scholarly journals The Counter-Conduct of Medieval Hermits

2016 ◽  
pp. 80-97
Author(s):  
Christopher Roman
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Richard Rolle ◽  
The Church ◽  
Rule Order

The hermit posed a challenge to a medieval Church that emphasized rule, order, and discipline since oversight of their life could be virtually non-existent. The writings of Richard Rolle, hermit, negotiates the space between Foucauldian exomolgesis and exoagouresis as Rolle strove to articulate the identity of the hermit without any kind of church endorsement. As well, he forged his life out of a struggle with concepts of medieval sin, specifically Pride, which placed him in a queer position in terms of relationships with his surrounding community. His way of life was highly influential in his local community, however, and, through manuscript dissemination, beyond. Because he experienced mystical visions without church oversight, his eremitic life and example inspired a movement toward lay, affective piety in the later Middle Ages. The hermit, in his case, challenges the medieval Church’s hierarchy in that hermits practice a form of living at a local level, placing them in dangerous, sometimes heretical, positions that force the Church to either absorb their practices or suppress them.

Church Discipline in the Later Middle Ages: the Priors of Durham as Archdeacons

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 95-105
Author(s):  
Margaret Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Church Discipline ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Church Courts ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

It is often forgotten that the medieval Church imposed public penance and reconciliation by law. The discipline was administered by the church courts, among which one of the most important, because it acted at local level, was that of the archdeacon. In the later Middle Ages and certainly by 1435, the priors of Durham were archdeacons in all the churches appropriated to the monastery. The priors had established their rights in Durham County by the early fourteenth century and in Northumberland slightly later. Although the origins of this peculiar jurisdiction were long ago unravelled by Barlow, there is no full account of how it worked in practice. Yet it is not difficult from the Durham archives to elicit a coherent account, with examples, of the way penance and ecclesiastical justice were administered from day to day in the Durham area in this period. The picture that emerges from these documents, though not in itself unusual, is nevertheless valuable and affords an extraordinary degree of detail which is missing from other places, where the evidence no longer exists. This study should complement the recent work by Larry Poos for Lincoln and Wisbech, drawing attention to an institution which would reward further research. It is only possible here to outline what the court did and how and why it was used.

The medieval church of Montrose: a place ‘of much antiquity and abundantly populous’

2014 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catriona Anna Gray
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Date ◽  
Plausible Candidate ◽  
External Evidence ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Local Tradition ◽  
The Church

Montrose was one of Scotland's earliest royal burghs, but historians have largely overlooked its parish kirk. A number of fourteenth and fifteenth-century sources indicate that the church of Montrose was an important ecclesiastical centre from an early date. Dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, by the later middle ages it was a place of pilgrimage linked in local tradition with the cult of Saint Boniface of Rosemarkie. This connection with Boniface appears to have been of long standing, and it is argued that the church of Montrose is a plausible candidate for the lost Egglespether, the ‘church of Peter’, associated with the priory of Restenneth. External evidence from England and Iceland appears to identify Montrose as the seat of a bishop, raising the possibility that it may also have been an ultimately unsuccessful rival for Brechin as the episcopal centre for Angus and the Mearns.

The medieval church

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Luscombe
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter discusses the contributions that were made by former Fellows of the Academy to the study of the medieval church. It states that the history of the medieval church is inseparable from the general history of the Middle Ages, since the church shaped society and society shaped the church. The chapter determines that no hard and fast distinction can always be made between the works by ecclesiastical historians during the twentieth century, and the contributions made to general history by other historians.

Medieval Heretics as Protestant Martyrs

1993 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 185-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Euan Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Church History ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Church Polity ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Articles Of Faith ◽  
The Church

Two themes which figure repeatedly in the history of the Western Church are the contrasting ones of tradition and renewal. To emphasize tradition, or continuity, is to stress the divine element in the continuous collective teaching and witness of the Church. To call periodically for renewal and reform is to acknowledge that any institution composed of people will, with time, lose its pristine vigour or deviate from its original purpose. At certain periods in church history the tension between these two themes has broken out into open conflict, as happened with such dramatic results in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Protestant Reformers seem to present one of the most extreme cases where the desire for renewal triumphed over the instinct to preserve continuity of witness. A fundamentally novel analysis of the process by which human souls were saved was formulated by Martin Luther in the course of debate, and soon adopted or reinvented by others. This analysis was then used as a touchstone against which to test and to attack the most prominent features of contemporary teaching, worship, and church polity. In so far as any appeal was made to Christian antiquity, it was to the scriptural texts and to the early Fathers; though even the latter could be selected and criticized if they deviated from the primary articles of faith. There was, then, no reason why any of the Reformers should have sought to justify their actions by reference to any forbears or ‘forerunners’ in the Middle Ages, whether real or spurious. On the contrary, Martin Luther’s instinctive response towards those condemned by the medieval Church as heretics was to echo the conventional and prejudiced hostility felt by the religious intelligentsia towards those outside their pale.

scholarly journals Developing Definitions of Reform in the Church in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Barrow
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Church Councils ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

There is a noticeable gap between the use of ‘reform’ terminology (reformo, reformatio) in the pre-1100 period and modern usage: in the earlier Middle Ages the terminology was essentially used to refer to the restoration of peace, buildings, and property or in a spiritual sense, as a change of heart (as established by Gerd Ladner on the basis of patristic writings); it is also noticeable that reform terminology was used much less by medieval authors, especially pre-1215, than by modern historians writing about the Middle Ages and above all on the medieval church. Nonetheless, ‘reform’ terminology did begin, very slowly, to be used about change in medieval ecclesiastical institutions in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, first in the diocese of Rheims and Lotharingia and later in Burgundy, and this chapter attempts to show how this process began, tracing the earliest moves towards this in records of Carolingian church councils and tenth-century historical narratives.

A Consistory Court in the Middle Ages

1963 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Morris
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Church Courts ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Church ◽  
Insight Into

Some years ago Professor Powicke wrote of the possibility that a study of the surviving records of the medieval church courts would ‘reveal unexpected possibilities of insight into the daily lives of men and women in a pre-Reformation diocese as subjects of an active jurisdiction, parallel to that of the common law. That this jurisdiction existed we already knew, but the prospect of seeing it at work is exciting’. Since then, it has become increasingly clear that the exploration of the working of the church courts would throw light on the whole relationship between Church and People in medieval, and indeed post-medieval, England. Unfortunately, the records, although quite voluminous, have survived only in a haphazard and intermittent way, and it is, as yet, impossible to form any general conclusions about the subject as a whole. In the hope of contributing to this process, I propose to examine the working of the consistory court in the diocese of Lincoln, one of the largest and most populous dioceses in pre-Reformation England.

Matrimonial Politics in Thirteenth-Century Aragon: Moncada v. Urgel

1980 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Brundage
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
The Family ◽  
Individual Family ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Church

Since apostolic times Christians have treated the family as a micro-community which reflects the values and problems of the larger Christian community as a whole. Most communities, including Christian ones, are reluctant to contemplate the possibility that their own existence will end. But although Jesus is said to have promised St Peter that His Church would survive death, and although the notion of the Church as a community that never dies became a commonplace in subsequent ecclesiology, there was no such guarantee of immortality to the individual family. The breakup and restructuring of family units through death or the dissolution of marriage was a reality which medieval Christian communities had to face in each generation. Even so, high-ranking social groups sought to minimise generational disruptions by adopting the fiction of the family that never dies, a notion that is especially familiar to historians of the theory of monarchy in the Middle Ages. The medieval Church was a keen champion of the continuity of domestic units. As Georges Duby has recently pointed out, the Church in the early Middle Ages struggled mightily to make its own theory of marriage prevail over the alternative marriage theory popular among the laity. The ecclesiastical model of marriage, which emphasised the free consent of the contracting parties and the indissolubility of unions, triumphed over the lay model of marriage, which, according to Duby, valued family concerns above the wishes of the individual at the end of the eleventh century in France. The pattern of marriage arrangements that Duby calls the lay model seems to have persisted vigorously until much later in other places, including Catalonia and Aragon. This paper will examine a case from mid-thirteenth century Arago-Catalonia in which the conflict of lay and ecclesiastical marriage ideals features prominently.

La secolarizzazione č moderna?

2009 ◽  
pp. 43-51
Author(s):  
Rémi Brague
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The Other ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

- The paper is focused on the connections between secularization and modernity, and calls into question an almost unanimously accepted and largely undisputed thesis, according to which it would be possible to explain one term (secularization) through the other (modernity). Drawing from medieval history and philosophy, the author challenges the validity of such a connection between secularization and modernity. While the term "secularization" is a modern coinage and has unfolded its effects only in the modern era, the circumstances that made the process of secularization possible took shape in the Middle Ages. The epicentre of the modern earthquake is located in the Middle Ages. More precisely, the author underscores the secularizing role of the Medieval Church and proves the counter-intuitive thesis that the defence of secularization was not promoted by the Empire, nor was the defence of the sacred championed by the Church. Things went exactly the other way around.Keywords: secularization, saeculum, catholic church, state, middle ages

scholarly journals Models of Perceiving Social Reality in the Middle Ages

2019 ◽  
pp. 241-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ju.Eu. Arnautova
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Social Order ◽  
World Order ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Professional Groups ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
The Church

The article considers the views of contemporaries about the social structure of the Western European Middle Ages. Social knowledge has represented these ideas in interpretative schemes (models), operating with the ancient concept of ordo. Medieval authors understood ordo metaphysically — as the „order“ of the world order and as an „estate“, i.e. the part of the world created by God, which has its place and purpose. In public consciousness, there were two parallel models of perception of the social order, which can be arbitrarily described as “hierarchical” and “functional”. The earliest interpretation scheme was based on the New Testament (2 Tim. 2:4 and 1 Cor. 9:14; 1 Tim. 5: 1) and divided society into “two estates of the Church” (duo ordines ecclesiae), i.e. to „clerics“ (clerici) and „laity“ (laici), which vary in their way of life and occupation. In the year 400 monasticism appeared, also having a specific “life form”. Therefore concept of social order formulated by Augustine and then by Gregory the Great, had noted the existence of “the three estates of the Church” (tres ordines ecclesiae) — clerics, monks and laity. Both models were hierarchical, because they justified the priority nature of service to God. At the turn of the X–XI centuries in the process of differentiation of new professional groups (knights, peasants), the model of the “three estates of the Church” has been rethought. “Estates” are defined in it in accordance with their functions: “oratores (praying)”, “bellatores (fighting)” and “laboratores (working)”, each of them working as a part of the whole for the rest, which meant the equivalence of their functions. The scheme of the tres ordines ecclesiae existed until the beginning of the New Time, constantly adding new social realities. The highest point of its socio-historical impact is the consolidation of peasants and townspeople into one “estate”, later called in France the “third estate” (tiers état, tiers membre), whose social and economic existence was predetermined by work and lack of privileges.

The church in the West Highlands in the late middle ages

2003 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
A. D. M. Barrell
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
The Church
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