Religion among the Poor in Thirteenth-Century France: The Testimony of Humbert de Romans

Traditio ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 285-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Murray
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Western World ◽  
Main Form ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich

Some people say the Western world is in a mess, and what it needs is to rediscover its religion. Of the two chief kinds of objection made to this idea, scientific and social, the second is probably nearer the centre of debate now. Its main form, put broadly, is the theory that religion is a device promoted by the rich to stop the poor rebelling. A social theory like this has an historical dimension. To tell if it is true, data are needed about what people have actually done, rich or poor. Since history so far has mostly been about the great, the need for data is all the keener in respect of the poor. The aim of this article is to add, in the context of this general debate, to known data about poor men's religion, from an especially crucial and obscure period: the central Middle Ages.

Florence, 1492: The Reappearance of Plotinus*

1996 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 488-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henri D. Saffrey
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Saint Augustine ◽  
Latin Translation ◽  
Western World ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
The Middle Ages

In the western world, Plotinus was only a name until 1492. None of his treatises had been translated during the Middle Ages, and the translations dating back to antiquity had been lost. He was not totally unknown, however, thanks to scholars like Firmicus Maternus, Saint Augustine, Macrobius, and to those parts of the works of Proclus translated in the thirteenth century by William of Moerbeke. But Plotinus's own writings remained completely unknown,and as Vespasiano da Bisticci observed in his Vite, “senza i libri non si poteva fare nulla” (“without the books, nothing can be done”). This fact was to change completely only with the publication by Marsilio Ficino of his Latin translation of the Enneads.

Resistance to Tithes in the Middle Ages

1962 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giles Constable
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Income Tax ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Middle Ages

The system of compulsory tithes in the Middle Ages has long been used by protestant and liberal historians as a stick with which to beat the medieval Church. ‘This most harassing and oppressive form of taxation’, wrote H. C. Lea in his well-known History of the Inquisition, ‘had long been the cause of incurable trouble, aggravated by the rapacity with which it was enforced, even to the pitiful collections of the gleaner’. Von Inama-Sternegg remarked on the growing hatred of tithes in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, especially among the small free landholders, ‘upon whom the burden of tithes must have fallen most heavily’. Gioacchino Volpe said that tithes were ‘the more hated because they oppressed the rich less than the poor, the dependents on seigneurial estates less than the small free proprietors to whose ruin they contributed…. At that time tithes were both an ecclesiastical and secular oppression, a double offence against religious sentiment and popular misery’. G. G. Coulton, writing before the introduction in England of an income tax at a rate of over ten per cent., proclaimed that before the Reformation tithes ‘constituted a land tax, income tax and death duty far more onerous than any known to modern times, and proportionately unpopular’.

Elite and Popular Religion: The Book of Hours and Lay Piety in the Later Middle Ages

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 140-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eamon Duffy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Lay Piety ◽  
Book Of Hours ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Institutional Church

The very phrase ‘elite and popular religion’ is laden with potentially misleading polarities. In talking about elite religion or popular religion, are we contrasting notions of orthodoxy with heterodoxy or superstition, or the religion of the clergy with the religion of the laity, or the religion of the rich with the religion of the poor, or the religion of the polite and educated with the religion of the unwashed and unlettered, or the religion of the thinking individual over against the religion of the undifferentiated multitude, or the disciplined and liturgically-based official religion of the institutional Church with something more charismatic, less structured – or some permutation of any of the above?

The Preplague Population of England

1966 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josiah C. Russell
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Total Population ◽  
Population Change ◽  
Differential Mortality ◽  
The Poor ◽  
English Population ◽  
Domesday Book ◽  
English Society ◽  
The Subject

Sometime in the period 1300-48, English population reached its high point in the Middle Ages. All agree that it rose rapidly in the thirteenth century and dropped catastrophically in 1348-77. Its course in the first half of the century, however, is the subject of two sharply divergent opinions. One is that population increased gradually to about 3,700,000 at the outbreak of the plague, a point at which “the agricultural people were being crowded.” The other opinion is less exact: population reached its height about 1315, when the great famine and pestilence of 1315-17 reduced the population markedly and started a decline, restrained perhaps by a mild recovery in the two decades before 1348. According to this second theory population was much denser than the 3,700,000: even in the late thirteenth century, England had a “starving and over-populated countryside,” with “the poor sokemen of Lincolnshire — [struggling] to support five people on five acres of land,” and “a society in which every appreciable failure of harvests could result in large increases in deaths in a society balanced on the margin of subsistence.”This study will discuss first the pattern of English society as it appears in Domesday Book and the descriptions of manors called extents, which must be understood in order to estimate population properly. Next, it will consider some interesting evidence concerning social class differential mortality. Third, it will try to estimate the mortality of the 1315-17 famine and pestilence. Fourth, it will take up the trend of population change from 1300 to 1348. Fifth, it will consider the reliability of the poll tax data. Lastly, it will discuss the problem of household size and its relationship to the total population of England in the period.

Ivthe Spiritual EconomyDevozione longobarda

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Delogu
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Public Display ◽  
Po Plain ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Divine Mercy ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church ◽  
Insight Into

The investigation takes its inspiration from the book recently dedicated by Peter Brown (Through the Eye of a Needle, 2012) to the genesis of the Christian ethics of wealth and its good use. Brown had highlighted the transition from pagan evergetism to Christian charity; from the use of wealth for public display in favor of the city and the fellow-citizens, to its dispensation to the poor, who are the representatives of Christ. Thanks to this providence the rich can gain the divine mercy and save his soul. The Church, as a mundane institution, receives the pious gifts of the rich and administers them for the relief of the poor, but the poor are considered to be the real owners of the wealth accumulated by the Church. This ideological expedient allows the Church to consider itself poor. When this cultural process is complete, the Middle Ages have arrived. My aim has been to investigate how the precepts of the ancient Fathers were received and put into practice by the Langobardic society in Italy. Given the shortage of doctrinal texts similar to those exploited by Brown, I had recourse to more humble documents such as the deeds edited by Luigi Schiaparelli in the first two volumes of the Codice Diplomatico Longobardo. It is a collection of 296 documents, for the larger part concerning foundations or endowments of churches, monasteries, senodochia and oratoria, ordered by lay devotees. Most of them come from Tuscany; a lesser number from centres of the Po plain. These texts do not have any doctrinal purpose, but they give an insight into the way in which the Christian doctrine of wealth and its good use was received and put in practice by the Langobards in the 8th century.

scholarly journals Elements of sociology of the Black Death (1340-1350s). Inequalities before pandemic death in the Middle Ages : “chantries”, “private” priests, lower “surgeons”, and other farces of the rich.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camille Akmut
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Black Death ◽  
Fixed Income ◽  
Comfort Zone ◽  
The Poor ◽  
First Category ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Experimental History ◽  
The Middle Ages

Medieval scholars, in all of their expertise, often fail to see thegreater sociological rules governing their subjects in spite of having assembledall the necessary material themselves. In the following - based on their works -we remind of the great inequalities in times of pandemics, taking the events ofthe 14th+ c. Black Death as exemplary case. Not everyone was equal in frontof death : the major divisions between ”beneficed” and ”regular” priests arerecalled (they respectively received a fixed income, while the others made vowsof poverty and subsisted on offerings), as well as the institutions that emergedaround that time - ”chantry”, ”private” services, etc. : the rich sought a faster,surer way to heaven, while the first category of priests sought a faster wayaway from death - the poor, and the working-class, and their regular priestsstayed behind, joined in common death. (Experimental history : a historianand sociologist once again steps out of their comfort zone, so as to make othersuncomfortable.)

scholarly journals 865The dynamics of SES-related health inequality across the lifecycle and the role of selective mortality

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (Supplement_1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Petrie ◽  
Paul Allanson ◽  
Linkun Chen ◽  
Ulf Gerdtham
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Health Inequalities ◽  
Health Inequality ◽  
Current Evidence ◽  
Selective Mortality ◽  
Inequality Decomposition ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Age Cohorts ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich

Abstract Background The positive cross-sectional association between health and SES often strengthens at younger ages before peaking at middle ages and then weakening at older ages. Selective mortality is a possible reason for the weakening relationship at older ages but current evidence for this is limited. Methods This paper uncovers the changing nature of the inter-dependence between SES and health over the lifecycle by further developing and applying longitudinal inequality decomposition techniques which account for mortality. We examine changes in SES-related health inequality for rolling age cohorts by gender for Australia (using the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey) and the United Kingdom (using the Understanding Society survey). Results We find for young men in both countries that the simultaneous co-movement in both health and income plays the major role in increasing health inequalities. At middle ages the poor start to lose health more quickly than the rich but at older ages selective mortality plays the major role with the poor more likely to die than the rich which also has an indirect effect of making morbidity losses seem less concentrated among the poor. Conclusions Selective mortality plays a major role in weakening the relationship between SES and health at older ages. Past studies have missed identifying the full effect of selective mortality. Key messages SES-related health inequalities accumulate throughout the lifecycle, even in older ages.

Editor's Note

2004 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. i-iii
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Education ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Ethnic Origin ◽  
Fair Use ◽  
Good Education ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich

In this election year, 2004, people are grappling with the various forces that make up these United States. What forces encourage inclusion and which exclusion? Who is to be included and who excluded? Is this to be a country with wide discrepancies between the rich and the poor? Is this to be a country where public education is poorly funded and a good education depends upon private resources? Are we going to forget that discrimination on the basis of gender, race, ethnic origin, and economic status still exists and needs to be perpetually, vigilantly addressed? There is a deep division in the country over the proper and fair use of our resources that constitutes concern in all our citizens

Venantius Fortunatus, Poems, edited and translated by Michael Roberts. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017, pp. 944.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 390-392
Author(s):  
Raymond J. Cormier
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
The Middle Ages

It doesn’t pay to sing about the poor! Literary patronage in the Middle Ages is as old as poetry itself. The aristocratic context guaranteed a rich intellectual focus, whether we consider the poetry of praise or blame, and whether fulsome or just simple. Authorized compositions offered to a patron implied a hope for favorable compensation, and with his (or her) audience assured, the ceremonial promotion of the kingdom by the poet brought glory to the sponsor. Following a benefactor’s tastes within a cultural climate of liberality and magnanimity might bring unimaginable rewards to a court poet. A quick example from the life of Fortunatus: the renowned Gregory of Tours rewarded the poet with gifts, such as an estate on the Vienne River.

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