The Conditions of Mercy

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 403-429
Author(s):  
William Revere
Keyword(s):  
Piers Plowman ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Active Life ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Justification By Faith

This article examines John Bunyan’s relationship to traditions of representing labor reaching back before the Reformation, from Piers Plowman and its imitators through to a range of “plowman” satires, complaints, and reformist dialogues in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bunyan’s provocative rejection of the virtues of labor in part one of The Pilgrim’s Progress brings together theological convictions about justification by faith with a vision of mechanic mobility and schooling in the Spirit that disrupts a range of social forms and hierarchies. Yet in part two of The Pilgrim’s Progress, particularly in the figure of Mercie, Bunyan offers up a new valuation of the exemplarist potentials of labor. Part two expands rather than contracts Bunyan’s exploration of the active life of dissent, reimagining questions of embodiment, habituation, imitation, and community. Mercie’s labors are performed in continuity with a late medieval tradition linking work and virtue. Her example prompts reconsideration both of Bunyan’s own dissenting allegories and of the uses of literary forms and ethical traditions across conventional period boundaries and confessional identities.

scholarly journals What Is Charity? William Langland’s Answers with Some Diachronic Questions

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 458
Author(s):  
David Aers
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Piers Plowman ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Medieval Christianity ◽  
Ethics And Politics

Charity turns out to be the virtue which is both the root and the fruit of salvation in Langland’s Piers Plowman, a late fourteenth-century poem, the greatest theological poem in English. It takes time, suffering and error upon error for Wille, the central protagonist in Piers Plowman, to grasp Charity. Wille is both a figure of the poet and a power of the soul, voluntas, the subject of charity. Langland’s poem offers a profound and beautiful exploration of Charity and the impediments to Charity, one in which individual and collective life is inextricably bound together. This exploration is characteristic of late medieval Christianity. As such it is also an illuminating work in helping one identify and understand what happened to this virtue in the Reformation. Only through diachronic studies which engage seriously with medieval writing and culture can we hope to develop an adequate grasp of the outcomes of the Reformation in theology, ethics and politics, and, I should add, the remakings of what we understand by “person” in these outcomes. Although this essay concentrates on one long and extremely complex medieval work, it actually belongs to a diachronic inquiry. This will only be explicit in some observations on Calvin when I consider Langland’s treatment of Christ’s crucifixion and in some concluding suggestions about the history of this virtue.

Despair

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Watson
Keyword(s):  
Piers Plowman ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Divine Omnipotence ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
The Reformation

The terrain of the Christian psyche and the theological structure within which Christians directed their lives towards salvation were both reconfigured during the Reformation. William Langland’sPiers Plowmanoffers an account of despair as a phenomenon associated with the deathbed. In the late medieval period, despair was also seen as a spiritual problem affecting religious specialists engaged in contemplative living, rather than ordinary people on their deathbeds. This article explores despair as it was understood in the late medieval period and as a key concern of Protestant theology and narrative after Reformation. It considers two sets of works written in England: a series of narrative treatments of despair related to the death of the apostate Francesco Spiera in 1548 and a set of “remedy” texts that include the Augustinian Friar William Flete’sDe remediis contra temptacionesfrom the 1350s. It also examines the doctrine of “double election” proposed by John Calvin during the 1540s based on a tradition of thinking about divine omnipotence.

Habit and Belief in the Early Scottish Reformation

2019 ◽  
pp. 173-188
Author(s):  
Martin Holt Dotterweich
Keyword(s):  
Primary Concern ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Justification By Faith ◽  
Theological Debate ◽  
Bible Reading ◽  
Evangelical Theology

The theology of the Reformation arrived in Scotland with travellers, smuggled books, and theological debate at the universities. This chapter examines the scant evidence for how this theology took shape, examining theological tracts written by religious exiles, along with heresy trials and other records. Given a potent symbol in the preaching and martyrdom of Patrick Hamilton in 1528, the doctrine of justification by faith alone was the primary concern of early Scots evangelical theology, coupled with a consistent emphasis on the habit of Bible reading. When a more confessional Reformed theology arrived with George Wishart, it was built on these emphases of habit and belief.

THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN THE CULTURE OF HUMANISTS AND THE COMMUNICATIVE ORIGINS OF THE REFORMATION

Traditio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 375-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
JORGE LEDO
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Common Currency ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Rules Of The Game

Ideas and opinions about communication and intellectual exchange underwent significant changes during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The rediscovery of parrhesia by the humanists of the Quattrocento is one of the least studied of these changes, and at the same time, paradoxically, one of the most fascinating. My main argument in these pages is that the recovery of Hellenistic “freedom of speech” was a process that took place from the thirteenth century through the first decade of the sixteenth century; thus it began well before the term παρρησία was common currency among humanists. This is the most important and counterituitive aspect of the present analysis of early modern parrhesia, because it means that the concept did not develop at the expense of classical and biblical tradition so much as at the expense of late-medieval scholastic speculation about the sins of the tongue and the legitimation of anger as an intellectual emotion. To illustrate this longue durée process, I have focused on three stages: (i) the creation, transformation, and assimilation by fourteenth-century humanism of the systems of sins of the tongue, and especially the sin of contentio; (ii) the synthesis carried out by Lorenzo Valla between the scholastic tradition, the communicative presumptions of early humanism, and the classical and New Testament ideas of parrhesia; and (iii) the systematization and transformation of this synthesis in Raffaele Maffei's Commentariorum rerum urbanorum libri XXXVIII. In closing, I propose a hypothesis. The theoretical framework behind Maffei's encyclopaedic approach is not only that he was attempting to synthesize the Quattrocento's heritage through the prism of classical sources; it was also that he was crystallizing the communicative “rules of the game” that all of Christianitas implicitly accepted at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Taking the three ways of manifesting the truth considered by Maffei and fleshing them out in the figures of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Celio Calcagnini, and Martin Luther just before the emergence of the Protestant Reformation could help to explain from a communicative perspective the success and pan-European impact of the Reformation.

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