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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

THE WORK CALLED CONGESTA AND FIFTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH THEOLOGY

Traditio ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 73 ◽  
pp. 291-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
SIEGFRIED WENZEL
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Great Length ◽  
Alphabetical Order ◽  
Imitatio Christi ◽  
The Church

Congesta, written about the middle of the fifteenth century in England and only partially preserved, is a massive sermon commentary, originally in five volumes, covering the Sundays of the church year, some feast days and common sermons for saints, and two special occasions (“In Time of Persecution” and “For Religious”). Of the entire cycle only forty-six sermons are extant in two manuscripts (Oxford, Magdalen College MSS 96 and 212). The commentary deals at great length with the Epistle or Gospel lection of the respective Mass. Its anonymous author, probably an English Carthusian, excerpted long passages from over 130 named authors and anonymous works, including Petrus Berchorius, Saint Brigid of Sweden, and the Imitatio Christi. The sermons, which are basically moral postillation of the lections and show much concern with the qualities of a good pastor, can be seen as part of the reforming tendencies in the English church marked especially by Thomas Gascoigne. The article describes and discusses the sermon cycle, analyzes the sermon for 23 Trinity, and discusses the structure of the sermons and some of the authors of the later Middle Ages that are quoted or excerpted. An appendix lists the authors and anonymous works quoted in alphabetical order.

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 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.

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.

The Mediæval Legend of Judas Iscariot

PMLA ◽  
1916 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-632
Author(s):  
Paull Franklin Baum
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Early Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Greek Myth ◽  
Judas Iscariot ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

The legendary Life of Judas the Betrayer, based, it is usually said, on the Greek myth of Œdipus, is found in almost every language and country of mediæval Europe. It was written down in Latin as early as the twelfth century. By the end of the thirteenth century it was turned into the vernacular in lands as far apart as Wales, Catalonia, and Bohemia. At the close of the Middle Ages it had become the possession of the folk, and since that period—to some extent even during the fifteenth century—it has spread northward and eastward into Scandinavia, Finland, Russia, and Bulgaria. It was related in Greek, probably in the Middle Ages, although the manuscripts are of a much later date. It was still told orally in Galicia at the end of the last century. As a regular part of the ecclesiastical literature of the West it received canonization, so to say, late in the thirteenth century, in the great legendary of Jacopo da Voragine; but, on the other hand, it is a remarkable fact that in the Middle Ages, so far as I have been able to learn, none of the reputable church writers (with the exception of Jacopo) recognized or even mentioned it. And furthermore, mediaeval sculptors and carvers of wood and ivory, who gave themselves with so much zeal to the plastic representation of legendary matter, completely eschewed or overlooked the ‘early life’ of Judas. Not indeed that either the church writers or artists sought to avoid contact with such a wicked character; on the contrary, they devoted considerable space to him, rejecting only his apocryphal career. However this omission may be explained, the fact must be recognized as of some interest.

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.

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