Introduction: Reading sacred space in late medieval England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Varnam
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Stained Glass ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

The introduction establishes the methodology for reading sacred space in Middle English literature through an examination of the fifteenth-century text ‘The Canterbury Interlude’, in which Chaucer’s pilgrims arrive at Canterbury Cathedral, visit the shrine of Thomas Becket and argue over their interpretation of the stained glass. The chapter explores the relationship between texts, buildings, visual art, and lay practice in the production of sanctity and sets up the theoretical framework for discussing the church as sacred space. The chapter argues that sacred space is performative and must be made manifest, with reference to Mircea Eliade’s concept of the hierophany, and suggests that sacred space is a powerful tool in the negotiation of social relationships. Finally, the chapter discusses sanctity as a form of symbolic capital in an increasingly competitive devotional environment.

The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Varnam
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Lay Devotion ◽  
The Church

The church as sacred space places the reader at the heart of medieval religious life, standing inside the church with the medieval laity in order to ask what the church meant to them and why. It examines the church as a building, idea, and community, and explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was crucial to its place at the centre of lay devotion and parish life. At a time when the parish church was facing competition for lay attention, and dissenting movements such as Lollardy were challenging the relevance of the material church, the book examines what was at stake in discussions of sanctity and its manifestations. Exploring a range of Middle English literature alongside liturgy, architecture, and material culture, the book explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was constructed and maintained for the edification of the laity. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary theoretical approaches, the book offers a reading of the church as continually produced and negotiated by the rituals, performances, and practices of its lay communities, who were constantly being asked to attend to its material form, visual decorations, and significance. The meaning of the church was a dominant question in late-medieval religious culture and this book provides an invaluable context for students and academics working on lay religious experience and canonical Middle English texts.

What the church betokeneth: Placing the people at the heart of sacred space

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Varnam
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Church Architecture ◽  
The People ◽  
Church Building ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Buildings

This chapter examines the debate over the relationship between the church building and its community in orthodox and Lollard texts. The chapter begins with the allegorical reading of church architecture in William of Durandus’s Rationale divinorum officiorum and the Middle English What the Church Betokeneth, in which every member of the community has a designated place in the church. The chapter then discusses Lollard attempts to divorce the building from the people by critiquing costly material churches and their decorations in The Lanterne of Liȝt, Lollard sermons, and Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede. The chapter concludes by examining Dives and Pauper in the context of fifteenth-century investment in the church, both financial and spiritual, and argues that in practice church buildings were at the devotional heart of their communities.

Heresy and Humanism

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Cole
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Considerable Debate

A controversial idea associated with religious culture in the late Middle Ages is that anyone who considers himself a part of mainstream religion must know his difference from heretics. A religious writer in this period who does not hew closely to orthodox teachings may be accused of being a heretic in his lyrical or prosaic musings about Church hierarchies, the Scripture, or the sacraments. This notion has become a subject of considerable debate among some specialists in Middle English literature. This article considers other paradigms that may broaden our notions about religious literature in fifteenth-century England. In particular, it proposes a paradigm that includes bishops rather than heretics, in part because bishops are mainly responsible for innovations that are neglected in a focus on Wycliffism. It also explores the critically neglected innovations within what it calls ecclesiastical humanism, some of its features, and how it emerged during the fifteenth century. It argues that the prevailing cultural obsession with the Wycliffite heresy had largely disappeared between the 1430s and the 1480s and was replaced, in part, by attempts to promote ecclesiastical institutions as centers of patronage and humanist literary culture.

scholarly journals “L’enfer, c’est les autres”: En-gendering Sin in Middle English Religious Drama. The Case of Chester

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-107
Author(s):  
Estella Ciobanu
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Religious Drama ◽  
Biblical Drama ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Gender Specific ◽  
Social Suppression

Abstract This article investigates the relationship between sin and its retribution as depicted in three Middle English biblical plays concerned with retribution, Noah’s Flood, the Harrowing of Hell and the Last Judgement, in the Chester biblical drama collection. The plays’ general tenor is, to modern sensibilities, conservative and disciplinarian with respect to social mores. Yet, studying the portrayal of sin against the plays’ social background may uncover secular mutations of the Christian conceptualisation of sin as a function of gender as well as estate. Chester’s Last Judgement dramatises sin in accordance with fifteenth-century ecclesiastical and secular developments which criminalise people along gender-specific, not just trade-specific, lines. In showing Mulier as the only human being whom Christ leaves behind in hell after his redemptive descensus, the Harrowing dooms not just the brewers’ and alehouse-keepers’ dishonesty, as imputed to brewsters in late medieval England, but women themselves, if under the guise of their trade-related dishonesty. The underside of the Chester Noahs’ cleansing voyage is women’s ideological and social suppression. Whether or not we regard the Good Gossips’ wine-drinking – for fear of the surging waters – or Mrs Noah’s defiant resistance to her husband as a performance of the sin of humankind calling for the punitive deluge, the script gives female characters a voice not only to show their sinfulness. Rather, like the Harrowing of Hell and less so the Last Judgement, Noah’s Flood, I argue, participates in a hegemonic game which appropriates one sin of the tongue, gossip, to make it backfire against those incriminated for using it in the first place: women.

Liturgy

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Holsinger
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
English Writing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early English ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Common Prayer

In medieval England, liturgy was a looming presence in so many aspects of English literary production. Yet many fundamental questions concerning the relationship between liturgy and vernacular literary production have remained unaddressed. This article explores the liturgical character of Middle English literature and how liturgy links the pre- and post-Conquest eras. In pursuing a liturgical history of early English writing, it outlines a detheologizing vision of liturgy and its objects. It also discusses the phenomenology of the modern theologized category of the “service book,” how previous theologizing habits of liturgical understanding have affected the Middle English religious lyric, and the writing and dissemination of the Book of Common Prayer.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document