Plowshares and Swords: Clerical Involvement in Acts of Violence and Peacemaking in Late Medieval England,c.1400–1536

2004 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel E. Thiery
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Interpersonal Aggression ◽  
Personal Relations ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
The Village ◽  
Parish Priests

“My men should use their swords and bucklers…but if John Stanshaw is in one alehouse then I will be in another.”To historians of medieval and Reformation England, these lines should not be all that surprising. Throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the heyday of livery and maintenance, ritualized effrontery was in vogue among the affluent and they often employed large retinues of armed servants as signs of potency and prestige. However, it may surprise some to learn that the above statement was uttered by a priest, Geoffrey Elys, vicar of Thatcham (Berks.), around the beginning of the sixteenth century. Though the medieval Church tirelessly struggled to convince its flock of the wickedness of interpersonal aggression, its own servants were not immune to bouts of conflict and strife. As R. N. Swanson cautions in his study of parish priests, the clergy “can be considered as a group; but they were also individuals who created their own careers and had their own personal relations with their parishioners.” Indeed, the conduct of clerics in their parish communities, especially their violent conduct, can be quite baffling if one only evaluates it by the criteria of ecclesiastical proscription and fails to recognize that such proscription was just one thick strand of an intricate web of relations and expectations. In his examination of thirteenth-century parish priesthood, J. Goering has traced the transition of pastors from merely members of the village to semi-detached individuals who were compelled to abide by both village customs and the values of a more unified and doctrinally authoritative Church.

Peasant Houses

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Suggett
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
High Status ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
Central Aspect ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Late Medieval England

Archaeology (excavation, building survey, scientific dating) has established that peasant houses in much of Britain had a durability that was probably exceptional in late medieval Europe. Peasant houses in late medieval England and Wales (Scotland and Ireland were more complex) were not self-built homes but professionally made by craftsmen, and a central aspect of material culture. Building the late medieval peasant house was an aspect of consumption that entailed important choices relating to expenditure, construction, and, above all, the plan that structured household life. The widespread adoption by peasants of the hierarchical hall-house plan was in part an appropriation of high-status housing culture and inseparable from the construction and maintenance of free peasant social identity. The eventual rejection of the hall-house in the sixteenth century ended a peasant building tradition that had begun in the thirteenth century and matured during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Matthew Cheung Salisbury, Worship in Medieval England. Past Imperfect Series. Croydon: ARC Humanities Press, 2018, 92 pages.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 315-318
Author(s):  
Jane Beal
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Liturgical Studies ◽  
University Of Oxford ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
The University

Matthew Cheung Salisbury, a Lecturer in Music at University and Worcester College, Oxford, and a member of the Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford, wrote this book for ARC Humanities Press’s Past Imperfect series (a series comparable to Oxford’s Very Short Introductions). Two of his recent, significant contributions to the field of medieval liturgical studies include The Secular Office in Late-Medieval England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015) and, as editor and translator, Medieval Latin Liturgy in English Translation (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017). In keeping with the work of editors Thomas Heffernan and E. Ann Matter in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, 2nd ed. (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005) and Richard W. Pfaff in The Liturgy of Medieval England: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2009), this most recent book provides a fascinating overview of the liturgy of the medieval church, specifically in England. Salisbury’s expertise is evident on every page.

scholarly journals Trinitarian Hagiography in Late Medieval England: Rewriting St Robert of Knaresborough in Latin Verse

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 74-95
Author(s):  
Hazel J. Hunter Blair
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Holy Trinity ◽  
Latin Verse ◽  
Weberian Theory ◽  
Late Medieval England

The Order of the Holy Trinity for the Redemption of Captives (or Trinitarian Order) is one of the least studied continental religious groups to have expanded into thirteenth-century England. This article examines shifting notions of Trinitarian redemption in late medieval England through the prism of the order's writing about Yorkshire hermit St Robert of Knaresborough (d. 1218). Against the Weberian theory of the routinization of charisma, it demonstrates that Robert's inspirational sanctity was never bound too rigidly by his Trinitarian hagiographers, who rather co-opted his unstable charisma in distinct yet complementary ways to facilitate institutional reinvention and spiritual flourishing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Print, Orality and Communications in the Maid of Kent Affair

2001 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
ETHAN H. SHAGAN
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Career ◽  
The Political ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Media ◽  
Oral Communications ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
Elizabeth Barton ◽  
Political Realm

This article explores the printed and oral communications through which the sixteenth-century holy woman Elizabeth Barton publicised her political prophecies against the Henrician Reformation. Authorship of the primary printed account of Barton's early career has been misattributed, leading scholars to underestimate the number of accounts of Barton's miracles which circulated in her lifetime. This observation leads to an analysis of the media apparatus used by Barton and her adherents, which was an expansion into the political realm of the textual and oral networks through which saints' lives and miracles were publicised in late medieval England.

scholarly journals Child death, grief, and the community in high and late Medieval England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Danielle Nicole Griego
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Child Death ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Divine Intervention ◽  
Holy Water ◽  
Return Home ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
The Village

"William of Canterbury, one of the authors of the Thomas Becket miracle collection, reports in a twelfth-century miracle that an eight-year-old boy named Phillip was looking at rocks by a lake located in the county of Cheshire, when he slipped and was overtaken by the water (aquis obrutus est). When he did not return home, his father, Hugh Scot, searched for him everywhere in the village and found his body submerged in the lake. Hugh was sighing and groaning (suspiriis et gemitu) after extracting him from the water, and when Phillip's mother heard about his death, she indulged in tears and wailing (lacrymis indulget et plactui).1 Rather than preparing the boy's corpse for a funeral, his parents attempted to revive him by suspending him by his feet in order to drain the liquid from his body, and when that did not work, by giving him holy water associated with Thomas Becket (aqua sancti Thomoe). According to William of Canterbury, because of the devotion of the parents (devotio parentum) and divine intervention, Phillip began to show signs of life, making his father leap forth (exsiliente) from his seat with excitement." -- Introduction

Arbitration, Delegation, Conservation: Marginalized Mechanisms for Dispute Resolution in the Pre-Reformation English Church

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 165-181
Author(s):  
R. N. Swanson
Keyword(s):  
Dispute Resolution ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Practical Importance ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
Late Medieval England

The records of diocesan and peculiar courts of late medieval England have received extensive academic scrutiny, generating a reasonably clear picture of a hierarchical pyramid ultimately headed by the papal curia. However, that picture is an incomplete depiction of the totality of the ecclesiastical mechanisms of dispute resolution. Existing scholarship largely ignores the use of arbitrated extra-curial settlements to avoid litigation (or, alternatively, a formal sentence). Concentration on the provincial court hierarchy also marginalizes the more directly papal courts of judges delegate and assorted local agents with judicial powers, which functioned within England between 1300 and the Reformation and bypassed the normal fora. Drawing on a wide range of scattered source material, this article introduces these neglected elements of the church's legal system, including the resident papal conservators appointed at the request of petitioners to exercise a general delegated papal judicial authority on their behalf, whose existence has been almost completely unnoticed. It suggests the significance of arbitration, delegation and conservation within the wider structure, and the need to give them much more attention if the practical importance of canon law in pre-Reformation England is to be properly understood and appreciated.

Holy Maydens, Holy Wyfes: the Cult of Women Saints in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-century England

1990 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 175-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eamon Duffy
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Women Saints ◽  
John The Baptist ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
The Trinity ◽  
The Middle Ages

The cult of the saints, according to Emile Male, ‘sheds over all the centuries of the middle ages its poetic enchantment’, but ‘it may well be that the saints were never better loved than during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ Certainly their images and shrines were everywhere in late medieval England. They filled the churches, gazing down in polychrome glory from altar-piece and bracket, from windows and tilt-tabernacles. In 1488 the little Norfolk church of Stratton Strawless had lamps burning not only before the Rood with Mary and John, and an image of the Trinity, but before a separate statue of the Virgin, and images of Saints Margaret, Anne, Nicholas, John the Baptist, Thomas à Becket, Christopher, Erasmus, James the Great, Katherine, Petronilla, Sitha, and Michael the Archangel.

‘The Good Old Way’: Prayer Book Protestantism in the 1640s and 1650s

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 233-256
Author(s):  
Judith Maltby
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Continued Use ◽  
Common Prayer ◽  
The Church

Between 1640 and 1642 the Church of England collapsed, its leaders reviled and discredited, its structures paralysed, its practices if not yet proscribed, at least inhibited. In the years that followed, yet worse was to befall it. And yet in every year of its persecution after 1646, new shoots sprang up out of the fallen timber: bereft of episcopal leadership, lacking any power of coercion, its observances illegal, anglicanism thrived. As memories of the 1630s faded and were overlaid by the tyrannies of the 1640s … the deeper rhythms of the Kalendar and the ingrained perfections of Cranmer’s liturgies bound a growing majority together.Professor John Morrill, quoted above, has rightly identified a set of historiographical contradictions about the Stuart Church in a series of important articles. Historians have until recently paid little attention to the positive and popular elements of conformity to the national Church of England in the period before the civil war. The lack of interest in conformity has led to a seventeenth-century version of the old Whig view of the late medieval Church: the Church of England is presented as a complacent, corrupt, and clericalist institution, ‘ripe’ – as the English Church in the early sixteenth century was ‘ripe’ – to be purified by reformers. However, if this was the case, how does one account for the durable commitment to the Prayer Book demonstrated during the 1640s and 1650s and the widespread – but not universal – support for the ‘return’ of the Church of England in 1660?This paper contributes to the larger exploration of the theme of ‘the Church and the book’ by addressing in particular the continued use by clergy and laity alike of one ‘book’ – the Book of Common Prayer – after its banning by Parliament during the years of civil war and the Commonwealth.

Biblical Languages and National-Religious Boundaries in Muscovy

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-22
Author(s):  
Isaiah Gruber
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Russian Orthodoxy ◽  
Biblical Language ◽  
Biblical Languages

Inspired in part by conversations with David Goldfrank, this essay considers aspects of how attitudes toward biblical language contributed to representations of national and religious identity in late medieval and early modern Muscovite Russia. At roughly the same time in history that revived Hebrew and Greek study in Western Europe helped to stimulate the Renaissance and Reformation, bookmen in East Slavia also reconsidered the original languages of sacred writings. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, such interest was neither unknown nor marginal within Muscovite religious culture. Hebrew-Russian glossaries circulated in leading monasteries from at least the thirteenth century; major infusions of Greek (and other) words and definitions in the sixteenth century transformed these texts into multilingual dictionaries. This mainstream tradition in Russian Orthodoxy can be linked to such important religious figures as Nil Sorskii and Maksim Grek. I argue that by “appropriating” biblical languages and terminology, often via inaccurate translations, Muscovite Russian literati created and defended their distinctive identity vis-à-vis Jews and Greeks, who were considered God’s former chosen peoples. These findings suggest reconsideration of the nature and boundaries of faith in Muscovy in the “age of confessionalism.”

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