Corpus Christi College, Oxford, as an Emotional Community

2019 ◽  
pp. 81-102
Author(s):  
Miri Rubin
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Actual Performance ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter focuses on the aesthetic of the cultural moment at which Corpus Christi College was founded: 1517 lies on the cusp between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in England. If one accepts that cusp as fundamentally contested, it remains fruitful to explore how the main actors in affairs of Church and State manifest certain tastes and ideas, combining ‘medieval‘ and ‘Renaissance‘ themes, that are identifiable as elements of coterie-signalling. Two artefacts directly associated with Richard Fox, the College’s founder, stand as such signals, that is material testimonies to group-definition in the dominant sub-culture. The chapter then draws on the wider ecclesiastical and court milieu to explore how performative gestures in the patronage of the built environment have counterparts in actual performance, in the pageantry and plays of the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century.

Ritual and reality in the early medieval ordines

1975 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 41-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet L. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Know How ◽  
Full Picture ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
The Way

To know what was generally believed in all ages, the way is to consult the liturgies, not any private man’s writings.’ John Selden’s maxim, which surely owed much to his own pioneering work as a liturgist, shows a shrewd appreciation of the significance of the medieval ordines for the consecration of kings. Thanks to the more recent efforts of Waitz, Eichmann, Schramm and others, this material now forms part of the medievalist’s stock in trade; and much has been written on the evidence which the ordines provide concerning the nature of kingship, and the interaction of church and state, in the middle ages. The usefulness of the ordines to the historian might therefore seem to need no further demonstration or qualification. But there is another side to the coin. The value of the early medieval ordines can be, not perhaps overestimated, but misconstrued. ‘The liturgies’ may indeed tell us ‘what was generally believed’—but we must first be sure that we know how they were perceived and understood by their participants, as well as by their designers. They need to be correlated with other sources, and as often as possible with ‘private writings’ too, before the full picture becomes intelligible.

Protestant Rivalry — Metaphysics and Rhetoric in Germany c. 1590–1620

1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
The Middle Ages

One of the most remarkable changes to take place at German Protestant universities during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first twenty years of the seventeenth century was the return of metaphysics after more than halfa century of absence. University metaphysics has acquired a reputation for sterile aridity which was strengthened rather than diminished by its survival in early modern times, when such disciplines are supposed deservedly to have vanished with the end of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, this survival has attracted some attention this century. For a long urne it was assumed that German Protestants needed a metaphysical defence against the intellectual vigour of the Jesuits. Lewalter has shown, however, that this was not the case.

Receiving the Ars Poetica

2019 ◽  
pp. 244-272
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ferriss-Hill
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Artistic Process ◽  
Literary Achievement ◽  
Ars Poetica ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Making Art

This epilogue traces the themes and concerns of the previous chapters throughout the Ars Poetica's considerable reception history. If the Ars Poetica's poetic qualities have not always been clear to scholars of literature, they seem to have been more evident to the practicing writers who, inspired by Horace's poem, wrote artes poeticae of their own. Indeed, practicing poets have long discerned what many literary scholars have not: that the poem's value lies not so much in its stated contents as in its fine-spun internal unity; in its interest in human nature and the onward march of time; in the importance of criticism—both giving and receiving it—to the artistic process; and in the essential sameness of writing, of making art, and of living, loving, being, and even dying. The argument made in this study for reading the Ars Poetica as a literary achievement in its own right may therefore be viewed as a return to the complex, nuanced ways in which it was already read in the Middle Ages, through the sixteenth century, and into the twenty-first. The authors of the later works examined in this chapter read the Ars Poetica as exemplifying and instantiating the sort of artistry that it opaquely commands, and they reflected this in turn through their own verses.

The Medieval Image, I

2019 ◽  
pp. 196-223
Author(s):  
Thomas Nail
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Aesthetic Field ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

Chapter 10 presents a realist aesthetics (versus constructivist) and a kinetic materialism (versus formal idealism) that focuses on the material kinetic structure of the work of art itself, inclusive of milieu and viewer. What the author calls “kinesthetics” is a return to the works of art themselves as fields of images, affects, and sensations. The chapter more specifically offers a focused study of the material kinetic conditions of the dominant aesthetic field of relation during the Middle Ages. The argument here and in the next chapter is that during the Middle Ages, the aesthetic field is defined by a tensional and relational regime of motion. This idea is supported by looking closely at three major arts of the Middle Ages: glassworks, the church, and distillation. The next chapter likewise considers perspective, the keyboard, and epistolography.

Major, John (1467–1550)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Biard
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
William Of Ockham ◽  
The Middle Ages

John Major was one of the last great logicians of the Middle Ages. Scottish in origin but Parisian by training, he continued the doctrines and the mode of thinking of fourteenth-century masters like John Buridan and William of Ockham. Using a resolutely nominalist approach, he developed a logic centred on the analysis of terms and their properties, and he applied this method of analysis to discourse in physics and theology. Although he came to oppose excessive dependence on logical subtlety in theology and maintained the authority of Holy Scripture, Major’s work was stubbornly independent of the growing influence of humanism in Europe. Later, he would be regarded as representative of the heavily criticized ‘scholastic spirit’, being referred to disparagingly by Rabelais as well as by later historians such as Villoslada (1938), but at the beginning of the sixteenth century, his teaching influenced an entire generation of students in the fields of logic, physics and theology.

English Books of Martyrs and Saints of the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries

1994 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. T. Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Status ◽  
Special Case ◽  
The Middle Ages

Martyrs were the first saints and some were among the most popular saints of the Middle Ages. Because it was the manner of theirdeaththat won them their place in heaven, martyrs were a special case; unlike other saints, evidence of heroic virtue in life and miracles were not required. Like the early martyrs, many sixteenth-century English martyrs were immediately recognized as saints by their co-religionists, without reference to judicial processes. But the status of martyr was not popularly accorded automatically to Catholics who died on account of their faith. Despite Southwell's ‘Epitaph’: ‘A Queen I liu'd, now dead I am a Saint/Once MARIE calde; my name now Martir is’, Mary, Queen of Scots, was not generally acclaimed as a martyr, even by Catholics.

The vocacyon of Johan Bale and Early English Autobiography

1971 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie P. Fairfield
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Personality ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Early English ◽  
Sub Specie Aeternitatis ◽  
The Middle Ages

Sixteenth-Century Englishmen were not frequently given to self-scrutiny—at least not in writing. This was a disinclination which they shared with their medieval forbears, since autobiography was not a very common form of literary activity in the Middle Ages. Monastic self-analysis, sub specie aeternitatis and guided by the standard categories of virtues and vices—yes. Coherent study of the self, for its own sake and in all its quirks and idiosyncracies—scarcely ever. In the early sixteenth century, the murmur of new ideas from Italy did begin to touch England: a sense of distance and of difference between the present and the past, and an awakened appreciation for the discrete, the singular in human personality.

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