Population, Plague, and the Sweating Sickness: Demographic Movements in Late Fifteenth-Century England

1977 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. S. Gottfried
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
Marriage Patterns ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
Late Fifteenth

Demographic movements remain a controversial and largely unknown facet of medieval studies. This is particularly true for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the later middle ages, which in western Europe coincided with the second and most destructive pandemic of plague in recorded history. Most observers of late medieval England agree that population declined from sometime early in the fourteenth century, and that the decline extended to at least 1450, but the precise causes, extent, and chronology of this decline are still very much in debate. A recent analysis of 20,000 testamentary records from East Anglia, London, and Hertfordshire from 1430 to 1480 indicated that epidemic disease was the primary element in controlling and establishing demographic trends. It also showed, however, that this pattern began to change in the early 1470s when child replacement ratios, the generational measure of parents to progeny at fixed periods in time, began to rise for virtually all socio-geographic groups surveyed. By process of elimination, it was concluded that this was the result of an upturn in fertility. Since population increases generally have been attributed to changes in marriage patterns and/or mortality schedules, and since mortality was the major element in regulating population from 1348, the onset of the Black Death and the second plague pandemic, the postulated fertility rise of the 1470s took on even greater interest. Were the events of the 1470s anomalous, or did the projected fertility rise continue on into the 1480s, and even lead to the long-term period of population growth which occurred in the sixteenth century?

scholarly journals Astrological Medicine and the Popular Press in Early Modern England

2005 ◽  
Vol 09 (01) ◽  
pp. 73-93
Author(s):  
Louise Curth
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
University Curriculum ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The University ◽  
Huge Variety

For many centuries the study of the stars was considered to be a science in western Europe. In the middle ages both astrology and astronomy, thought be the practical and theoretical parts of the scientific study of the celestial heavens, were taught as part of the university curriculum. The advent of printing in the late fifteenth century resulted in a huge variety of publications that provided the general public with access to this knowledge. This essay will examine the major role that almanacs, which were cheap, mass-produced astrological publications, played in disseminating information about astrological medical beliefs and practices to a national audience.

The Medieval Sea

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Rose
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
North Sea ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
English Channel ◽  
Naval Warfare ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Late Fifteenth

This book provides an accessible study of how peoples bordering the Mediterranean, North Sea, English Channel and eastern Atlantic related to the sea in all its aspects. This book surveys how the peoples bordering the Mediterranean, North Sea, English Channel and eastern Atlantic related to the sea in all its aspects between approximately 1000-1500 A.D.How was the sea represented in poems and other writings? What kinds of boats were used and how were they built? How easy was it to navigate on short or long passages? Was seaborne trade crucial to the economy of this area? Did naval warfare loom large in the minds of medieval rulers? What can be said more generally about the lives of those who went to sea or who lived by its shores? These are the major questions which are addressed in this book, which is based on extensive research in both maritime archives and also in secondary literature. It concludes by pointing out how the relatively enclosed maritime world of Western Europe was radically changed by the voyages of the late fifteenth century across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and round Africa to India.

Latin

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Sharpe ◽  
Alan Deyermond
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Background Information ◽  
Latin Literature ◽  
Medieval Studies ◽  
Latin Language ◽  
Language And Literature

This chapter examines the study of Latin language and literature in Great Britain during the twentieth century. It explains that Latin is so pervasive in the literature, philosophy, science, law and historiography of medieval western Europe that most aspects of scholarship on Latin are covered in most medieval studies. It provides background information on Latin language of the earlier middle ages and discusses Latin literature.

Why This Time and Place?

Born to Write ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 10-19
Author(s):  
Neil Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Position ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Revolution

From about the late fifteenth century onwards, literature and learning acquired increased importance for the social position of noble and elite-commoner families in France. One reason is the expansion and rise to prominence of the royal office-holder milieu, which had no exact equivalent in, say, England, where the aristocracy was much smaller than the French nobility and where there was no equivalent of the French system of venality of office. In France, family literature often helped extend across the generations a relationship between two families—that of the literary producer and that of the monarch. From the late Middle Ages, the conditions for family literature were made more favourable by broad social shifts. Although this study focuses mainly on the period from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, it is likely that the production of works from within families of literary producers thrived especially up to the Revolution.

Ritual Brotherhood in Western Medieval Europe

Traditio ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 357-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. R. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Union ◽  
Gerald Of Wales ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Distinctive Aspect ◽  
The Difference

Concentrating as he did on the office of adelphopoiesis preserved in Eastern Christian liturgical sources, John Boswell gave short shrift to the West. Although he believed that the ritual was known and practiced there, the only documentary trace of any similar ceremony he discussed was an account that Gerald of Wales included toward the end of the twelfth century in his Topographica Hibernica. Boswell did present a fifteenth-century French pact of brotherhood in translation in an appendix, but he did not consider its ceremonial significance in his text. Nor did he believe it pertinent to his topic, labeling it as he did, “an agreement of ‘brotherhood',” and terming it “[a] treaty of political union using fraternal language.” I shall discuss Gerald's account and this compact later, in the course of analyzing a variety of evidence regarding ritual brotherhood in Western Europe between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. I shall attempt to show that ties of brotherhood contracted formally and ritually between two individuals were more common in the West than Boswell believed. I shall argue that bonds of ritual brotherhood similar to those solemnized in the office of adelphopoiesis existed in many parts of Western Europe in the later Middle Ages, in areas far removed from the regions of Italy subject to Byzantine influence, where euchologies containing the Eastern ceremony were preserved.’ In dealing with the Western evidence I shall be particularly concerned with its nature, which contrasts strikingly with the Eastern sources. For the East, the most abundant documentation is liturgical, and traces of such relationships in other sources are rare — although (as Claudia Rapp shows in this symposium) not as sparse as has sometimes been thought. For the West the situation is precisely the reverse.’ The Western cases of individuals linked by ritual fraternal ties that Du Cange presented far outnumber the Eastern instances he cited, and additional Western examples have come to light since his time. However, as regards the ceremonial by which the ties were forged in the West, there is no strictly liturgical evidence. Western liturgical books contain no special prayers and offices for making brothers. Narrative and documentary sources cast fitful light on the nature of the ceremony that accompanied the unions, but they do not suggest that any uniform ritual ever existed. Why this was so is a matter for speculation, but I believe that the absence of fraternal ceremonial from the liturgy is closely related to another distinctive aspect of the institution in the West: the lack of prohibitions, ecclesiastical and secular, against the bond. I shall consider this issue after examining the various motives that seem to have underlain the Western fraternal alliances, and also the outcomes of the unions. In the end I shall propose that whatever the differences in documentation, and despite the difference in the ritual practices, striking formal and functional likenesses existed between the Eastern and Western institutions of ritual brotherhood linking two participants: in the purposes they served, the means by which they were contracted, and the gap that often existed between ideal and reality. In a final section I shall discuss the problems associated with attempting to establish whether or not — or when and how often — Western (or Eastern) rituals of brotherhood formalized relationships that involved or were expected to involve sexual intercourse between the participants.

The Savior, the Woman, and the Head of the Dragon in the Caput Masses and Motet

2006 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 537-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNE WALTERS ROBERTSON
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Immaculate Conception ◽  
Genesis 3 ◽  
Johannes Ockeghem ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Lasting Influence

Abstract God's dramatic curse of Adam, Eve, and the serpent, as recorded in Genesis 3:14–15, contains a theological ambiguity that played out in the visual arts, literature, and, as this article contends, music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Translations of this passage leave in doubt whether a male, a female, or both, will defeat sin by crushing Satan's head (“caput”). This issue lies at the heart of the three Caput masses by an anonymous Englishman, Johannes Ockeghem, and Jacob Obrecht, and the Caput Motet for the Virgin by Richard Hygons from the Eton Choirbook. Fifteenth-century discussions of the roles of Christ and Mary in confronting sin, often called the “head of the dragon,” help unravel the meaning of these works. The Caput masses are Christ-focused and emphasize the Savior or one of his surrogates suppressing the beast's head, as seen in illumination, rubric, and canon found in the masses. Folklorically based rituals and concepts of liturgical time are similarly built around the idea of the temporary reign of the Devil, who is ultimately trodden down by Christ. Hygons's motet appears after celebration of the Immaculate Conception was authorized in the late fifteenth century. This feast proclaimed Mary's conquest of sin through her own trampling on the dragon; the motet stresses Marian elements of the Caput theology, especially the contrast between the Virgin's spotlessness and Eve's corruption. Features of the Caput tradition mirror topics discussed in astrological and astronomical treatises and suggest that the composer of the original Caput Mass may also have been an astronomer. The disappearance of the Caput tradition signals its lasting influence through its progeny, which rise up in yet another renowned family of polyphonic masses. Together, the Caput masses and motet encompass the multifaceted doctrine of Redemption from the late middle ages under one highly symbolic Caput rubric.

scholarly journals “Detrusio: Penal Cloistering in the Middle Ages,” Revue Bénédictine 118 (2008): 89-108

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Geltner
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Lay People ◽  
The Middle Ages

Documents and examines the use of monasteries as spaces and places of penal incarceration for lay people in western Europe between the fifth and fifteenth century.

Preaching to the Laity in Fifteenth-Century Germany: Johannes Nider's ‘Harps’

1983 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Dahmus
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Middle Ages

Bernd Moeller concludes in his often-quoted study of late medieval German piety that ‘one could dare to call the late fifteenth century in Germany one of the most churchly-minded and devout periods of the Middle Ages’. In his review of Moeller's work, W. D.J. Cargill Thompson points out that the ‘profound conservatism’ of this religiosity, which included devotion to the mass, veneration of saints and their relics, and the reading of vast amounts of religious literature, poses a problem for our understanding of the causes of the Reformation. How does one reconcile this traditional churchliness with the ‘remarkable suddenness’ of its collapse after 1520? One would have expected greater resistance to Lutheran ideas than actually occurred.

Homer in the French Renaissance*

2006 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Ford
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Publishing History ◽  
French Renaissance ◽  
Small Band ◽  
Student Audience ◽  
The Middle Ages

AbstractAlthough the works of Homer remained unknown in Western Europe for much of the Middle Ages, their reappearance was welcomed enthusiastically in France toward the end of the fifteenth century by the small band of scholars capable of reading Greek. The founding of the Collège des lecteurs royaux in 1530 gave a fillip to Homeric studies, and partial editions of Homer were printed in Paris, aimed at a student audience. French translations also helped to bring the poems to a wider audience. However, the question of the interpretation of Homer was central to the reception of the two epics, and, after examining the publishing history, this paper sets out to assess how succeeding generations of scholars set about reading and teaching the prince of poets.

Arbitration and the Growth of Urban Liberties in Late Medieval England

1992 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorraine Attreed
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Dispute Settlement ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Financial Investments ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
The City ◽  
Shed Light

In December 1448, the city of Exeter agreed with the bishop and dean and chapter of the cathedral church to abide by the arbitration of two local magnates who settled a complex dispute over urban jurisdiction. That the arbitrators decided against the city, which suffered a slight constitutional setback as a result, is only one of several important conclusions to be drawn from a study of the dispute and its resolution. The nature of the argument and the procedures by which both parties sought to resolve it shed light on the character of urban constitutional growth in the later Middle Ages, on legal procedures and what medieval people thought about the law, and on the lengths they were willing to go to assure a decision that was as favorable as possible without poisoning relations between two institutions that coexisted within city walls. The case also illustrates the important role arbitration played in dispute settlement and reveals this method to be as viable an alternative as recourse to the common-law and equity courts of the royal government.Exeter's case is unique in that so much written evidence survives to testify to the financial investments and political aims of both parties involved. Comparisons will be drawn to other boroughs that endured similar jurisdictional disputes in the fifteenth century, but their evidence is far less revealing of decision and motivation than that remaining for Exeter. Although many of the major documents associated with the case have been in print for over a century, and examined in some detail in a brief monograph published over fifty years ago, the nature of the records has focused more attention on the city's participation than on that of the cathedral.

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