Popular Violence and Popular Heresy in Western Europe, c1000-1179

1984 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 43-50
Author(s):  
R. I. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Defensive Reaction ◽  
Religious Persecution ◽  
Ecclesiastical Authority ◽  
The People ◽  
Spiritual Authority ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
The Church

In general modern writers on popular heresy in the high middle ages have shared the opinion of contemporary observers that the capacity of dissident preachers to attract a popular following, stimulate sentiments of intense devotion and loyalty, and canalise resentment of clerical exaction and abuse, constituted a significant threat to the authority of the Church. Hence, more or less explicitly, the extension of the theory and practice of coercion in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has been seen as a defensive reaction designed (with the emphasis according to the preference of the historian) to protect clerical privilege and spiritual authority. There are, however, distinguished exceptions. In one of the few passages in his writings where religious persecution is discussed, Southern accounts for it thus: … those who bore authority in the church were agents with very limited powers of initiative. They were not free agents. Doubtless they were responsible for some terrible acts of violence and cruelty, among which the Albigensian Crusade holds a particular horror. But on the whole the holders of ecclesiastical authority were less prone to violence, even against unbelievers, than the people whom they ruled.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
G.E.M. Lippiatt
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Governing Institutions

Historians of political development in the High Middle Ages often focus on the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries as the generations in which monarchy finally triumphed over aristocracy to create a monopoly on governing institutions in Western Europe. However, it was precisely in this period that Simon of Montfort emerged from his modest forest lordship in France to conquer a principality stretching from the Pyrenees to the Rhône. A remarkable ascendancy in any period, it is perhaps especially so in its contrast with the accepted historiographical narrative. Despite the supposed triumph of monarchy during his lifetime, Simon’s meteoric career took place largely outside of royal auspices. Simon’s experience provides a challenge to an uncomplicated or teleological understanding of contemporary politics as effectively national affairs directed by kings.

Astronomy in romanic churches

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (S367) ◽  
pp. 471-473
Author(s):  
Ederlinda Viñuales Gavn
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
The Church

AbstractIn this poster we present a study of the orientation of the church of San Adrián de Sasabé in Borau, Huesca (Spain) in a practical way. This church is a characteristic Romanesque construction, predominant in the High Middle Ages, mainly in southwestern Europe.The apse of Romanesque churches are oriented towards the east. But, in some churches, the apse has three windows and these are oriented in the direction of the sunrises on the days of the solstices and equinoxes. But sunrises and sunsets depend on the latitude of the place.The church of San Adrián de Sasabé, the object of our study, has three windows in the apse, which allows us to carry out the necessary calculations to determine its orientation with precision outside the church.

SACRED POLYPHONY ‘NOT UNDERSTANDID’: MEDIEVAL EXEGESIS, RITUAL TRADITION AND HENRY VIII'S REFORMATION

2010 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 33-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana T. Marsh
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Traditional Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
To Come ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

This study focuses on the ritual ‘conservatism’ of Henry VIII's Reformation through a new look at biblical exegeses of the period dealing with sacred music. Accordingly, it reconsiders the one extant passage of rhetoric to come from the Henrician regime in support of traditional church polyphony, as found in A Book of Ceremonies to be Used in the Church of England, c.1540. Examining the document's genesis, editorial history and ultimate suppression by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, it is shown that Bishop Richard Sampson, Dean of the Chapel Royal (1522–40), was responsible for the original drafting of the musical paragraph. Beginning with Sampson's printed commentaries on the Psalms and on the Epistles of St Paul, the literary precedents and historical continuities upon which Sampson's topos in Ceremonies was founded are traced in detail. Identified through recurring patterns of scriptural and patristic citation, and understood via transhistorical shifts in the meaning of certain key words (e.g. iubilare), this new perspective clarifies important origins of the English church's musical ‘traditionalism’ on the eve of the Reformation. Moreover, it reveals a precise species of exegetical method – anagogy – as the literary vehicle through which influential clergy were able to justify expansions and elaborations of musical practice in the Western Church from the high Middle Ages to the Reformation.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
State Building ◽  
Court System ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Church ◽  
Written Sources

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Russian and Ukrainian witchcraft from the Middle Ages to the turn of the twentieth century. Like their European neighbors, Russia and the Ukrainian lands recorded incidents of witchcraft and sorcery from the times of the earliest written sources, and along with other Christian cultures, they formally condemned the practice of magic outside of the Church. In synch with their European contemporaries, they saw spikes in formal legal prosecution during the early modern period. In the case of Russia, this was a time of ambitious state building and expansion of the tsarist court system. Formal trials of witches there began as a minute trickle in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, when they were already well underway or even inching toward an end in parts of Western Europe. Peaking in the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries, Russian and Ukrainian trials abated only during the 1770s but did not cease altogether until the mid-nineteenth century. Witchcraft was energetically prosecuted in Russia and Ukraine after the entire notion of magic had fallen into disrepute (or even become laughable) among most members of the educated classes in Western areas.

Religious Diplomacy and Socialism

2008 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-43
Author(s):  
Lucian N. Leustean
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
The West ◽  
Religious Persecution ◽  
House Arrest ◽  
Church Hierarchy ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

This article analyzes the relationship between the Orthodox Church and the communist regime during one of the most intense periods of religious persecution in the Romanian People's Republic from 1956 to 1959. The church hierarchy demonstrated its support for the socialist construction of the country, while, at the same time, the regime began a campaign against religion by arresting clergy and reducing the number of religious people in monasteries; rumours even circulated that in 1958 Patriarch Justinian was under house arrest. Seeking closer contact with Western Europe, the regime allowed the hierarchy to meet foreign clergymen, especially from the Church of England. These diplomatic religious encounters played a double role. The regime realised that it could benefit from international ecclesiastical relations, while the image of Justinian in the West changed from that of “red patriarch” to that of a leader who was genuinely interested in his church's survival.

Unions and Confraternity with Cluny

1965 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. E. J. Cowdrey
Keyword(s):  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The Other ◽  
Rapid Rise ◽  
The South ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Church And Society ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Church

It is not at first sight easy to explain the ever-growing appeal which Cluny had during the tenth and eleventh centuries for clergy and still more for laymen, particularly in Burgundy, France, Christian Spain and North Italy. The basis of Cluniac life was the choir service of the monks and the silence and ordered round of the cloister. By and large the Cluniacs did not seek to work outside the cloister or to become involved in wider pastoral care. They were, indeed, concerned for the Church and for the world at large, but with a view to winning individuals to share spiritually and to support materially the other-worldly ends of the monastic order. Yet, especially under abbots Odilo and Hugh, there was a rapid rise in the number of houses subject to Cluny or otherwise influenced by it; a Cluniac house formed part of the neighbourhood of a large part of the people who lived to the south and west of Lorraine. Cluny itself was well situated to attract travellers, and its dependencies were especially important on the pilgrimage routes. Together with the increasing number of Cluniac houses the long series of charters which record its endowment with monasteries, churches, lands and other wealth testify to its impact upon Church and Society in western Europe.

scholarly journals Certificate of the Holy Unity

2016 ◽  
pp. 26-28
Author(s):  
Editorial board Of the Journal
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Church Of Christ ◽  
Church Of God ◽  
People Of God ◽  
The People ◽  
Spiritual Authority ◽  
Triune God ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
The Church ◽  
As If

In the name of the triune God, we are gathered at the next Cathedral in Berenshit, in the church of St.. Mykodlaya, Mitropolit, and bishops of the Greek rite, proclaim to eternal memory: Seeing that the monotony of the Church of God in the gospel and the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ is based on one Peter, as if on a stone, so that the Church of Christ would stand firmly under the rule and leadership of his one, so that in one body there was one head, and in one house only one master and the bearer of God's favor, placed over the people of God, to care for the order and goodness of all, and because this order, which began from the Apostolic times, continued in the Divine Church continuously . Therefore, all the Eastern Patriarchs in the affairs of faith and in the reception of the spiritual authority, as well as in the episcopal courts and responses, have always been related to the successor of St. Peter, the Holy Pope, as is evident from the Ecumenical Councils and the rules of the Holy Fathers. This is satisfactorily proved by other Slavic letters, which have already been translated into Greek from ancient times, as well as by the holy Fathers of the Eastern Churches. They all recognize this holy throne of Peter, his privilege and his authority over bishops of the whole world.

The Middle Ages

2020 ◽  
pp. 14-26
Author(s):  
Kati Ihnat
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The Arts ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Large Churches ◽  
North Western ◽  
The Middle Ages

The High Middle Ages witnessed Christmas emerge as a major Christian feast in western Europe, a time of merriment and miracles. Always intended to celebrate the Incarnation, Christmas became a time to honour the little baby in the manger and his loving mother, as part of a spiritual shift towards remembering the human Jesus. Although Kalends traditions continued on from Antiquity, which engaged the lay population in carnivalesque revelries that included mumming, games, and feasting, clerics developed new practices that infused ecclesiastical celebrations with the same sense of inversion and fun. Feasts of Fools, Boy Bishops, and extravagant liturgical dramas allowed reformers to channel festive energy in ways that showcased developments in the arts, especially in the large churches of north-western Europe, without losing the joyful character that came with honouring the paradox of God made man.

The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Love Marriage ◽  
And Gender

This book maps out what we now firmly know—and what we are just beginning to know--after four decades of scholarship on women and gender in medieval Europe. Medieval gender rules seem both foreign and familiar today. Medieval people understood religion, law, love, marriage, and sexual identity in distinctive ways that compel us today to understand women and gender as changeable, malleable, and unyoked from constraints of nature or biology. Yet some medieval views are echoed in modern traditions, and those echoes tease out critical tensions of continuity and change in gender relations. The essays collected here also speak to interpretative challenges common to all fields of women’s and gender history—that is, how best to uncover the experiences of ordinary people from archives formed mainly by and about elite males, and how to combine social histories of lived experiences with cultural histories of gendered discourses and identities. The collection focuses on western Europe in the Middle Ages but essays also offer some consideration of medieval Islam and Byzantium. The essays range widely and are gathered together under seven themes: Christian, Jewish and Muslim thought; law in theory and practice; domestic life and material culture; labor, land, and economy; bodies and sexualities; gender and holiness; and the interplay of continuity and change over the medieval millennium.

scholarly journals I Second That Emotion: Modelling the Anxious Experiences of Thirteenth-Century Episcopal Office

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Philippa Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Institutional Authority ◽  
Emotional Language ◽  
Christian Service ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
The Church

Abstract The episcopacy in the High Middle Ages (c.1100–1300) can be understood through the idea of a shared emotional language, as seen in two treatises written to advise new bishops. In them, episcopal office was largely defined by the emotions it provoked: it was a cause for sorrow, a burden akin to back-breaking agricultural service. The ideas most associated with episcopal office were anxiety, labour and endurance. Ideas about Christian service as painful labour became particularly important in the twelfth century, alongside the development of the institutional authority of the Church. As episcopal power began to look more threatening and less humble, this emotional register provided one means of distinguishing episcopal power from secular lordly power: both were authorities, but bishops were distinguished by sorrowing over office and ‘enduring’, not enjoying it.

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