Haringhandel en heiligenverering : Het toenemend belang van religieuze praktijken binnen het Haarlems Schonenvaardersgilde in de zestiende eeuw

Herring trade and holy feast. The growing importance of religious practices in the Schonenvaarders guild in sixteenth-century HaarlemThis article examines the importance of religious and social practices for a sixteenth-century guild of herring merchants in Haarlem. Although recent historiography on medieval and early modern corporations has shown the importance of these practices for guild life in general, not much is known regarding merchant guilds specifically. Using practice-oriented sources such as the administration and memberships lists in guild books, and religious artefacts such as the guild’s altar, this article maps the religious and social practices of the guild members. It argues that although in the sixteenth century the guild still presented itself as a guild of herring traders, these economic activities of the guild declined in importance in this period compared with its pre-existing social and religious activities. Thus, the function and practices of the guild changed over time, showing the flexibility of these dynamic institutions. The Schonenvaarders guild shows also the importance of these religious practices for both community cohesion within the guild and corporation-based lay piety in sixteenth-century Haarlem.

Friendship and Eighteenth-Century Nonconformist Memorial Publication

This chapter investigates the role of friendship in the composition, publication, and circulation of biographical accounts and collected works of religious poets in the first half of the eighteenth century. Funeral sermons and elegaic poems published to mark the death of Isaac Watts in 1748 were typical of collective memory making within his reformed Protestant tradition that reinforced the primacy of religious ministers in the world of dissent. The examples of Elizabeth Rowe (in England) and Jane Turell (in America) complicate our picture of the role of memorial in sustaining a tradition of lay piety and authorship within a transatlantic religious community. The emotional and practical circumstances of friendship (as compared to family ties) contributed significantly to shaping the printed texts that were produced as memorials to Watts, Rowe, and Turell, to the reception of those texts, and to the reputations of those authors.

Byzantine Reception

This chapter presents an overview of the Byzantine reception of patristic methods of biblical exegesis, focusing on the period between approximately the sixth and the fourteenth centuries. Byzantine exegetes accepted the threefold method of interpretation, as defined by Origen, but were flexible with regard to how Scripture should be read in particular liturgical or didactic settings. The chapter explores four separate contexts of Byzantine biblical exegesis, including (1) liturgical celebration; (2) commentaries and theological treatises; (3) lay piety; and (4) monastic life, asking whether these demanded different hermeneutical approaches. Above all, the chapter demonstrates that patristic influence remained strong throughout the Byzantine period, with medieval exegetes regarding the fathers as authoritative in their interpretation of the Old and New Testaments for contemporary Christian audiences.

Preaching and Popular Christianity

The vast homiletic corpus of John Chrysostom has received renewed attention in recent years as a source for the wider cultural and historical context within which his sermons were preached. Scholars have demonstrated the excitin potential his sermons have to shed light on aspects of daily life, popular attitudes and practices of lay piety. In short, Chrysostom’s sermons have been recognised as a valuable source for the study of ’popular Christianity’ at the end of the fourth century. This study, however, questions the validity of some recent conclusions. A narrative has been developed in which Chrysostom is often seen as at odds with the congregations to whom he preached. On this view, the Christianity of élites such as Chrysostom had made little inroads into popular thought beyond the fairly superficial, and congregations were still living with older, more culturally traditional views about religious beliefs which preachers were doing their utmost to overcome. This study argues that such a portrayal is based on a misreading of Chrysostom’s sermons and fails to explain satisfactorily the apparent popularity that Chrysostom enjoyed as a preacher. What this study sets out to do, therefore, is to reassess how we read Chrysostom’s sermons, with a particular focus on the stern language which permeated his preaching, and on which the image of the contrary congregation is largely based. In doing this, we recover a neglected portrayal of Chrysostom as a pastor and of preaching as a pastoral and liturgical activity, and it becomes clear that his use of critical language says more about how he understood his role as preacher than about the nature of popular Christianity in late-antique society. There thus emerges a very different picture of late–antique Christianity, in which Chrysostom’s congregations are rather more willing to listen and learn from their preacher than is often assumed.