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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of Christianity
  • Cited by 6
  • Volume 4: Christianity in Western Europe, c.1100–c.1500
  • Edited by Miri Rubin, Queen Mary University of London, Walter Simons, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2010
Print publication year:
2009
Online ISBN:
9781139056021
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521811064
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Religion
Series:
Cambridge History of Christianity
Subjects:
Regional and World History: General Interest, History, Regional History Before 1500, Religion, Church History
Information

Book description

During the early middle ages, Europe developed complex and varied Christian cultures, and from about 1100 secular rulers, competing factions and inspired individuals continued to engender a diverse and ever-changing mix within Christian society. This volume explores the wide range of institutions, practices and experiences associated with the life of European Christians in the later middle ages. The clergy of this period initiated new approaches to the role of priests, bishops and popes, and developed an ambitious project to instruct the laity. For lay people, the practices of parish religion were central, but many sought additional ways to enrich their lives as Christians. Impulses towards reform and renewal periodically swept across Europe, led by charismatic preachers and supported by secular rulers. This book provides accessible accounts of these complex historical processes and entices the reader towards further enquiry.

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"...inspires awe....enormous diversity of of excellent scholars....stands out from rivals by its sheer scale....provide an effective structure....identification and development of themes is thoroughly successful....deeply impressive..."
--Philip Jenkins

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 23 - Repression and power
    pp 353-371
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter discusses the events around Mainz and popular image of medieval repression. Indiscriminate persecution was to be replaced by the methodical application of law. Protestant historians, from the sixteenth century onward, sought roots for their reforms in the heresies of earlier periods, and hence associated their contemporary struggles with past persecution, depicting an all-powerful and highly repressive Catholic Church. Elements of this viewpoint continued to inform the foundational histories of medieval repression written in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the Third Lateran Council various named heretical groups were anathematised, using measures designed to enlist the aid of local secular powers against them. The Franciscan preacher Bernard Delicieux famously led a popular and legal revolt against inquisition in southern France. In various ways, the mechanisms of repression were prey to the vicissitudes of local politics and attitudes.
  • 24 - Faith and the intellectuals I
    pp 372-393
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The history of medieval thought could be written in terms of limitations demanded from reason to make room for faith. The church would be depicted as an inherently thought-curbing institute that constantly and efficiently exerted pressure on intellectuals for the defence of orthodoxy. The study of the relationship between faith and reason has been overshadowed by the censorial act of the condemnation of 219 propositions in philosophy and theology by Bishop Stephen Tempier. The condemnation was portrayed as a response to the unbearable challenges to faith posed by the absorption of non-Christian philosophical learning. Jean Buridan alternated his metaphysics to accommodate the separability of accidents dictated by the doctrine of faith. The case of Albert the Great discussion of sodomy is another example of self-censorship that demonstrates the inability or unwillingness of intellectuals to disengage their thought from the constraints of orthodox religion. There were several strategies adopted by different intellectuals to legitimise physiognomy.
  • 25 - Faith and the intellectuals II
    pp 394-404
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter concerns the persistent preoccupation with the boundaries between inquiry and faith, as they appear in the context of the liberal arts in the high and in the later Middle Ages. Augustine's main argument is that the Israelites, when they fled from Egypt, were advised by God to take foreign gold and silver vessels with them. Justified by such arguments, the liberal arts found their way into the intellectual life of the Middle Ages. Thierry of Chartres, who since about 1142 was chancellor of the bishop of Chartres, dedicated a book to the seven liberal arts, which he calls Heptateuchon. Frequently the proscribed opinions derive from the ideas of Aristotelian commentators, as is the case for Averroes' doctrine on the unity and uniqueness of the intellect. As Roger Bacon puts it, the new learning introduced by the Aristotelian and Arabic writings must not be neglected at all, but has to be reclaimed for the faith.
  • 26 - Empowerment through reading, writing and example: the Devotio moderna
    pp 405-419
  • View abstract

    Summary

    During the last decades of the fourteenth century a movement of religious revival started in the present-day Netherlands, which came to be known as the Modern Devotion. The Modern Devout led a life of reading, writing, meditation and prayer. The attitude of the New Devout towards mysticism was characterised by ambivalence. Speculative mysticism of the Dominican type, represented by Meister Eckhart, found no echo among them. The typical work for men was the writing of books, as scribes or as authors. Writing pro pretio had some economic relevance; clients were found mainly among the clergy and in the many women's convents of which the brethren had pastoral care. All these texts, however, were in one way or another subservient to the common goal of improving the lives of the houses and their inhabitants: empowerment through reading and writing. Gabriel Biel was an exception to the rule that the Devotio moderna stayed aloof from university life.
  • 27 - Demons and the Christian community
    pp 420-432
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The anxiety over Satan, which led, in a reciprocal relationship of cause and effect, to the relentless persecution of devil-worshippers and acolytes, took hold fully half-way through the Middle Ages. Thus the devil claims an ancient history in Christianity, but the creation of a science of the devil, a demonology, seems to be much more recent. Also, during Christianity's first centuries the possessed could testify to the devil's plans and thus provide the church with useful knowledge. This chapter proposes that the process emerged out of the conjunction, revival and interaction of two ancient ideas: the pact with the devil and devil possession. The first great work of scholastic demonology is probably the lengthy discussion of devils in Thomas Aquinas' treatise On Evil, towards the end of his life. Various juridical bodies could deal with people who invoked demons: numerous episcopal law courts, the court of the Inquisition and ad hoc papal commissions.
  • 28 - Wycliffism and Lollardy
    pp 433-445
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Wycliffism and Lollardy raise a question of fundamental relevance to the study of late-medieval 'heresy' in England. This chapter explores whether it might be meaningful to use 'Wycliffism' and 'Lollardy' at least for purposes of analysis as designating conceptually distinct phenomena, whatever their actual interrelationship may have been in late-medieval England. The episcopal condemnation in 1277 of 219 Aristotelian articles allegedly supported by members of the faculty of arts in the University of Paris had a long prehistory and an equally substantial posterity. The implied endorsement of lay, extra-institutional, spiritual authority was sometimes accompanied by a questioning of the efficacy and administration of the sacraments. Of equal importance in Wyclif's polemic is anticlericalism. Wyclif's work both uses and critiques the academic-rationalist tools available to medieval scholasticism. Alexander Patschovsky's insight can be of assistance in broaching the vexed question of the medieval meanings and definitions of 'heresy' in general, and of Wycliffism/Lollardy in particular.
  • 29 - Observant reform in religious orders
    pp 446-457
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The period of the so-called Observant reforms was far more dynamic than longstanding convictions concerning the decline of religious life in the closing centuries of the Middle Ages. Most impressive was the wave of Observant initiatives in the mendicant orders, and the Franciscan order in particular. Observant reforms among the Augustinian hermits first made headway at the Lecceto hermitage near Siena in 1385, soon leading to the first Augustinian Observant Congregation. Until the 1460s the spread of moderate Dominican Observant reforms was very much a steered and moderately successful phenomenon, without granting much specific autonomy to the Observant houses. The Lateran reform congregation at first had an impact in Italy, but soon influenced many houses of regular canons in middle and eastern Europe, notably in Poland. Significant for late medieval society as a whole was the Observant interference with the religious life of the laity.
  • 30 - Public purity and discipline: states and religious renewal
    pp 458-471
  • View abstract

    Summary

    From the last decades of the fourteenth century to the first part of the sixteenth, preaching acquired a central role within the religious, social and political life of Western Europe. Both chronicles and regulatory documents attest that from the first decades of the fourteenth century onwards there was a growing and deliberate intervention by the Observant friars in the mechanisms of reform of city statutes. The displays which accompanied the friar's controversial regime exhibited a marked theatricality, ranging from processions of devoted 'boys' in the streets to the 'bonfires of the vanities' in the piazzas. The events surrounding the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola da Ferrara crystallised many of the characteristics and contradictions of popular preaching during the Italian Renaissance. The preaching phenomenon had particular characteristics within the Italian peninsula, due to the close ties between the Christian renewal of society and the establishment of papal power in its territories.
  • 31 - The Bible in the fifteenth century
    pp 472-493
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The medieval Bible was hardly a book at all, but a collection of ancient writings in translation. Usually the Bible was read in parts with commentary or in the form of semi-biblical narratives. One of the most influential commentaries was Nicholas of Lyra's Postilla litteralis on the entire Bible. Cambridge also continued to require Bible lectures, as did Paris and, given the influence of Paris' theology curriculum, probably every theology faculty in Europe's proliferating universities. Fifteenth-century theologians believed, like their predecessors, that the Bible was a coherent body of literature. The Bible's purpose, defined as its 'final cause', was human salvation, a state of perfect humanity. Perhaps the most important sign of the proliferation of biblical media was the production of vernacular translations of the Bible. The fifteenth-century church knew no total censure of Bible translation. Waldensianism was a movement begun around an interpretation of the gospel and vernacular Bible reading in the late twelfth century.

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