scholarly journals “So shall yoe bee:” Encountering the Shrouded Effigies of Thomas Beresford and Agnes Hassall at Fenny Bentley

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Aimee Caya
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

The Beresford Monument from the Church of St Edmund at Fenny Bentley in Derbyshire is a funerary monument that has received relatively little attention from scholars due to its unusual imagery and the lack of documentary evidence regarding its creation. The alabaster monument depicts Thomas Beresford (d. 1473) and Agnes Hassall (d. 1467) as fully shrouded three-dimensional effigies. Incised around the base of the monument are enshrouded representations of their twenty-one children. This paper analyzes the impact that veiling the bodies of Thomas Beresford and Agnes Hassall has on the effectiveness of the monument as a commemorative tool and situates the shrouded effigies within their broader visual and social context at the turn of the sixteenth century. Rather than dismiss the unusual imagery of the Beresford Monument as an expedient solution selected by sculptors who did not know what Thomas Beresford and Agnes Hassall actually looked like, this paper argues that shrouding the effigies was a deliberate commemorative strategy meant to evoke specific responses in the monument’s viewers. Although there is little concrete information about the tomb’s commission, contextualizing it by examining the monument in concert with other aspects of late medieval culture—including purgatorial piety, macabre texts and imagery, and ex votos—can provide a richer understanding of the object’s potentiality for its beholders. The anonymizing aspect of the shroud ultimately enabled viewers to identify freely and easily with the individuals depicted on the monument, which would have encouraged them to pray for the souls of Thomas and Agnes, thus perpetuating their memories and reducing their time in purgatory.

Select document: Catholic ownership of tithes: a County Wexford widow’s dispensation, 1595

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (162) ◽  
pp. 336-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Mac Cuarta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Rural Population ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
Ecclesiastical Authority ◽  
Agricultural Produce ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

AbstractDown to the mid-nineteenth century, the rural population in Ireland was obliged by law to contribute to the upkeep of the Church of Ireland clergy by means of tithes, a measure denoting a proportion of annual agricultural produce. The document illustrates what was happening in the late sixteenth century, as separate ecclesial structures were emerging, and Catholics were beginning to determine how to support their own clergy. Control of ecclesiastical resources was a major issue for the Catholic community in the century after the introduction of the Reformation. However, for want of documentation the use of tithes to support Catholic priests, much less the impact of this issue on relationships within that community, between ecclesiastics and propertied laity, has been little noted. This text – a dispensation to hold parish revenues, signed by a papally-appointed bishop ministering in the south-east – illustrates how the recusant community in an anglicised part of Ireland addressed some issues posed by Catholic ownership of tithes in the 1590s. It exemplifies the confusion, competing claims, and anxiety of conscience among some who benefited from the secularisation of the church’s medieval patrimony; it also preserves the official response of the relevant Catholic ecclesiastical authority to an individual situation.

The Writings of Fr. Henry Garnet, S.J. (1555–1606)

1951 ◽  
Vol 1 (01) ◽  
pp. 7-21
Author(s):  
A. F. Allison
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church History ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

Father Garnet's works were written in England during the last decade of the sixteenth century when the persecution of priests was at its most intense and Catholic literature was systematically suppressed. They were written anonymously and those that were printed were printed secretly, without indication of place or date. The result has been that his bibliography has remained in a state of confusion to this day. The earliest printed list of his writings, in Alegambe’s Bibliotheca Scriptorum Societatis Iesu (1643), is inaccurate and incomplete, and little attempt has since been made to supplement it. Southwell’s revised edition of Alegambe (1676) reproduces the original list without alteration. Dodd, in The Church History of England (1737–42), also follows Alegambe. The first and only attempt to check Alegambe’s list in the light of original documents is to be found in Oliver’s Collections…S.J. (1845) which gives some corrections and fresh information based on the Stonyhurst MSS. Gillow combines the findings of Dodd and Oliver, adding some speculations of his own which do not stand the test of investigation. Sommervogel and D.N.B. follow Gillow. The extent to which bibliographers blindly copy one another is not always fully realized. Before any satisfactory study of Father Garnet’s life and work can be begun it is essential that his bibliography should be re-established, if possible, from documentary evidence.

Church and Chapelry in Sixteenth-Century England

1979 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 279-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Kitching
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Great Difficulty ◽  
Entire Population ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Harvest Time ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

The church has always experienced great difficulty in ministering to those dwelling in the remotest parts of its parishes. In this paper I shall look briefly at how the sixteenth century church coped with the problem, and attempt to answer two questions: what facilities for worship were available in outlying districts, and what was the impact of the reformation changes upon them?Chapels abounded in England on the eve of the reformation. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that wherever he lived a parishioner could, without an unreasonably arduous journey, reach a place where mass was sung or said. Quite apart from matters of spiritual and moral discipline, it was important for very practical reasons that he should be able to get quickly to church. Disaster could take hold in villages and townships if the entire population had set off on a long hike to a remote parish church and was unlikely to return for some hours. Moreover, the length of the hike determined the extent of the diversion of labour from other pursuits, notably in the fields at harvest time: indeed, this was to influence government rulings on the number of saints’ days to be observed by the laity.

scholarly journals John Calvin's Christological Assertion of Word Authority in the Context of Sixteenth Century Ecclesiological Polemics

1992 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-486
Author(s):  
John D. Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Face ◽  
Fourth Lateran Council ◽  
The Church

The late medieval synthesis reflected in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) generally and in the doctrine of transubstantiation in particular established an understanding of the nature of the church and authority that was to be varied and wide in its effects. Transubstantiation as doctrine and as coalescor of Church worship laid the groundwork for a particularly formative understanding of the ekklesia of Christ. It issued in a view of immanental, divine authority and grace that would come to manifest itself in the indulgences, the treasury of merits, invocation of saints, relics, etc. To be critical of the Mass was to bring into question the entire hierarchy of the Church and its authority on earth. In this context of strong ecclesiological authority, God was reckoned primarily as immanent and immediate through the papal head. In the face of this development, John Calvin asserted that Christ, as center of all true Christian reality, is the necessary focus and the preeminent authority in and to the Church through the Word of God, the Scriptures.

‘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.

Church music in English towns 1450–1550: an interim report

Urban History ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline M. Barron
Keyword(s):  
Church Music ◽  
Interim Report ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
Devotional Practices ◽  
Parish Churches ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

In the towns of late medieval England (where perhaps 10 per cent of the population may have lived) the parish churches were being continuously expanded, adapted and decorated. Chantry and fraternity chapels were added between the nave pillars, or at the eastern ends of the aisles and here, as well as at the high altar, masses were celebrated and prayers recited with incessant devotion by the living for the repose of the souls of those who had died. These intercessory services, together with those of the usual liturgical round which took place in the choir and in the nave, were increasingly accompanied by complex polyphonic music involving several singers, both men and boys, and the playing of organs which were becoming ubiquitous in medieval parish churches. The development of this dynamic parish music has been detected, but not much studied. In part this is the result of the failure of urban historians and musicologists to talk to each other. Historians of late medieval religion have recently been exploring the diversity and sophistication of parochial devotional practices and have reaffirmed the importance of religious guilds and chantry foundations in enriching the liturgical practices of the parish, but they have paid little attention to music, and none to the impact of church music on civic ceremonial and the legitimating processes of urban rulers. Musicologists who have worked on the music of the English church have been, until very recently, comparatively uninterested in what happened beyond the interior of the church and, in any case, more interested in the great royal and collegiate foundations from which some music has survived. The surprising conclusion is that, for both urban historians and musicologists, the connected argument that links religious ritual, broadly defined, with the spatial and social dimensions of life and work in towns barely yet exists.

scholarly journals The Concept of Heresy and the Debates on Descartes’s Philosophy

2020 ◽  
Vol 100 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 172-186
Author(s):  
Aza Goudriaan
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Francisco Suarez ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Complex Term ◽  
The Church

Abstract This article explores connotations of ‘heresy’ in theological traditions before and during Descartes’s life. Lutheran and Reformed Protestants, themselves considered heretics by the Church of Rome, adopted the patristic heresiology while designating sixteenth-century antitrinitarian and Anabaptist teachings as heresies. Francisco Suárez and Gisbertus Voetius knew the late medieval conceptuality (e.g., Council of Konstanz, 1418). Voetius possibly thought of Descartes when describing certain philosophical views as “smacking of heresy.” This was not, however, an outright charge of heresy. In fact, Descartes’s readiness to be corrected contradicted the traditional heretical quality of “stubbornness.” Plempius’s expression “Cartesian heresy” seems to have been rare. For anti-Cartesians, the rich vocabulary of error made the complex term ‘heresy’ easily avoidable.

Performance and the parish: space, memory, and material devotion

2018 ◽  
pp. 100-143
Author(s):  
Susannah Crowder
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Devotional Images ◽  
Religious Associations ◽  
Family Identities ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Integrated Program ◽  
The Church

Individual women employed performance in parish settings, as well; in Metz, such practices permitted female performers to “write” fresh meanings upon the histories of existing bodies, objects, and spaces. Catherine Gronnaix made sizable foundations at her parish church of St-Martin and at a nearby Celestine monastery; together, these formed an integrated program of liturgy that represented Catherine in the context of personal, family, and public memory. The resulting performances mapped social and spatial geographies onto the buildings and streets of Metz in ways that connected the various family identities that Catherine could claim. Confraternal devotion and material culture also played equally vibrant roles in the parish performances of women, however. Catherine participated in two religious associations at St-Martin and founded masses to be celebrated in their chapels. This chapter brings together these collective practices with the surviving late-medieval elements of the church: sculpture, murals, and windows. Building on recent work that positions devotional images as active objects within performance, it traces the impact of female “matter” and personal practice upon a shared sphere. At St-Martin, bodily performance situated women within privileged places and integrated them into a larger environment of memory, while distinguishing individuals through social and devotional hierarchies.

The Church, Leprosy and Plague in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

1982 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 79-99
Author(s):  
Richard Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Control Of Epidemics ◽  
The Church

In this paper I would like to explore theories of disease and practices of healing in late medieval and early modern Europe, and to focus on two diseases, leprosy and plague. Much of the discussion will be based on Italian evidence since in this period, and especially in the sixteenth century, Italy was in the forefront of European medicine. Physicians were more numerous in Italy than in most European countries, and available not only in cities, but in small towns and rural communities. But disease and healing were not the exclusive concern of the medical profession. The church had not forgotten that healing had theological overtones. Equally there were the governments of the Italian states deeply committed to legislation for public health and to the control of epidemics.

DRAMATIZED DISPUTATIONS: LATE MEDIEVAL GERMAN DRAMATIZATIONS OF JEWISH-CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS DISPUTATIONS, CHURCH POLICY, AND LOCAL SOCIAL CLIMATES

2002 ◽  
Vol 8 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 209-227
Author(s):  
John Martin
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
German Literature ◽  
Social Conditions ◽  
Dramatic Works ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Passion Play ◽  
Lay People ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Church Policy ◽  
The Church

AbstractA comparison of the two Frankfurt Passion play manuscripts with two major dramatic works of Nuremberg dramatist Hans Folz reveals the impact of local social conditions on attitudes toward Christian-Jewish religious disputation between lay people. Though such debate was officially condemned by the Church from the thirteenth century onward, local attitudes determined whether the official condemnation would be respected or ignored. Further, dramatic engagement with theological issues produced, in Folz's work, toward a more benign depiction of Jews than commonly seen in late medieval German literature.

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