Councils and synods in thirteenth-century Castile and Aragon

1971 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 101-111
Author(s):  
Peter Linehan

In 1228 Gregory IX dispatched as his legate to the Spanish Peninsula the Paris theologian and Cardinal-Bishop of Sabina, John of Abbeville: the first legate sent there since before the Fourth Lateran Council and the last to come during the entire thirteenth century in the cause of ecclesiastical reform. During his stay, which lasted for some fifteen months, he held at least three councils, but of only one of these—the Lérida Council of March 1229—have the statutes come down to us intact. Though he visited Portugal as well as Castile and Aragon, this brief communication is concerned only with John’s impact on the Castilian and Aragonese Churches during the central years of the century, and with a summary consideration of the quite different reception which John’s reform programme received in each place.

Traditio ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 308-317
Author(s):  
Timothy M. Thibodeau

In a recent article on the medieval dogma of transubstantiation, Gary Macy builds upon the works of Hans Jorissen and James F. McCue to question the validity of Jaroslav Pelikan's claim that “at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the doctrine of the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist achieved its definitive formulation in the dogma of transubstantiation.” Macy demonstrates that through most of the thirteenth century, the majority of theologians did not, in fact, consider Lateran IV's decree the final word on eucharistic theology. The debate over precisely how the real presence of Christ occurred in the eucharist was far from closed.


Author(s):  
Adam J. Davis

This epilogue reflects on the manifold ways that charitable institutions benefited from commerce—whether from their own commercial activities or those of their patrons. Church reformers criticized hospitals for accepting donati, who were permitted to receive room and board without taking vows. The reality, however, was that the donati at times brought in valuable resources that could be used to serve the poor and sick. In addition, the increased commercialization of late twelfth- and thirteenth-century society, particularly in a region like Champagne, may have contributed to the idea of a moral economy, including the obligation of charitable giving and service. The twelfth- and thirteenth-century social conditions that created a conducive environment for the flourishing of commerce were also advantageous for fostering charity and pious giving more generally. During a period of urban transformation, which created greater prosperity for some but also increasing poverty and insecurity for many others, the medieval hospital opened up new opportunities for social reciprocity and mutual assistance. For those with various kinds of needs, the hospital served as a source of physical, social, and material support in this earthly world, with all of its vagaries and vulnerabilities. In addition, though, the medieval hospital held out the promise of spiritual redemption in the world to come.


2008 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 46-61
Author(s):  
Anne Kirkham

A round 1230 Burchard of Ursperg, a Premonstratensian canon, writing about the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), reported that ‘with the world already growing old, two religious orders arose in the Church – whose youth is renewed like the eagle’s’. The success of the Franciscans in contributing to what Burchard saw as the renewal of the Church’s youth was simultaneously assisted and celebrated by documenting the life of the founder, Francis (1182–1226), in words and images soon after his death and throughout the thirteenth century. Within these representations, the pivotal event in securing Francis’s religious ‘conversion’ was his encounter with the decaying church of San Damiano outside Assisi. His association with the actual repair of churches in the written and pictorial accounts of his life was a potent allegorical image to signal the revival of the Church and the role of Francis and his followers in this. This essay focuses on how references to the repair of churches were used to call attention to the role of the Franciscans in the revival of the Church in the thirteenth century.


Traditio ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 115-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Kuttner ◽  
Antonio García Y García

Two years ago we briefly announced the discovery of a new document of great interest for the history of the Fourth Lateran Council. Written in Spring 1216 as a letter from Rome, presumably by a German, it was copied by a thirteenth-century scribe into a manuscript now at the Universitäts-bibliothek of Giessen, where it follows directly after the constitutiones of the council. With its detailed and vivid description of the three plenary sessions and of many events that took place in between, the anonymous report adds considerably to the information we possess from other sources. But although other portions of the Giessen codex have been known and used by many scholars ever since the eighteenth century, this text has been overlooked to the present day. It is a happy coincidence that we are able to present this eyewitness account of the greatest of the ecumenical councils of the Middle Ages while the Second Vatican Council is in session.


Author(s):  
Atria A. Larson

AbstractConstitutions 23 and 24 of the Fourth Lateran Council dealt with episcopal elections, providing the proper timeframe and three possible electoral procedures, respectively. Although the former stipulated that an electoral body’s proximate superior was to gain the potestas eligendi and thus make an appointment if the electoral body failed to elect within the specified three months, the latter constitution was far less explicit about to whom the power to elect devolved if an electoral body did not follow proper procedure. The former constitution also failed to identify clearly which office constituted the ‘proximate superior’. Both constitutions were based in some sense on recent conciliar decrees (from the Third Lateran Council) or pre-1215 decretals issued from Innocent III’s curia. Since both constitutions lacked certain points of legal precision, several more decretals and conciliar decrees were needed in the thirteenth century before it was fully and clearly decided when the power to elect devolved to the metropolitan and when it devolved to the pope. A constitution by Boniface VIII in the Liber Sextus finally resolved the matter. This essay traces this development.


1944 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 274-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. J. Bailey
Keyword(s):  

In its ordinary form, the warranty of land was an obligation, owed to the tenant of certain land, to defend him in his possession of that land against all men. This obligation to warrant was primarily, therefore, an obligation to come into Court, if called upon (‘vouched’) by the tenant, in order to defend some action brought against him for the possession of that land.


2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
James White

This article will analyze edinoverie reform in the early twentieth century. Edinoverie was a uniate movement that joined former Old Believer schismatics to the Orthodox Church. Its unique position between the Church and the schism led to a feeling of insecurity and alienation from the ecclesiastical administration among the edinovertsy: in 1905, this culminated in an attempt to reform the bases of edinoverie. A party of edinovertsy led by Father Simeon Shleev proposed an alternative vision of Orthodoxy wherein edinoverie’s Old Believer legacy would be used to rejuvenate the Church and even Russia itself. However, like some of the other ecclesiastical reform movements with which Shleev’s party was connected, edinoverie reform failed to come to fruition because of the hostile atmosphere of Church politics between 1905 and 1918 and the long-standing problems within edinoverie itself.


Author(s):  
Atria A. Larson

Abstract Constitutions 23 and 24 of the Fourth Lateran Council dealt with episcopal elections, providing the proper timeframe and three possible electoral procedures, respectively. Although the former stipulated that an electoral body’s proximate superior was to gain the potestas eligendi and thus make an appointment if the electoral body failed to elect within the specified three months, the latter constitution was far less explicit about to whom the power to elect devolved if an electoral body did not follow proper procedure. The former constitution also failed to identify clearly which office constituted the ‘proximate superior’. Both constitutions were based in some sense on recent conciliar decrees (from the Third Lateran Council) or pre-1215 decretals issued from Innocent III’s curia. Since both constitutions lacked certain points of legal precision, several more decretals and conciliar decrees were needed in the thirteenth century before it was fully and clearly decided when the power to elect devolved to the metropolitan and when it devolved to the pope. A constitution by Boniface VIII in the Liber Sextus finally resolved the matter. This essay traces this development.


2016 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 17-48
Author(s):  
Frances Andrews

This essay focuses on the figure of John the Baptist in prison and the question he sent his disciples to ask Christ: was he ‘the one who is to come’ (Matthew 11: 2–3)? Having observed how the Fathers strove to distance John from the perils of doubt in their readings of this passage, it traces the way their arguments were picked up by twelfth- and thirteenth-century biblical exegetes and then by authors of anti-heretical dispute texts in urban Italy, where the Baptist was a popular patron saint. So as to give force to their own counter-arguments, learned polemicists, clerical and lay, made much of heretics’ hostility to John, powerfully ventriloquizing a doubting, sceptical standpoint. One counter-argument was to assign any doubts to John's disciples, for whose benefit he therefore sent to ask for confirmation of the means of Christ's return, neatly moving doubt from questions of faith to epistemology. Such ideas may have seeped beyond the bounds of a university-trained elite, as is perhaps visible in a fourteenth-century fresco representing John in prison engaging with anxious disciples. But place, audience and genre determined where doubt was energetically debated and where it was more usually avoided, as in sermons for the laity on the feast of a popular saint.


Traditio ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
pp. 215-246
Author(s):  
MAUREEN C. MILLER

Revisiting Robert Brentano's 1960 article in Traditio on “The Bishops’ Books of Città di Castello,” this contribution challenges a reigning narrative of the “documentary revolution” in medieval Italy as primarily the achievement of the thirteenth-century communal governments of the north. While these urban ruling regimes did produce prodigious numbers of documents and new documentary forms, they were not the earliest innovators. By broadening the scope of analysis to include all the early administrative codices surviving in Città di Castello — those of the city's communal government, cathedral chapter, and bishopric — the author demonstrates that the initial leap from administrative reliance on single sheet parchments to registers occurred earliest in the cathedral chapter (by 1192), then in the bishop's court (1207), and finally more than a decade later in the commune (1221). At least in this one small Umbrian town, ecclesiastical institutions were the earliest innovators. The evidence of Città di Castello also indicates that political instability and its related economic effects drove innovation, not the reform initiatives of Innocent III and the Fourth Lateran Council. Local ecclesiastical leaders, not popes, were the innovators.


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