Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Krug
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Margery Kempe ◽  
Emotional Engagement ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Christian Mysticism ◽  
Spiritual Community ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
First Child ◽  
Devotional Writing

Since its rediscovery in 1934, the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe has become a canonical text for students of medieval Christian mysticism and spirituality. Its author was a fifteenth-century English laywoman who, after the birth of her first child, experienced vivid religious visions and vowed to lead a deeply religious life while remaining part of the secular world. After twenty years, Kempe began to compose with the help of scribes a book of consolation, a type of devotional writing found in late medieval religious culture that taught readers how to find spiritual comfort and how to feel about one's spiritual life. This book shows how and why Kempe wrote her Book, arguing that in her engagement with written culture she discovered a desire to experience spiritual comfort and to interact with fellow believers who also sought to live lives of intense emotional engagement. An unlikely candidate for authorship in the late medieval period given her gender and lack of formal education, Kempe wrote her Book as a revisionary act. This book shows how the Book reinterprets concepts from late medieval devotional writing (comfort, despair, shame, fear, and loneliness) in its search to create a spiritual community that reaches out to and includes Kempe, her friends, family, advisers, and potential readers. It offers a fresh analysis of the Book as a written work and draws attention to the importance of reading, revision, and collaboration for understanding both Kempe's particular decision to write and the social conditions of late medieval women's authorship.

Ambrosius Spiera: A Fifteenth-Century Italian Preacher and Scholar

1974 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 448-459
Author(s):  
Ronald M. Rentner
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Medieval Theology ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Late Medieval Period

Our attempts to piece together the mosaic of ideas and events during the late medieval period have been enriched in recent years by the increased attention given to the study of sermons. Sentence commentaries, summae and tracts are the bedrock for the study of medieval theology, but we also wish to know what was being preached.

International Humanitarian Law

2020 ◽  
pp. 117-137
Author(s):  
Aryeh Neier
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Sun Tzu ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
Chinese Military ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the notion that truly “civilized” people should set boundaries even in war, which was not solely confined to those who founded Western civilization. It mentions the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, whose writings about the relationship between warfare and politics anticipated much contemporary thought on civility. It also identifies some of the leading figures in the Christian Church in the West that called for restraint in combat. The chapter looks into the most significant development of codes imposing restraints on the conduct of hostilities that took place during the “age of chivalry,” which was the late medieval period that lasted from about the twelfth to the fifteenth century. It also reviews accounts of the development of contemporary international humanitarian law, starting with the battle of Solferino in 1859.

scholarly journals Economic inequality in the rural Southern Low Countries during the Fifteenth century: sources, data and reflection

2020 ◽  
pp. 205-229
Author(s):  
Thijs Lambrecht ◽  
Wouter Ryckbosch
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Regional Variation ◽  
Regional Differences ◽  
Reliable Data ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Income Distributions ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
Rural Income ◽  
Distribution Of Income

This chapter seeks to explore local and regional variation in levels of inequality in different types of rural localities and regions within the late medieval County of Flanders. Our research indicates that fiscal sources for the County of Flanders can produce reliable data on the distribution of income during the late medieval period. The analysis of these data shows that important local and regional differences can be observed in the distribution of rural income. To a large extent, these local variations can be explained by differences in access to local economic resources. Our results, however, also indicate that substantial regional differences in access to rural resources can produce similar income distributions.

scholarly journals Writing the Ethnic Origins of the Rasulids in Late Medieval South Arabia

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 380-399
Author(s):  
Daniel Mahoney
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Islamic Period ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
South Arabia ◽  
New Strategy ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Political Groups ◽  
Ethnic Origins

The Rasulids arrived in South Arabia towards the end of the sixth/twelfth century as Turkoman officers in the Ayyubid military. Thereafter they established a dynasty that lasted until the mid-ninth/fifteenth century. At the height of their power at the end of the seventh/thirteenth century, an effort to further buoy their political legitimacy was undertaken by resituating their ethnic origins to South Arabia. This first appeared within a genealogy that simultaneously showed their emergence from the complex web of descent of the local tribes, as well as juxtaposed them with the rulers of the Islamic Caliphate and elevated them above other contemporary political groups in South Arabia. However, after the Rasulid military was increasingly challenged over the course of the eighth/fourteenth century and the dynasty’s influence in the region and the wider Islamic world continued to dissipate, the assertion of their local origins was greatly fleshed out into a narrative at the beginning of a dynastic chronicle of the early ninth/fifteenth century. This prologue explains more explicitly how they first emigrated from South Arabia in the pre-Islamic period only to then return in the late medieval period as its rightful rulers. Overall, the construction of this origin story points to the Rasulids’ attempt to take on a new strategy of identification through the appropriation of South Arabian cultural memory in order to strengthen their political status.

Merchant Taylors of London’s shift to business English: New insights on the languages of record in their Master and Wardens’ Accounts

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
José Miguel Alcolado Carnicero
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Written Communication ◽  
Business English ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Late Medieval Period

AbstractFrench and Latin used to be the two main languages of record in the Merchant Taylors, as well as other London livery companies, as late as the fifteenth century, at least. From the fourteenth century onwards, English was becoming more and more present in this guild’s business accounts, until it replaced both Romance languages as their new official medium of written communication. Seen the inconsistent dates of adoption of English in the Merchant Taylors’ Master and Wardens’ Accounts suggested in the literature, this article applies two different approaches to language shift in the late medieval period in order to analyse and illustrate when exactly the whole Company is supposed to have substituted French and Latin for English forever. As the search of that permanent and communal shift leads to the necessary consultation of financial manuscripts kept as late as the seventeenth century, it is concluded that the construction of a unitary framework for the study of the different language shifts in the London livery companies at different periods would yield more comprehensive results.

scholarly journals Phonotactics, graphotactics and contrast: the history of Scots dental fricative spellings

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
BENJAMIN MOLINEAUX ◽  
JOANNA KOPACZYK ◽  
RHONA ALCORN ◽  
WARREN MAGUIRE ◽  
VASILIS KARAISKOS ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Sound Pattern ◽  
The North ◽  
Late Medieval Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Fifteenth

The spelling conventions for dental fricatives in Anglic languages (Scots and English) have a rich and complex history. However, the various – often competing – graphemic representations (<þ>, <ð>, <y> and <th>, among others) eventually settled on one digraph, <th>, for all contemporary varieties, irrespective of the phonemic distinction between /ð/ and /θ/. This single representation is odd among the languages’ fricatives, which tend to use contrasting graphemes (cf. <f> vs <v> and <s> vs <z>) to represent contrastive voicing, a sound pattern that emerged nearly a millennium ago. Close examinations of the scribal practices for English in the late medieval period, however, have shown that northern texts had begun to develop precisely this type of distinction for dental fricatives as well. Here /ð/ was predominantly represented by <y> and /θ/ by <th> (Jordan 1925; Benskin 1982). In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, this ‘Northern System’ collapsed, due to the northward spread of a London-based convention using exclusively <th> (Stenroos 2004). This article uses a rich body of corpus evidence for fifteenth-century Scots to show that, north of the North, the phonemic distinction was more clearly mirrored by spelling conventions than in any contemporary variety of English. Indeed, our data for Older Scots local documents (1375–1500) show a pattern where <y> progressively spreads into voiced contexts, while <th> recedes into voiceless ones. This system is traced back to the Old English positional preferences for <þ> and <ð> via subsequent changes in phonology, graphemic repertoire and letter shapes. An independent medieval Scots spelling norm is seen to emerge as part of a developing, proto-standard orthographic system, only to be cut short in the sixteenth century by top-down anglicisation processes.

A Mathematical Turn

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Oosterhoff
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
University Reform ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Nicholas Of Cusa ◽  
Devotio Moderna ◽  
Court Politics ◽  
Spiritual Reform ◽  
The University

Lefèvre described his own mathematical turn as a kind of conversion. This chapter explains what motivated his turn to mathematics, considering the place of mathematics in fifteenth-century Paris in relation to court politics and Lefèvre’s own connections to Italian humanists. But more importantly, Lefèvre’s attitude to learning and the propaedeutic value of mathematics drew on the context of late medieval spiritual reform, with its emphasis on conversion and care of the soul. In particular, Lefèvre’s turn to university reform seems to have responded to the works of Ramon Lull, alongside the devotio moderna and Nicholas of Cusa, which he printed in important collections. With such influences, Lefèvre chose the university as the site for intellectual reform.

Public and Private: The Late Medieval Wall Paintings of Haddon Hall Chapel, Derbyshire

2006 ◽  
Vol 86 ◽  
pp. 179-205
Author(s):  
Mellie Naydenova
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Wall Paintings ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Public Statement ◽  
The Public ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Public Persona ◽  
Private Devotion

This paper focuses on the mural scheme executed in Haddon Hall Chapel shortly after 1427 for Sir Richard Vernon. It argues that at that time the chapel was also being used as a parish church, and that the paintings were therefore both an expression of private devotion and a public statement. This is reflected in their subject matter, which combines themes associated with popular beliefs, the public persona of the Hall's owner and the Vernon family's personal devotions. The remarkable inventiveness and complexity of the iconography is matched by the exceptionally sophisticated style of the paintings. Attention is also given to part of the decoration previously thought to be contemporary with this fifteenth-century scheme but for which an early sixteenth-century date is now proposed on the basis of stylistic and other evidence.

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