The Book as Object of Lay Devotion in Late Medieval Transylvania (Fifteenth-Sixteenth Centuries)

"Research on late-medieval religiosity in Central and Western Europe has shown that religious books were not only possessed, but also read, and sometimes even copied or disseminated by laymen. The need for a better definition of the relationship between the laity and the religious text leads to the formulation and intensive discussion of concepts such as devotional reading, culture of religious reading, or vernacular theology. Several examples of works that belonged to late-medieval Transylvanian laymen suggest the opportunity and, at the same time, the need to ask whether similar dynamics of pious behaviour can be discussed in their case. In order to provide a convincing answer, this study proposes an analysis of these books from at least three perspectives: theme, language, formal characteristics. The most interesting information is offered, however, by property notes, which suggest that the devotional potential of the book was not activated by reading, but rather by donation. By offering solutions to the everyday necessities of ecclesiastical institutions, these gifts were designed to ensure personal salvation as well. In order to support this hypothesis, I will also address another category of sources from which mentions regarding this kind of donations can be recovered, i.e. last wills. Keywords: religious books, devotional practices, pious donations, last wills, laity "

Local Religion and Tridentine Reform in the Early Modern Basque Country

This chapter provides a brief synopsis of the presence of Navarrese delegates at the Council of Trent, then moves on to an overview of the Diocese of Pamplona's most important Tridentine era synod meeting and a representative sampling of reform episodes as they played out on the ground. To understand the inconsistencies in enforcement concerning the seroras, reforms concerning the seroras must be left in their original context. Mirroring the diocese's attention to clerical misbehavior, the chapter thus approaches reform of the seroras through the lens of male reform, and especially pastoral residency. The diocese's concentration on professionalizing the lower clergy and directing lay devotion into appropriate channels reveals much about the diocese's unstated policy against interfering with the seroras: that is, the diocese identified reforming the lower clergy as the key to a successful reform program, and everything else was secondary. Other aspects of local religious life that did not mesh with official Tridentine reform ideals were allowed to slide to make way for more urgent reforms. In this context, the diocese judged that licensing the seroras was the easiest way to control the vocation, allowing ecclesiastical authorities to turn their eye to more pressing matters such as wandering abbots, violent hermits, and “repulsive” parish priests.

‘Grant me Grace’: Alternative Visions for Vernacular Theology and Lay Devotion in Richard Caister and Nicholas Love

Richard Caister is an important but unstudied example of vernacular theology in England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Himself a priest, Caister’s extant work indicates a figure who departed from the conservative instutionalism of Thomas Arundel’s regime on two very important points: the suitability of the vernacular for theological and spiritual discourse and the necessity of auricular confession. The distinctive position Caister takes on these points can be observed best by a comparative analysis to Nicholas Love’s theological work which provided a theological rationale for Arundel’s restrictive legislation, articulating a negative view of the vernacular and of the capacity of the laity which endorsed lay dependence upon their Latinate clergy. This article argues that Caister provides an important alternative vision for vernacular theology and the laity predicated upon a thorough Christocentrism.

The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture

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.

Music, ritual and patronage at the Church of Our Lady, Antwerp

The development of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century sacred polyphony is linked closely not only to the Mass and divine services of the Roman Catholic Church, but equally to the rise of lay devotional congregations who sponsored their own services, often musically elaborate, at private chapels and altars. Within this popular phenomenon of lay devotion in the Low Countries, several northern confraternities can be cited for their very early regular use of polyphony. A polyphonic Salve service was established in 1362 by the Marian confraternity at St Goedele in Brussels, and Reinhard Strohm has shown that, by 1396, the Marian Guild of the Dry Tree (Ghilde vanden droghen Boome) in Bruges sponsored weekly masses sung in polyphony by its guild members. That polyphony was central to some fourteenth-century confraternity services is confirmed by the records of the Illustrious Confraternity of Our Lady in 's-Hertogenbosch, founded in 1318 in St John's Church.