement in its own right may therefore be viewed as a return to the complex, nuanced ways in which it was already read in the Middle Ages, through the sixteenth century, and into the twenty-first. The authors of the later works examined in this chapter read the Ars Poetica as exemplifying and instantiating the sort of artistry that it opaquely commands, and they reflected this in turn through their own verses.


Author(s):  
Joel Biard

John Major was one of the last great logicians of the Middle Ages. Scottish in origin but Parisian by training, he continued the doctrines and the mode of thinking of fourteenth-century masters like John Buridan and William of Ockham. Using a resolutely nominalist approach, he developed a logic centred on the analysis of terms and their properties, and he applied this method of analysis to discourse in physics and theology. Although he came to oppose excessive dependence on logical subtlety in theology and maintained the authority of Holy Scripture, Major’s work was stubbornly independent of the growing influence of humanism in Europe. Later, he would be regarded as representative of the heavily criticized ‘scholastic spirit’, being referred to disparagingly by Rabelais as well as by later historians such as Villoslada (1938), but at the beginning of the sixteenth century, his teaching influenced an entire generation of students in the fields of logic, physics and theology.


2020 ◽  
Vol 149 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-497
Author(s):  
Klaus Ridder

The twelfth-century 'Ludus de Antichristo' already contains a number of the threatening scenarios (Ottoman Expansion, Heresy, Antichrist, etc.) that maintain a presence in the theatre up until the sixteenth century. This essay aims to investigate which scenarios of religious threat are dominant in the dramas of the later Middle Ages and Reformation, and what kinds of dramatic and production techniques are used in order to perform these scenarios on stage. Three levels of dramatic staging may be distinguished (Latency, Presence, Topicality), and these will be analysed here on the basis of three exemplary plays published before and after the Reformation (Hans Folz, 'Der Herzog von Burgund' / 'The Jewish Messiah'; Niklaus Manuel, 'Vom Papst und seiner Priesterschaft' / 'Of the Pope and his Priesthood'; Thomas Naogeorg, 'Pammachius' / 'Pammachius'). Bereits im 'Ludus de Antichristo' (12. Jh.) findet sich ein Großteil der Bedrohungsszenarien (Osmanische Expansion, Häresie, Antichrist etc.), die im Schauspiel bis ins 16. Jh. präsent bleiben. Der Aufsatz fragt danach, welche religiösen Bedrohungsszenarien im spätmittelalterlichen und reformatorischen Schauspiel dominant sind und auf welchen dramatischen Darstellungstechniken deren Wirkung in der Aufführung beruht. Drei Ebenen der theatralen Inszenierung von Bedrohung (Latenz, Präsenz, Aktualität) werden analytisch unterschieden und anhand von drei Schauspielen vor und nach der Reformation (Hans Folz, 'Der Herzog von Burgund'; Niklaus Manuel, 'Vom Papst und seiner Priesterschaft'; Thomas Naogeorg, 'Pammachius') exemplarisch beschrieben.


1994 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. T. Rhodes

Martyrs were the first saints and some were among the most popular saints of the Middle Ages. Because it was the manner of theirdeaththat won them their place in heaven, martyrs were a special case; unlike other saints, evidence of heroic virtue in life and miracles were not required. Like the early martyrs, many sixteenth-century English martyrs were immediately recognized as saints by their co-religionists, without reference to judicial processes. But the status of martyr was not popularly accorded automatically to Catholics who died on account of their faith. Despite Southwell's ‘Epitaph’: ‘A Queen I liu'd, now dead I am a Saint/Once MARIE calde; my name now Martir is’, Mary, Queen of Scots, was not generally acclaimed as a martyr, even by Catholics.


2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (4) ◽  
pp. 803-809
Author(s):  
Euan Cameron

Robert Bartlett's book on the cult of saints in the Middle Ages clearly constitutes a major achievement. Its scope is vast; its approach ranges from the chronological to the thematic; it embraces many cultural, as well as theological and religious, aspects of the subject. Finally, it is informed by a rich comparative vision that includes wide-ranging discussion of other religions.


Traditio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 375-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
JORGE LEDO

Ideas and opinions about communication and intellectual exchange underwent significant changes during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The rediscovery of parrhesia by the humanists of the Quattrocento is one of the least studied of these changes, and at the same time, paradoxically, one of the most fascinating. My main argument in these pages is that the recovery of Hellenistic “freedom of speech” was a process that took place from the thirteenth century through the first decade of the sixteenth century; thus it began well before the term παρρησία was common currency among humanists. This is the most important and counterituitive aspect of the present analysis of early modern parrhesia, because it means that the concept did not develop at the expense of classical and biblical tradition so much as at the expense of late-medieval scholastic speculation about the sins of the tongue and the legitimation of anger as an intellectual emotion. To illustrate this longue durée process, I have focused on three stages: (i) the creation, transformation, and assimilation by fourteenth-century humanism of the systems of sins of the tongue, and especially the sin of contentio; (ii) the synthesis carried out by Lorenzo Valla between the scholastic tradition, the communicative presumptions of early humanism, and the classical and New Testament ideas of parrhesia; and (iii) the systematization and transformation of this synthesis in Raffaele Maffei's Commentariorum rerum urbanorum libri XXXVIII. In closing, I propose a hypothesis. The theoretical framework behind Maffei's encyclopaedic approach is not only that he was attempting to synthesize the Quattrocento's heritage through the prism of classical sources; it was also that he was crystallizing the communicative “rules of the game” that all of Christianitas implicitly accepted at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Taking the three ways of manifesting the truth considered by Maffei and fleshing them out in the figures of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Celio Calcagnini, and Martin Luther just before the emergence of the Protestant Reformation could help to explain from a communicative perspective the success and pan-European impact of the Reformation.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document