Excommunicated Princes in Medieval Wales

Author(s):  
Maria E. Loshkareva ◽  

Excommunication as a punishment for violating church rules on marriage and family relations was repeatedly imposed on members of Welsh dynasties during the 12th century. The aim of the research is to define the true reasons of such strict measures by means of analyzing historical sources: Welsh and English chronicles, including the Chronicle of the Princes, Annales Monastici, the corpus of Welsh native law texts known as the Law of Hywel Dda, the Historical Works of Gerald of Wales, some legal acts and official correspondence concerning Wales, including Thomas Becket’s letters. The Welsh native law was considered as a “barbarian” one by the Church. Undoubtedly, Welsh native customs contradicted canon law to some extent, allowing marriages between relatives, permitting divorces without reference to ecclesiastical procedures, and tolerating extramarital relationship. Incest marriages between members of major Welsh dynasties were a widespread phenomenon in Wales till the 13th century. Such marriages seemed to be an inevitable part of creating native political alliances in the face of danger from the Norman invaders. Welsh dynasties were often closely interrelated through marriages, but far not always this fact drew attention of the church. Owain Gwynedd and the Lord Rhys, who are believed to be the most powerful Welsh leaders of the 12th century, were both married to their first cousins. Owain Gwynedd was excommunicated for refusal to have his marriage annulled on the grounds of consanguinity. Meanwhile, the same circumstances of the Lord Rhys’ marriage went unnoticed. It must be taken into account that Owain Gwynedd’s canonically unacceptable marriage became a subject of the Pope’s attention only when the question of the Bishop of Bangor’s election and subsequent conflict with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, erupted. The Lord Rhys suffered the penalty of anathema just before his death not because of his scandalous marriage or immoral relationship but on account of disrespectful treatment of the Bishop of St. David’s, Peter de Leia. Obviously, conflicts between the Welsh rulers and the Anglo-Norman senior clergy as an essential part of Anglo-Welsh confrontation were the underlying reasons for such measures as excommunication. It is noteworthy that both of the aforementioned great Welsh princes were buried with due honor in the consecrated land despite the fact of excommunication, which demonstrated that the Welsh native clergy were loyal to their Welsh patrons rather than to the supreme ecclesiastical authorities.

Radiocarbon ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Marek Krąpiec ◽  
Sławomir Moździoch ◽  
Ewa Moździoch

ABSTRACT Excavations of the remains of the medieval church of Santa Maria di Campogrosso (Sicily) were conducted by the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences as part of scientific cooperation with Soprintendenza per i Beni Culturali ed Ambientali di Palermo. Based on the records of post-medieval historians, the construction of the church was placed in the second half of the 11th century, which contradicts the findings of architectural historians, who dated the building to the 13th-century and even later. As a result of archaeological excavations carried out in 2015–2018, it was possible to locate unknown fragments of the church’s structure and the remains of the cemetery adjacent to it. The 14C dating carried out for samples obtained from the walls of the existing building as well as from bone remains from the churchyard in combination with stratigraphic information from archaeological trenches and the chronology of coins indicates a high probability of the church construction in the second half of the 12th century and confirms the end of the monastery complex existence at the end of the 13th century.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vedrana Delonga

Within the archaeological-historical complex at the hillfort of Biranj (Kaštel Lukšić), the ancient church of St. John the Baptist stands out in particular as a cultural entity. Three architectural phases (Romanesque, Late Gothic, and Modern period) can be perceived in its present appearance. The façade of the church bears a group of late medieval inscriptions in Latin: a donative inscription on the lintel, dated 1444 and also by the reign of the Venetian Doge Francesco Foscari (today placed in the interior of the church), as well as four consecratory inscriptions from the same time on the corners of the church. They were placed by donors (church juspatronatus) on the structure of the church on the occasion of the dedication of the thoroughly renovated original church of St. John, which had been built in the Romanesque period, at the end of the 12th or in the early 13th century, as the endowment of the Ostrog free villagers. From the donative inscription on the lintel it is learned that the ruinous Romanesque church was renovated from the foundations up by the juspatronus and plebanus Grgur Nikolin, the archpresbyter and canon of the Trogir diocese, in the name of a personal vow and the vows of all the juspatroni of St. John of Biranj. The four consecratory inscriptions with the text + Christus venit in pace et Deus homo factus est on the corners of the Late Gothic church from the same period are particularly interesting. On the basis of the contents it is hypothesized that they represent some kind of reminiscence of the possible original epigraphic dedications from the period of the construction of the Romanesque church at the end of the 12th century or in the early decades of the 13th century. The inscriptions and the sacred structure to which they belong are considered in the framework of the site as a cultural-historical complex and multi-century religious shrine and are analyzed in terms of the formal and contextual epigraphic traits. Their context is explored in the framework of the historical and religious-spiritual conditions related to the specific area in the period of the developed (12th and 13th centuries) and late Middle Ages (middle of the 15th century).


Ritið ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-94
Author(s):  
Lára Magnúsardóttir

The article recounts the account from the Árna saga about Loftur Helgason’s trip to Bergen in 1282 and his stay there over winter, explained in terms of the formal sources about the organization of the government and changes in the law in the latter half of the 13th century. These changes were aimed at introducing into Iceland the power of both the King and the Church and in fact marked the actual changes throughout the Norwegian state. Loftur was Skálholt‘s official and the story about him was part of a long-standing dispute about the position of the chieftains versus the new power of the Church and the opposition to its introduction. The article defines the political confusion described in the Árna sagain Bergen in the winter of 1282-1283 as, on the one hand, changes in the constitution and, on the other hand, legislation, and at the same time whether the Kings Hákon Hákonarson and his son Magnús had systematically pursued a policy of having the Church be an independent party to the government of the state from 1247 onward until the death of the latter in 1280. When the disagreement is looked at as continuing, it is seen that Icelanders had made preparations for changes in the constitution with assurances of introduction of the power of the Church beginning in 1253 and the power of the King from 1262, but, on the other hand, the disagreements in both countries disappeared in the 1270s in the face of the conflict of interests that resulted from the laws that followed in the wake of the constiututional changes. Árna saga tell of this and how the disputes were described, but also that their nature changed as King Erikur came to power in 1280, as he gave the power of the King a new policy that was aimed against the power of the Church. Ousting of the archbishop from Norway and the Christian funerals of the excommunicated chieftains are examples of the conditions of government that could not have been, if the King had no longer had executive power over Christian concerns, as he had already conceded power over spiritual issues to the Pope in Rome with the Settlement at Túnsberg in 1277.


Author(s):  
E. A. Shelina ◽  

As corpora of medieval texts became available online, and platforms for textometric analysis (TXM, among others) were developed in the last decade, it has become possible to explore old historiographical issues from a new perspective. This study explores the actions of medieval dominants and the forces they used to perform those actions. The author unites a corpus of the author unites a corpus of the charters of prelates of the French dioceses from the period following the “documentary revolution”, because the general increase in the number of charters since the 12th century enables the author to work at the level of particular social groups. The charters of bishops and archbishops and the charters of abbots and abbesses of the 13th century were collected from online editions of medieval French cartularies (from the Chartae Galliae, the Cartulaires d'Île-de-France, and the Cartulaire blanc). The author generated lists of the most frequent verbs and nouns in the ablative and examined the most common adverb co-occurrences for the most frequent verbs of the two corpora. As a result of the study, a number of observations were obtained. 1) Along with the group of verbs that denote the activity of creating a charter and of disseminating the information, the most frequent verbs refer to the activities of giving, ordering and confirming in the corpus of bishops. These three main activities were distinguished by analyzing the structure of verb binomials in the corpus. 2) The activities of abbots appear to be different from those of bishops: the verbs of ordering are far less frequent, while the verbs of selling and exchanging are more common. While bishops form the dominant group within the whole society, the activities of the abbots in society are less conspicuous (abbots dominate within their monasteries). 3) The auctoritas, although an important power force that enables the majority of power actions, is not the only one used by prelates: members of the Church acted by voluntas; a large amount of actions requires consent or counsel. Finally, the promise requires the force of fides, etc. 4) The 13th century society was the one where all actions were judged as more or less spiritual, and where the less spiritual power actions and practices of the prelates were also ‘spiritualised’. Although different groups of verbs attract different kinds of adverbs (e.g. one should serve ‘honestly and devotedly’, one possesses ‘peacefully’, one commands and orders ‘firmly and rigorously’), they all have positive connotations. The charters serve to reproduce a system where the spiritual plays a dominant role and where attaining the celestial realm is the central goal of all actions (documents on the exercise of power belong to the same system as theological texts).


Author(s):  
Karlheinz Schlager

The melody for the verses beginning “Trinitas, Unitas, Deitas” has so far been published only from three French sources of the 13th century. Amedee Gastoue gave the melody in the course of his essay ‘Les anciens chants liturgiques des Églises d'Apt et du Comtat’; his transcription was based on the manuscript Apt 6 (No. du fonds 1), a mass-antiphoner of the 12th century used at the church of St.Pierre in Apt, with additions in various hands on the unfoliated leaves after folio CXII at the end of the manuscript, which is where we find Trinitas, Unitas, Deitas, between a troped Kyrie and a Christmas song. Henri Villetard (1907) and Wulf Arlt (1970) published the melody as part of their respective editions and commentaries for the New Year's offices of Sens and Beauvais, from the manuscripts Sens 46 and London, B.L., Egerton 2615, that is, from two sources of the early 13th century whose contents are related, and which may be seen as recensions of a 12th-century exemplar no longer extant.


Aethiopica ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 25-64
Author(s):  
Michael Gervers

The five churches of Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos, Ǝmäkina Mädḫane ʿAläm, Ǝmäkina Lǝdätä Maryam, Walye Iyäsus and Žämmädu Maryam are all built in caves in the massif of Abunä Yosef, situated in the Lasta region of Wollo. Changes in their architectural forms suggest that they were constructed over a period of several hundred years in the order listed and as such represent a significant chronological model against which many of Ethiopia’s rock-hewn churches may be compared. Until the publication of this paper, it has been universally accepted that the church of Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos was built in the second half of the 12th century under the sponsorship of an eponymous king. Aspects of the church’s architecture, namely the absence of a raised space reserved for the priesthood before the triumphal arch (the bema), of any sign of a chancel barrier around it, of western service rooms, of a vestibule and narthex, and of the presence of a reading platform (representative of the Coptic ambo), of a full-width open western bay (allowing for a ‘return aisle’), and of arches carrying the aisle ceilings, all point to a date of construction around the mid-13th century. In fact, the closest parallels to Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos may be found in Lalibäla’s second group of monolithic churches, Amanuʾel and Libanos. Closely associated also is the church of Gännätä Maryam. A painting of the Maiestas Domini in the south-east side room (pastophorion) of the latter suggests that the room served as an extension of the sanctuary. By the end of the 13th century, as witnessed by Ǝmäkina Mädḫane ʿAläm and the other churches built in caves, the full-width sanctuary becomes a characteristic which endures throughout 14th- and 15th -century Ethiopian church architecture. Yǝmrǝḥannä Krǝstos and Gännätä Maryam stand on the cusp of a major liturgical change which coincides with the transfer of royal power from the Zagwe dynasty to their Solomonic successors, who sought legitimacy by following Coptic practices.


2021 ◽  

Welsh writing before 1500 consists of a rich tradition of writing in Latin and the vernacular, in a range of genres including literary prose, poetry, chronicles, law, medicine, grammar, wisdom literature, genealogy, and religious writing. The earliest extant Welsh-language writing is epigraphy (on, for example, the Tywyn Stone) and Old Welsh glosses and marginal texts in 9th-century Latin manuscripts. Use of Latin in early medieval Wales, continuous from the Roman period, is attested in works of history, poetry, and record keeping. Early medieval writing is poorly served by the manuscript record, with only twenty pre-12th-century manuscripts extant, and only eleven before c. 1100. The early books that do survive display technical skills of manuscript production and handwriting on par with elsewhere in Europe, and studies of surviving Latin texts, Old Welsh glosses, and later copies of Old Welsh texts reveal a rich, varied written practice grounded in careful study of Latin classics. Wales is also the birthplace of three significant 12th-century Latin authors, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald of Wales, and Walter Map. The use of Latin for recording Welsh law is also very well attested. A group of vernacular codices survive from the 13th century onward, preserving a proliferation of prose literature, poetry, dozens of texts translated or adapted from Latin and French, and a cache of technical prose writing—law, medicine, and grammar—characterized by a vast technical vocabulary and mnemonic devices indicative of oral transmission. Orality is an important dimension of Welsh writing, with several genres displaying interplay between oral and written transmission. The oral medium of knowledge transmission, often referred to as cyfarwyddyd (oral lore), is attested in the prose style that frequently uses mnemonic devices and oral formulae. This oral literature was composed and transmitted by a professional class, and then written down and rewritten in successive phases. Another major area of Welsh writing is bardic poetry, which represents a longstanding tradition of professional poets composing mostly panegyric, eulogy, and elegy for royal patrons from the early medieval period until the Edwardian conquest of Wales in 1282, at which point patronage shifted to a new gentry class. Alongside this native practice, Welsh writing was also influenced by imported Latin and French texts, including romance, geography, history, apocrypha, and devotional literature. Historically, scholarship has prioritized vernacular compositions over Latin, and original texts over translations, but this has shifted in recent decades.


Ars Adriatica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-46
Author(s):  
Pavuša Vežić

The author discusses the architecture of the church and the monastery of St Francis in Zadar in their original form, and their transformation during the Gothic and Renaissance periods. Based on an analysis of published historical sources and the preserved architectural elements, it has been concluded that the extant structure of the complex emerged between the mid-13th and the early 14th century, when the church and the sacristy were built, as well as the monastery wings and the original cloister. An important typological feature of the church is its three-apse rear structure, which the author brings into connection with the Gothic architecture of Franciscans and Dominicans from Umbria and Veneto during the 13th century. The sacristy, in which the Peace of Zadar was signed in 1358, was also a chapel of St Louis and the chapter hall. Its significant rearrangement, with the furnishing of the choir and the sanctuary, took place at the end of the 14th century, when the General Chapter in Cologne proclaimed the monastery the seat of the Franciscan province of St Jerome for Dalmatia in 1393. The choir rebuilding was completed by the mid-15th century with the construction of Giorgio da Sebenico’s podium on the site of the presumed earlier railing.


1967 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 605-605
Author(s):  
A. S. THOMPSON

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-280
Author(s):  
Rhoderick John Suarez Abellanosa

The declaration of enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) in various provinces and cities in the Philippines did not impede the Catholic Church from celebrating its sacraments and popular devotions. Mired with poverty and various forms of economic and social limitations, the presence of God for Filipinos is an essential element in moving forward and surviving in a time of pandemic. Predominantly Roman Catholic in religious affiliation, seeking the face of God has been part of Filipinos' lives whenever a serious disaster would strike. This essay presents how the clergy, religious and lay communities in the Philippines have innovatively and creatively sustained treasured religious celebrations as a sign of communion and an expression of faith. In addition to online Eucharistic celebrations that are more of a privilege for some, culturally contextualised efforts were made during the Lenten Season and even on Sundays after Easter. This endeavour ends with a reflection on the Church as the sacrament of God in a time of pandemic. Pushed back to their homes, deprived of life's basic necessities and facing threats of social instability, unemployment and hunger, Filipinos through their innovative celebrations find in their communion with their Church the very presence of God acting significantly in their lives.


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