The Rise of Secular Drama in the Renaissance

The revival of the drama was not one of the accomplishments of the Renaissance. This revival had already taken place during the later Middle Ages, and by the twelfth century the plays connected with the festivals of the church had reached a considerable degree of complexity and dramatic effect. By the end of the fourteenth century the cycles of Biblical plays were well established, and in the fifteenth century they reached their greatest development. The rise of the moralities—those plays in which personified virtues and vices struggle for the possession of man's soul—also took place in the later Middle Ages, although the earliest references to them go back no further than the last quarter of the fourteenth century.

The Conquest in Historical Writing from the Late Thirteenth Century

The Norman Conquest in English History ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198726166.003.0006 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 173-208

Author(s):

George Garnett

Keyword(s):

Fifteenth Century ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Old English ◽

Fourteenth Century ◽

Thirteenth Century ◽

Twelfth Century ◽

Eleventh Century ◽

Historical Writing ◽

The Third ◽

History Of

Chapter 5 analyses three genres of historical writing about England in the later middle ages: histories of individual churches, universal histories, and histories of the kingdom. It confirms the provisional judgement reached in Chapter 4: that with respect to the Conquest and earlier England, historical writing fossilized. There were, however, exceptions, most of which could be categorized in the first genre. These are examined in great detail, and follow on from the treatment of the unusual episodes recorded during the thirteenth century at St Augustine’s, Canterbury and Burton Abbey which were considered in Chapter 4. The first is the problematic, neglected Historia Croylandensis attributed to (Pseudo-)Ingulf, which is for the most part a fabrication of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but which masquerades as the work of the abbot at Crowland at the end of the eleventh century, and therefore as contemporaneous with the great post-Conquest histories of England. The second is the early fourteenth-century Lichfield Chronicle, written by Alan of Ashbourn. The third is a general history of England conventionally attributed to John Brompton, abbot of Jervaulx in the early fifteenth century, and perhaps written at the abbey. All three pay a great deal of attention to (different) twelfth-century compilations of Old English and immediately post-Conquest law. This unusual characteristic accounts for their exceptional interest in the Conquest. The chapter also includes a briefer discussion of the more conventional histories into which condensed earlier discussions of the Conquest were inserted.

III.—The Painted Glass of All Saints’ Church, North Street, York

Archaeologia ◽

10.1017/s0261340900003763 ◽

1969 ◽

Vol 102 ◽

pp. 151-202 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

E. A. Gee

Keyword(s):

Fifteenth Century ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Fourteenth Century ◽

High Quality ◽

The Church ◽

Very High

The painted glass at All Saints', North Street, York, is exceptional even in York, and although that of the fourteenth century in two of the windows (II, VIII), is not outstanding, the early fifteenth-century glass is of very high quality. The Prick of Conscience window (III), is unique, and the theme of the Corporal Acts of Mercy, window IV, is rare. The whole medieval body of glass was limited to the church which existed before the penultimate bay, and the tower and the aisles on either side of it, were added by c. 1450. Windows which replaced the previous doorways in the fourth bay, on either side, contained plain glass in the later Middle Ages.

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

The Innes Review ◽

10.3366/inr.2014.0064 ◽

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 ◽

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.

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

Studies in Church History ◽

10.1017/s0424208400002795 ◽

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.

Aristotelianism, medieval

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy ◽

10.4324/9780415249126-b008-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Mark D. Jordan

Keyword(s):

Middle Ages ◽

Fourteenth Century ◽

Twelfth Century ◽

Large Scale ◽

Mathematical Reasoning ◽

Christian Theology ◽

John Duns Scotus ◽

Albert The Great ◽

Active Rivalry ◽

The Middle Ages

Although there are many possible definitions, ‘medieval Aristotelianism’ is here taken to mean explicit receptions of Aristotle’s texts or teachings by Latin-speaking writers from about ad 500 to about ad 1450. This roundabout, material definition avoids several common mistakes. First, it does not assert that there was a unified Aristotelian doctrine across the centuries. There was no such unity, and much of the engagement with Aristotle during the Middle Ages took the form of controversies over what was and was not Aristotelian. Second, the definition does not attempt to distinguish beforehand between philosophical and theological receptions of Aristotle. If it is important to pay attention to the varying and sometimes difficult relations of Aristotelian thought to Christian theology, it is just as important not to project an autonomous discipline of philosophy along contemporary lines back into medieval texts. The most important fact about the medieval reception of Aristotle is in many ways the most elementary: Aristotle wrote in Greek, a language unavailable to most educated Europeans from 500 to 1450. Aristotle’s fate in medieval Europe was largely determined by his fate in Latin. Early on, Boethius undertook to translate Aristotle and to write Latin commentaries upon him in order to show the agreement of Aristotle with Plato, and also presumably to make Aristotle available to readers increasingly unable to construe Greek. He was able to finish translations only of the logical works, and to write commentaries on a few of them and some related treatises. Even this small selection from Aristotle was not received entire in the early Middle Ages. Of the surviving pieces, only the translations of the Categories and De interpretatione were widely studied before the twelfth century, though not in the same way or for the same purposes. Before the twelfth century, Aristotelian teaching meant what could be reconstructed or imagined from a slim selection of the Organon and paraphrases or mentions by other authors. The cultural reinvigoration of the twelfth century was due in large part to new translations of Greek and Arabic works, including works of Aristotle. Some translators worked directly from the Greek, among whom the best known is James of Venice. Other translators based themselves on intermediary Arabic translations; the best known of these is Gerard of Cremona. Although the translations from Greek were often the more fluent, translations from the Arabic predominated because they were accompanied by expositions and applications of the Aristotelian texts. To have a Latin Aristotle was not enough; Latin readers also needed help in understanding him and in connecting him with other authors or bodies of knowledge. Hence they relied on explanations or uses of Aristotle in Islamic authors, chiefly Avicenna. The thirteenth century witnesses some of the most important and energetic efforts at understanding Aristotle, together with reactions against him. The reactions begin early in the century and continue throughout it. The teaching of Aristotelian books was condemned or restricted at Paris in 1210, 1215 and 1231, and lists of propositions inspired by certain interpretations of Aristotle were condemned at Paris and Oxford in 1270 and 1277. However, interest in Aristotle continued to grow, fuelled first by the translation of Averroes’ detailed commentaries, then by new translations from Greek. At the same time, some of the most powerful Christian theologians were engaged in large-scale efforts to appropriate Aristotle in ways that would be both intelligible and congenial to Christian readers. Albert the Great composed comprehensive paraphrases of the whole Aristotelian corpus, while his pupil Thomas Aquinas undertook to expound central Aristotelian texts so as to make them clear, coherent, and mostly concordant with Christianity. Very different projects predominate in the fourteenth century. For John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, the texts of Aristotle serve as distant ground against which to elaborate philosophical and theological teachings often radically anti-Peripatetic. If they are fully conversant with Aristotle, if they speak technical languages indebted to him, they are in no way constrained by what they take his teaching to be. Other fourteenth-century projects include the application of procedures of mathematical reasoning to problems outstanding in Aristotelian physics, the elaboration of Averroistic positions, and the rehabilitation of Albert’s Peripateticism as both faithful and true to reality. By the end of the Middle Ages, then, there is anything but consensus about how Aristotle is to be interpreted or judged. There is instead the active rivalry of a number of schools, each dependent in some way on Aristotle and some claiming to be his unique interpreters.

Archbishop John Morton and the Province of Canterbury, 1486–1500

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History ◽

10.1017/s002204690004210x ◽

1978 ◽

Vol 29 (1) ◽

pp. 1-21 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Christopher Harper-Bill

Keyword(s):

Fifteenth Century ◽

Twelfth Century ◽

Political Role ◽

Personal Nature ◽

Late Fifteenth ◽

Foster Father ◽

The episcopate of John Morton has received little attention from historians, possibly because it falls in time between the traditional interests of medievalists and of reformation specialists. Previous treatments, notably that of dean Hook in his Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury and the biography by Woodhouse, published in 1895 and heavily reliant on Hook, have concentrated on Morton's political role as ‘foster father of the Tudors’, and while Professor Claude Jenkins provided an excellent survey of the Canterbury register, he was more concerned with the evidence which it provides for die condition of the Church in die late fifteenth century than widi the archbishop himself. The purpose of this paper is to outline the salient characteristics of the episcopate and to examine the ecclesiastical policies pursued by Morton. Two qualifications must immediately be added. First, despite the wealth of material in the archiepiscopal register, supplemented by the records of the cathedral priory, there is almost nothing of a personal nature, and as always it is more difficult to estimate the character or sentiments of a fifteenth-century bishop than of his twelfth-century counterpart Secondly, it has been remarked how a hard and fresh look has upgraded the reputation of Hubert Walter, ‘that old model of secular prelacy’.

The Waldensian Recourse to Violence

Church History ◽

10.2307/3166819 ◽

1986 ◽

Vol 55 (3) ◽

pp. 294-306 ◽

Author(s):

Susanna K. Treesh

Keyword(s):

Fifteenth Century ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Twelfth Century ◽

The State ◽

The Reformation

From their origins in the twelfth century to their support for and involvement in the Reformation in the sixteenth, the Waldensian heretics professed nonviolence as one of their beliefs. Later Protestant and Catholic polemicists equated the profession of nonviolence with a policy and bestowed upon the sect a reputation as one of the precursors of religious pacifism. More recent scholars have noted that the heretics at least occasionally employed violence. I will argue that lay Waldensian believers, called credentes, reacted violently to persecution and learned to employ aggression in pursuit of political goals. In the later Middle Ages, at least, Waldensians resorted to violence on enough occasions and in enough different locations to justify dropping the idea that they were a nonviolent group. Their use of violence did become more sophisticated—that is, more closely connected to political goals—during the fifteenth century as access to representatives of the state increased.

Knights, Cooks, Monks and Tourists: Elite and Popular Experience of the Late-Medieval Jerusalem Pilgrimage

Studies in Church History ◽

10.1017/s0424208400003879 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 42 ◽

pp. 99-109 ◽

Author(s):

Kathryne Beebe

Keyword(s):

Fifteenth Century ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Lower Class ◽

Late Medieval ◽

Beliefs And Practices ◽

Late Middle Ages ◽

Popular Interest ◽

Multiple Levels ◽

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the late Middle Ages was the centre of a range of pilgrimage activity in which elite and popular beliefs and practices overlapped and complicated each other in exciting ways. The Jerusalem pilgrimage, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in particular, abounded in multiple levels of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ experience. Through the pilgrimage writings of a fifteenth-century Dominican pilgrim named Felix Fabri, this paper will explore two specific levels: the distinction between noble and lower-class experiences of the Jerusalem pilgrimage (both physical and spiritual), and the distinction between spiritually ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ conceptions of pilgrimage itself – that uneasy balance between the spiritually-sophisticated, contemplative experience of pilgrimage promoted by St Jerome and the more ‘popular’ interest in traditional ‘tourist’ activities, such as gathering indulgences or stocking up on holy souvenirs and relics to take home. However, as we will see, even these tourist acts were grounded in the orthodox spirituality of late-medieval piety, and the elite and popular experiences of pilgrimage, whether social or spiritual, were not so distinct as they may first appear.

An Incomplete Integration into the Orbis Christianus

Medieval Encounters ◽

10.1163/15700674-12342193 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 21 (2-3) ◽

pp. 232-249 ◽

Author(s):

Benjamin Weber

Keyword(s):

Fifteenth Century ◽

Fourteenth Century ◽

Twelfth Century ◽

Mutual Knowledge

Contacts between Ethiopia and the papacy may have developed since the twelfth century and are securely documented from the first half of the fourteenth century. Information and mutual knowledge, very vague at the beginning, slowly increased through merchants, missionaries, and official embassies; both sides learned from each other. But numerous misunderstandings remained and fabulous tales about Ethiopia were diffused in papal documents until the fifteenth century. This was caused, of course, by the difficulty of obtaining precise and genuine information about these remote lands but it was also the consequence of an intentional confusion and distortion of reality, fed by the papacy in order to highlight its universal power.

Italian Fables in Verse

PMLA ◽

10.2307/456594 ◽

1906 ◽

Vol 21 (1) ◽

pp. 226-278

Author(s):

Kenneth McKenzie

Keyword(s):

Fifteenth Century ◽

Middle Ages ◽

Twelfth Century ◽

Oral Tradition ◽

Classical Antiquity ◽

Folk Tales ◽

The People ◽

Medieval Europe ◽

Four Books ◽

The Middle Ages

Before the revival of Greek learning in the fifteenth century, the Æsopic fables of classical antiquity were known in Europe through Latin collections derived from Phædrus. Two of these collections were particularly well known; one which goes under the name of Romulus, written in prose in the tenth century; and a metrical version of the larger part of Romulus, written in the twelfth century. This metrical collection, called in the Middle Ages Esopus, is now ascribed to Walter of England, but is often called Anonymus Neveleti. Another metrical version of Romulus was made a little later by Alexander Neckam, and the fables of Avianus, also, were known to some extent. These collections, with numerous recensions and derivatives in Latin, and translations into many different languages, form a body of written fable-literature whose development can for the most part be clearly traced. At the same time, beast-fables were extensively employed in school and pulpit, and were continually repeated for entertainment as well as for instruction. Thus there was current all over Europe a great mass of fable-literature in oral tradition. The oral versions came in part from the written fable-books; others originated as folk-tales in medieval Europe; others had descended orally from ancient Greece, or had been brought from the Orient. Many are still current among the people in all parts of Europe, and beyond. From this mass of traditional material, heterogeneous collections of popular stories, including beast-fables, were reduced to writing in Latin and in other languages. An example of this process is found in the Esope of Marie de France, the earliest known fable-book in a modern vernacular, which was translated into French in the twelfth century from an English work which is now lost. Forty of Marie's fables, less than two-fifths of the whole number, came from a recension of the original Romulus called Romulus Nilantii; the others from popular stories of various kinds. Similarly, the important Æsop of Heinrich Steinhöwel contains the Romulus fables in four books, followed by seventeen fables called Extravagantes, others from the recently published Latin version of the Greek fables, from Avianus, from the Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alphonsus, and from Poggio,—in all, nine books, printed in Latin with a German translation about 1480, and speedily translated into many languages (including English, by Caxton in 1484, from the French version). The Extravagantes, like other collections, and like the episodes of the beast-epic (little known in Italy), came from popular tradition. Many writers show by incidental references that they were familiar with fables, although they may not have regarded them as worthy of serious attention,—writers like Dante, and his commentator Benvenuto da Imola. Moreover, the animal-lore of the bestiaries and of works like the Fiore di Virtù is closely akin to that of the fables. It is evident, then, that the collections descended from Phædrus, important though they were, represented but a fraction of the fable-literature that was current in the Middle Ages.