John Wyclif and the Rights of the Infidels: The Requerimiento Re-Examined

1980 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Muldoon
Keyword(s):  
Brute Force ◽  
Proper Position ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Las Casas ◽  
Long Line ◽  
Pope Innocent Iv ◽  
John Wyclif ◽  
Legal Opinion

The Requerimiento was one of the most striking legal documents of the entire age of European overseas expansion. A long line of publicists and scholars from Bartholomew de Las Casas to Lewis Hanke have discussed, praised and condemned it. The Requerimiento appears to illustrate more clearly than any other single document the combination of high-sounding motives, legal chicanery and brute force that made the Spanish conquest of the Americas possible. In recent years, there has been increasing emphasis upon examining the conquest in terms of the brute force involved and a decreasing emphasis upon the motives and the legalisms which the Spanish employed. As one scholar has said, the Requerimiento was but a “useless legalism,” and, presumably, no longer worthy of serious attention. In addition, scholars have generally agreed that the Requerimiento is thoroughly understood. Following Las Casas, they have asserted that it contained the legal opinion of the thirteenth century canon lawyer known as Hostiensis that infidels had no right to property or political jurisdiction. In medieval terms, that infidels, such as the inhabitants of the Americas, did not possess dominium. In recent years, scholars have asserted that those who defended the Indians against the conquerors, such as Las Casas himself and Francisco Vitoria, drew upon the opinion of Hostiensis' teacher, the canonist-Pope Innocent IV. In this way, the Requerimiento and the related debate about the rights of the Indians has been placed within its proper position within the late medieval canonistic tradition.

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the Nature of the American Indians

1975 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 434-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
José A. Fernández-Santamaria
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Saint Augustine ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
Las Casas ◽  
Bartolome De Las Casas ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Composite Nature ◽  
Juan Gines De Sepulveda ◽  
Rule Out

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda epitomizes in many ways, both personally and intellectually, the cosmopolitanism of Spanish political thought in the sixteenth century. Educated in Italy, disciple of Pomponazzi, translator of Aristotle, chronicler of the Emperor and mentor of his son Philip, Sepúlveda is best known—and often misunderstood as the defender of the more unsavory aspects of the Spanish conquest and colonization in America—for his bitter controversy with Bartolomé de las Casas. To that debate Sepúlveda brought a humanist's training and outlook anchored in his devotion to Aristotle, but strongly tempered by his attachment to Saint Augustine. It is the purpose of this paper to examine Sepúlveda's ideas on the nature of the American natives, particularly the question of whether the Indians are natural slaves. Considerations of space, of course, rule out the possibility of undertaking here a detailed scrutiny of the foundations upon which those ideas rest. It can be said, however, that they are typically Renaissance views, a blend of traditions characteristic of the composite nature of the age's intellectual milieu.

A Neglected Eucharistic Controversy: The Afterlife of John Wyclif's Eucharistic Thought in Bohemia in the Early Fifteenth Century

2015 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcela K. Perett
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Real Presence ◽  
The Subject ◽  
John Wyclif ◽  
Full Century

The renewed interest in John Wyclif (d. 1384) has brought this late medieval figure back into the spotlight of historians, giving rise to numerous studies evaluating his thought and its implications in the context of late fourteenth century England. However, it is not possible fully to appreciate Wyclif's importance in late medieval European culture without understanding the legacy of his ideas on the continent. According to the accepted narrative, John Wyclif's thought was mediated to the continent through the scholarly contacts between the universities in Oxford and in Prague, and re-emerged in the Latin writings of Jan Hus. This article argues that John Wyclif's thought, especially his critique of the church's doctrine of transubstantiation, found a larger audience among the rural clerics and laity in Bohemia, whom it reached through Peter Payne, who simplified and disseminated the works of the Oxford master. Wyclif's critique of transubstantiation sparked a nationwide debate about the nature of the Eucharist, generating numerous treatises, both in Latin and in the vernacular, on the subject of Christ's presence in the sacrament of the mass. This debate anticipated, a full century earlier, the famous debate between Luther and Zwingli and the Eucharistic debates of the sixteenth century Reformation more generally. The proliferation of vernacular Eucharistic tractates in Bohemia shows that Wyclif's critique of transubstantiation could be answered in a number of different ways that included both real presence (however defined) and figurative theologies—a fact, which, in turn, explains the doctrinal diversity among the Lollards in England.

Epilogue

World of Echo ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 195-206
Author(s):  
Adin E. Lears
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Personal Relationship ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
Access To Knowledge ◽  
The Voice ◽  
John Wyclif

This chapter argues that an attunement to extrasemantic experiences of language that is understood in terms of noise lays epistemologies and literacies that effloresced in myriad forms in late medieval England. It reviews impulses to experience and express language as noise, which were a means of cultivating direct access to knowledge through affective and sensory experience. It also reviews the ideas of John Wyclif and his followers that overlapped with the avenues of thought, feeling, and sensation. The chapter investigates how Wyclif and his followers are known for their desire to limit clerical authority by encouraging a deep personal relationship to the biblical word in a way that scholars have suggested was a precursor to the Reformation. It examines the world of echo that emphasized the material qualities of the voice in opposition to the Wycliffite ideal of bodily transcendence.

The vision of music in a Lollard florilegium: Cantus in the Middle English Rosarium theologie (Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 354/581)

1999 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-106
Author(s):  
Bruce W. Holsinger
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
John Wyclif

Despite their intriguing testimony to the vagaries of musical life in late medieval England, relatively little attention has been given by musicologists and historians of religion to the wealth of commentary on liturgical and secular music penned by the followers of the Oxford heretic John Wyclif. In a brief mention of this material in The Premature Reformation, her magisterial study of Wyclif and the Lollards, Anne Hudson suggests that the Lollards’ suspicion of musical display reflected their more general hostility towards the decoration of churches.

scholarly journals Judging the Franks: Proof, Justice, and Diversity in Late Medieval Alexandria and Damascus

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 350-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Apellániz
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Local Law ◽  
Legal Concepts ◽  
Comparative Manner

AbstractThis article describes how Islamic and Frankish legal devices complemented each other and were even combined to settle disagreements in the late medieval Middle East. For this purpose, it focuses on two legal institutions that provided responses to the biases of Islamic law against non-Muslims and to the prejudices of Franks against the local law. The first are the notaries sent to the Mamluk cities by the Venetian government to draw up legal documents and to support the transactions of Venetian merchants. The second are the new royal orsiyāsacourts implemented by the sultans, where justice was dispensed by government officials instead of by traditional judges, orqāḍīs. Specifically, the article discusses, in a comparative manner, what constituted proof for Christians and Muslims, whether minorities could bear testimony or not, and how notaries and judges dealt with unbelievers. A common notarial culture, together with the expansion ofsiyāsajurisdiction over the affairs of foreigners, brought about a much deeper legal interplay than has previously been understood. Ultimately, it is argued that Mediterranean medieval societies had evolving attitudes toward justice and diversity, and approached their own legal traditions in ways compatible with the conflict resolution, while constantly borrowing legal concepts about difference from each other.

Thefatwāas an instrument of the Islamization of a tribal society in process of sedentarization

1991 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-459
Author(s):  
Aharon Layish
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal Issue ◽  
Classical Sense ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Personal Status ◽  
Tribal Society ◽  
Legal Opinion

Thefatwāis the legal opinion of a jurist not institutionalized in the classical sense: it is intended to elucidate, at the request of an inquirer, the position as to a legal issue; it is not binding on the inquirer or anyone else; unlike the judgement of aqāḍī, it is not enforceable. Thefatwāthat is the object of this paper belongs to a collection of legal documents gathered from tribal arbitrators in the Judean Desert and from the archives ofsharī‘acourts. Those documents deal with various legal matters: personal status, torts (homicide and assault), contracts and property, land, etc.; most date from the twentieth century and some from the last quarter of the nineteenth. The collection has been used in research on the Islamization of tribal society in the Judean Desert in process of sedentarization.

scholarly journals The Pre-Reformation Landscape

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Religious Culture ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Nicholas Love ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
Walter Hilton ◽  
John Wyclif

This chapter surveys the rich and vibrant devotional culture of late medieval England, expressed in liturgy and collective religious practices, and in the development of a wide-ranging lay literature of spiritual and theological ambition, from writers such as Walter Hilton, Nicholas Love to energetic promoters of orthodox theology such as Margaret Beaufort. While acknowledging the emergence of Wycliffism, the heresy associated with Oxford theologian John Wyclif, the chapter argues that Wycliffism and its perceived off-shoot, ‘Lollardy’, should be read as part of a spectrum of reformist thinking that characterized the late medieval Church’s conception of its evangelical mission. The chapter problematizes notions of medieval religious culture as either atrophied or homogeneous, arguing instead that the variety and vitality of medieval English religious culture should complicate any quest for origins in accounts of the English Reformation.

Adam Easton and the Lutterworth Wall Paintings Revisited

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Gill
Keyword(s):  
Wall Painting ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Wall Paintings ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Conservation History ◽  
Visual Expression ◽  
John Wyclif

In his monograph on Easton, Andrew Lee proposed that a previously unidentified contemporary portrait of the cardinal may be preserved in the form of an image added to an existing morality wall painting in the parish church of Lutterworth in Leicestershire. This proposal not only suggests the existence of a second representation of this important historical f igure, but makes this wall painting a public visual expression of the ongoing animosity between Easton and the reformer John Wyclif, the incumbent at Lutterworth. This chapter reviews the conservation history and uncovering of the painting, its probable dating, its visual conventions and its iconographic content. This examination of the evidence makes Lee’s suggestion untenable; however, careful examination of the image of the cardinal shows that it was most probably once part of a scene of the Mass of St Gregory, a late medieval devotional theme exemplifying the doctrine of Transubstantiation. The Lutterworth mural thus represents the trenchant restatement in Wyclif’s former parish of the orthodox position which Adam Easton so vigorously defended.

Mexico’s Early Cookbooks

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maite Gomez-Rejón
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Conquest Of Mexico ◽  
Food Writing

During the Spanish conquest of Mexico (1519–1521), gastronomic literature was already prevalent in Europe, yet not so in Mexico. The use of the printing press in Mexico was limited to print and disseminate ecclesiastical and legal documents; it was not used for subjects as seemingly superfluous as recipes and food. This is not to say that food was not a source of fascination, or a means of social control. Kitchen manuscripts written before Mexico became independent of Spain (between 1810 and 1821) show that there was an abundance of food writing before Independence, especially by nuns in colonial convent kitchens. However, the earliest printed cookbooks did not make their debut in Mexico until 1831, a decade after Independence. Mexican cuisine can be examined beginning from the diaries of conquistadors and missionaries to colonial kitchen manuscripts to the cookbooks published after Independence through the Porfiriato (1876–1910) and Revolution (1910–1920). Reading between the lines of the recipes in these sources, one sees the shifting attitudes toward food, as it ceases to be a status marker and a divider of classes and becomes a tool for unifying the country.

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