Church Discipline in the Later Middle Ages: the Priors of Durham as Archdeacons

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 95-105
Author(s):  
Margaret Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Church Discipline ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Church Courts ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

It is often forgotten that the medieval Church imposed public penance and reconciliation by law. The discipline was administered by the church courts, among which one of the most important, because it acted at local level, was that of the archdeacon. In the later Middle Ages and certainly by 1435, the priors of Durham were archdeacons in all the churches appropriated to the monastery. The priors had established their rights in Durham County by the early fourteenth century and in Northumberland slightly later. Although the origins of this peculiar jurisdiction were long ago unravelled by Barlow, there is no full account of how it worked in practice. Yet it is not difficult from the Durham archives to elicit a coherent account, with examples, of the way penance and ecclesiastical justice were administered from day to day in the Durham area in this period. The picture that emerges from these documents, though not in itself unusual, is nevertheless valuable and affords an extraordinary degree of detail which is missing from other places, where the evidence no longer exists. This study should complement the recent work by Larry Poos for Lincoln and Wisbech, drawing attention to an institution which would reward further research. It is only possible here to outline what the court did and how and why it was used.

scholarly journals The Counter-Conduct of Medieval Hermits

2016 ◽  
pp. 80-97
Author(s):  
Christopher Roman
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Richard Rolle ◽  
The Church ◽  
Rule Order

The hermit posed a challenge to a medieval Church that emphasized rule, order, and discipline since oversight of their life could be virtually non-existent. The writings of Richard Rolle, hermit, negotiates the space between Foucauldian exomolgesis and exoagouresis as Rolle strove to articulate the identity of the hermit without any kind of church endorsement. As well, he forged his life out of a struggle with concepts of medieval sin, specifically Pride, which placed him in a queer position in terms of relationships with his surrounding community. His way of life was highly influential in his local community, however, and, through manuscript dissemination, beyond. Because he experienced mystical visions without church oversight, his eremitic life and example inspired a movement toward lay, affective piety in the later Middle Ages. The hermit, in his case, challenges the medieval Church’s hierarchy in that hermits practice a form of living at a local level, placing them in dangerous, sometimes heretical, positions that force the Church to either absorb their practices or suppress them.

A Consistory Court in the Middle Ages

1963 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Morris
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Church Courts ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Church ◽  
Insight Into

Some years ago Professor Powicke wrote of the possibility that a study of the surviving records of the medieval church courts would ‘reveal unexpected possibilities of insight into the daily lives of men and women in a pre-Reformation diocese as subjects of an active jurisdiction, parallel to that of the common law. That this jurisdiction existed we already knew, but the prospect of seeing it at work is exciting’. Since then, it has become increasingly clear that the exploration of the working of the church courts would throw light on the whole relationship between Church and People in medieval, and indeed post-medieval, England. Unfortunately, the records, although quite voluminous, have survived only in a haphazard and intermittent way, and it is, as yet, impossible to form any general conclusions about the subject as a whole. In the hope of contributing to this process, I propose to examine the working of the consistory court in the diocese of Lincoln, one of the largest and most populous dioceses in pre-Reformation England.

The medieval church of Montrose: a place ‘of much antiquity and abundantly populous’

2014 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catriona Anna Gray
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Date ◽  
Plausible Candidate ◽  
External Evidence ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Local Tradition ◽  
The Church

Montrose was one of Scotland's earliest royal burghs, but historians have largely overlooked its parish kirk. A number of fourteenth and fifteenth-century sources indicate that the church of Montrose was an important ecclesiastical centre from an early date. Dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, by the later middle ages it was a place of pilgrimage linked in local tradition with the cult of Saint Boniface of Rosemarkie. This connection with Boniface appears to have been of long standing, and it is argued that the church of Montrose is a plausible candidate for the lost Egglespether, the ‘church of Peter’, associated with the priory of Restenneth. External evidence from England and Iceland appears to identify Montrose as the seat of a bishop, raising the possibility that it may also have been an ultimately unsuccessful rival for Brechin as the episcopal centre for Angus and the Mearns.

The medieval church

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Luscombe
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter discusses the contributions that were made by former Fellows of the Academy to the study of the medieval church. It states that the history of the medieval church is inseparable from the general history of the Middle Ages, since the church shaped society and society shaped the church. The chapter determines that no hard and fast distinction can always be made between the works by ecclesiastical historians during the twentieth century, and the contributions made to general history by other historians.

Time, Death, and the Next Generation: The Early Elizabethan Recusancy Policy, 1558–1574

1982 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-117
Author(s):  
John J. LaRocca
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Recent Article ◽  
Local Level ◽  
The Political ◽  
Privy Council ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Character ◽  
The Church

In a recent article, Caroline M. Hibbard noted that recent work on Tudor-Stuart recusancy has focused on the enforcement of royal and statutory policy on the local level and has examined the social composition of the recusant community. These studies have revealed that the recusant community was not dominated by priests, not subject to the political directives of the papacy, and not plotting rebellion. The problem inherent in these local studies, as Professor Hibbard points out, is that they do not explain why the English were anti-Catholic and they do not examine the international character of the English Catholic Community. This article is an attempt to view the recusant problem from the perspective of the monarch and the privy council, because both monarch and privy council were aware of the international character of Catholicism and both stated clearly in their policies toward recusants the grounds of their objection to the Catholic community. An analysis of the recusancy policy established by Elizabeth between 1559 and 1574 reveals that her primary objection to the recusants was not religious but political. The recusants denied a fundamental claim of the monarch: the headship of the church and, therefore, the claim that the monarch was the source of all power within the realm. This article, then, will examine the ways in which she wished to contain a minority who denied her supreme power in the realm and the circumstances which caused the queen and the council to change that policy.

scholarly journals Prilozi proučavanju crkve Svetog Mateja u Splitu

Ars Adriatica ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 67
Author(s):  
Ivan Basić
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Existing Structures ◽  
The Church ◽  
East West

The church of St Matthew, which stood next to the south entrance to Split cathedral until 1881, was constructed between the peripteros and temenos of Diocletian’s mausoleum, along its east-west axis. A large number of pre-existing structures in the church of St Matthew and their degree of preservation indicate that it was erected at the beginning of the early middle ages, when the original layout of diocletian’s building had been well preserved. The church was the original setting for the sarcophagus with the epitaph of Archbishop John from the second half of the eighth century, which can be linked to the restorer of the Salonitan archbishopric in Split, John of Ravenna, who is mentioned by Thomas, the Archdeacon of Split, in his thirteenth-century chronicle, Historia Salonitana. The analysis of the sources relevant for the burial place of Archbishop John of Ravenna (the fourteenth-century chronicle of A. Cutheis and his catalogue of the archbishops of Split) showed that the data from these records are also of early medieval origin. The chronological frame in which the formula carved on the lid of the Archbishop’s sarcophagus existed, its epigraphic features and comparisons with the deceased’s epitaph, link it with the time when the longer inscription and the decoration of the sarcophagus front were carved - the end of the eighth century, and point to Archbishop John (c. 787) as the likeliest owner of the sarcophagus.  The choice of place for the sarcophagus of prior Peter, immediately next to the entrance to the church of St Matthew, in the ninth century, as well as the decoration and its relationship with the epitaph inspired by that on the sarcophagus of Archbishop john, corroborate that the prior’s sarcophagus was later than that of the Archbishop and the church in which it stood. The description of the church’s interior by D. Farlati in the eighteenth century, together with other indications, confirms that the sarcophagus and the church were made at the same  time, and that the Archbishop’s tomb was originally envisaged within the architectural setting of this church where an arcosolium contributed to its monumentality. The iconographic variant of the crossed-lily decoration and its specific symbolism originated in early christian Ravenna, which corresponds not only to the origin of the  Archbishop buried in the chapel but to the dedication to St Matthew, also of ravennate provenance, which creatively matches the iconographic programme of the sarcophagus. Thus, the sarcophagus, the church of St Matthew and John of Ravenna are connected to John,  the Archbishop of Split in the late eighth century.

Medieval Heretics as Protestant Martyrs

1993 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 185-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Euan Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Church History ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Church Polity ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Articles Of Faith ◽  
The Church

Two themes which figure repeatedly in the history of the Western Church are the contrasting ones of tradition and renewal. To emphasize tradition, or continuity, is to stress the divine element in the continuous collective teaching and witness of the Church. To call periodically for renewal and reform is to acknowledge that any institution composed of people will, with time, lose its pristine vigour or deviate from its original purpose. At certain periods in church history the tension between these two themes has broken out into open conflict, as happened with such dramatic results in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Protestant Reformers seem to present one of the most extreme cases where the desire for renewal triumphed over the instinct to preserve continuity of witness. A fundamentally novel analysis of the process by which human souls were saved was formulated by Martin Luther in the course of debate, and soon adopted or reinvented by others. This analysis was then used as a touchstone against which to test and to attack the most prominent features of contemporary teaching, worship, and church polity. In so far as any appeal was made to Christian antiquity, it was to the scriptural texts and to the early Fathers; though even the latter could be selected and criticized if they deviated from the primary articles of faith. There was, then, no reason why any of the Reformers should have sought to justify their actions by reference to any forbears or ‘forerunners’ in the Middle Ages, whether real or spurious. On the contrary, Martin Luther’s instinctive response towards those condemned by the medieval Church as heretics was to echo the conventional and prejudiced hostility felt by the religious intelligentsia towards those outside their pale.

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