scholarly journals Reading Ritual: Biblical Hermeneutics and the Liturgical “Text” in Pre-Reformation England

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-64
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Rinkevich
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
John Lydgate ◽  
Sacramental Theology ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
Moyen Age

This article argues that orthodox English writers during the pre-Reformation period conceptualized the liturgy as a type of biblical text interpreted with traditional exegetical tools, especially allegoresis. In particular, it focuses upon three devotional works produced during the first several decades of the sixteenth century: B. Langforde’s Meditatyons for Goostly Exercyse, in the Tyme of the Masse (ca. 1515); Wynken de Worde’s 1520 edition of John Lydgate’s The Vertue of the Masse; and John Fisher’s sermon Lamentationes, Carmen, et Vae (ca. 1534). These liturgical exegeses uphold orthodox sacramental theology and maintain that such orthodoxy complements the emphasis placed upon literacy by reformers. Placing each text within a larger context, this analysis complicates narratives of religious culture that insist upon divisions between the medieval and the early modern and the Catholic and the Protestant. It offers a fuller picture of religious experiences surrounding the English Reformation’s inception. Cet article avance que les auteurs catholiques anglais de la période pré-Réforme ont considéré la liturgie comme un type de texte biblique pouvant être interprété avec les outils exégétiques traditionnels, tels que l’allégorèse. L’étude se penche en particulier sur trois ouvrages dévotionnels des premières décennies du XVIe siècle : les Meditatyons for Goostly Exercyse, in the Tyme of the Masse (c.1515) de B. Langford, The Vertue of the Masse de John Lydgate dans l’édition de 1520 de Wynken de Worde, et les sermons de John Fisher publiés sous le titre Lamentationes, Carmen et Vae (c.1534). Ces exégèses liturgiques utilisent la théologie sacramentelle catholique et soulignent le fait que son orthodoxie correspond à l’accent que mettent les réformateurs sur l’alphabétisation des fidèles. En replaçant chaque texte dans un contexte plus large, cette analyse approfondit les descriptions de la culture religieuse soulignant les ruptures entre le Moyen Âge et la Renaissance ainsi qu’entre le catholicisme et le protestantisme. On propose ainsi une vision plus complète des expériences religieuses entourant les débuts de la Réforme anglaise.

scholarly journals The Dissolution of the Monasteries and the Democratisation of Magic in Post-Reformation England

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 241
Author(s):  
Francis Young
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
Literacy Knowledge ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Monastic Libraries ◽  
Former Inmates

The dissolution of the monasteries in England (1536–1540) forced hundreds of former inmates of religious houses to seek livelihoods outside the cloister to supplement meagre pensions from the crown. Among the marketable skills these individuals possessed were Latin literacy, knowledge of liturgy, sacramental authority and a reputation for arcane learning: all qualities desirable in magical practitioners in early modern Europe. Furthermore, the dissolution dispersed occult texts housed in monastic libraries, while the polemical efforts of the opponents of monasticism resulted in the growth of legends about the magical prowess of monks and friars. The dissolution was a key moment in the democratisation of learned magic in sixteenth-century England, which moved from being an illicit pastime of clerics, monks and friars to a service provided by lay practitioners. This article considers the extent of interest in magic among English monks and friars before the dissolution, the presence of occult texts in monastic libraries, and the evidence for the magical activities of former religious in post-dissolution England. The article considers the processes by which monks, friars and monastic sites became associated with magic in popular tradition, resulting in a lasting stereotype of medieval monks and friars as the masters of occult knowledge.

scholarly journals In the Borderlands of Periodization with “The blythnes that hes bein”: The medieval / early modern boundary in Scottish history

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mairi Cowan
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Atlantic History ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Social Discipline ◽  
Scottish History

The conventional placement of the boundary between “medieval” and “early modern” periods in Scottish history has obscured our understanding of certain developments in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scotland. This paper proposes a reconsideration of periodization so that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries be examined against the backdrop of early modern (rather than medieval) historical scholarship, and not only in the context of Europe but also in the more expansive field of Atlantic history. With such a shift in periodical alignment, several features become more apparent including a change to religious culture in connection with the Catholic Reformation, an increase in social discipline that helped shape the Protestant Reformation, and early participation in the Atlantic slave trade.

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.”

scholarly journals INTERCONFESSIONAL INTERACTIONS ON THE TERRITORIES OF UKRAINE IN THE FIRST HALF OF XVI CENTURY AND THEIR EFFECTS ON EDUCATION AND CULTURE

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-74
Author(s):  
Ruslana Mnozhynska
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
State Building ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Ideology

The article examines the spiritual and religious culture of Ukraine in the first half of the sixteenth century, which is one of the most interesting and poorly researched topics in the history of cultural development of Ukraine. It was during this period that the foundations were laid for the formation of early-modern national thought in its various ways - rationalistic and mystical; Renaissance-humanist and reformist ideas were formed, which later functioned and developed within the boundaries of Ukrainian Baroque culture. There is still an opinion that among the main Christian denominations in Ukraine - Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant and Uniate - national, state-building has always been and is still only Orthodox. As for the “Catholic movement” - Ukrainians of the Catholic faith, almost nothing is known about them in the general public. Meanwhile, from the point of view of national ideology, the "Catholic Rus" for the culture of Ukrainian did, probably, not less than the Greek Catholics or the Orthodox, and could produce no less than the cultural forces for both the Ukrainian material culture and the spiritual.

ECOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF THE JONAH NARRATIVE – HAVE THEY SUCCEEDED IN OVERCOMING ANTHROPOCENTRISM?

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Willie Van Heerden
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Text ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Relationship

A central concern of ecological biblical hermeneutics is to overcome the anthropocentric bias we are likely to find both in interpretations of the biblical texts and in the biblical text itself. One of the consequences of anthropocentrism has been described as a sense of distance, separation, and otherness in the relationship between humans and other members of the Earth community. This article is an attempt to determine whether extant ecological interpretations of the Jonah narrative have successfully addressed this sense of estrangement. The article focuses on the work of Ernst M. Conradie (2005), Raymond F. Person (2008), Yael Shemesh (2010), Brent A. Strawn (2012), and Phyllis Trible (1994, 1996).

FINANCIAL REPORTING AND STEWARDSHIP ACCOUNTING IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN

1986 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patti A. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Financial Reporting

This paper examines an early modern contribution to the literature on stewardship accounting, the Tratado de Cuentas or Treatise on Accounts, by Diego del Castillo, a sixteenth-century Spanish jurist.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Renaissance

This chapter explores the material culture of everyday life in late-Renaissance Paris by setting L’Estoile’s diaries and after-death inventory against a sample of the inventories of thirty-nine of his colleagues. L’Estoile and his family lived embedded in the society of royal office-holders and negotiated their place in its hierarchy with mixed success. His home was cramped and his wardrobe rather shabby. The paintings he displayed in the reception rooms reveal his iconoclastic attitude to the visual, contrasting with the overwhelming number of Catholic devotional pictures displayed by his colleagues. Yet the collection he stored in his study and cabinet made him stand out in his milieu as a distinguished curieux. It deserves a place in the early modern history of collecting, as his example reveals that the civil wars might be a stimulus as much as a disruption to collecting in sixteenth-century France.

Place, People, Texts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Nowakowska
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Nation State

What is Poland? If the meaning of apparently stable words such as ecclesia has been anything but stable historically, the same is of course true of ‘Poland’, a simple noun which masks multiple possible meanings and polemical intents. For the sixteenth century, Poland should be defined not as an ethnic people (a nascent nation state), but rather as a political phenomenon. As such, this study will consider all the peoples and territories under the authority of the Polish Crown in the reign of King Sigismund I, regardless of their ‘ethnic’ or linguistic status. Twenty years ago, John Elliott coined the phrase ‘composite monarchies’, pointing out that most early modern monarchies were patchworks of territories acquired at various times by different means (marriage, conquest, inheritance), held together by one monarch....

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary History ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Related Material ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Early English

Mythographies were books that collected, explained, and interpreted myth-related material. Extremely popular during the Renaissance, these works appealed to a wide range of readers. While the European mythographies of the sixteenth century have been utilized by scholars, the short, early English mythographies, written from 1577 to 1647, have puzzled critics. The first generation of English mythographers did not, as has been suggested, try to compete with their Italian predecessors. Instead, they made mythographies into rhetorical instruments designed to intervene in topical debates outside the world of classical learning. Because English mythographers brought mythology to bear on a variety of contemporary issues, they unfold a lively and historically well-defined picture of the roles myth was made to play in early modern England. Exploring these mythographies can contribute to previous insights into myth in the Renaissance offered by studies of iconography, literary history, allegory, and myth theory.

Reading from Worlds under the Text: Oceanic Women in the missio Dei

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-51
Author(s):  
Rosemary Dewerse ◽  
Cathy Hine
Keyword(s):  
Global South ◽  
Missio Dei ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Women

Abstract Missional hermeneutics is a relatively recent development in the field of biblical hermeneutics, emerging from several decades of scholarly engagement with the concept and frame of missio Dei. In a key recent publication in the field, Reading the Bible Missionally, edited by Michael Goheen, the voices of the Global South and of women – and certainly of women from Oceania – do not feature. In this article the authors, both Oceanic women, interrupt the discourse to read biblical text from their twice-under perspective. The Beatitudes provide the frame and the lens for a spiralling discussion of the missio Dei as, to borrow from Letty M. Russell, “calculated inefficiency.” Stories of faithful Oceanic women interweave with those of God and of biblical women, offering their complexities to challenge assumptions and simplicities.

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