¹ This essay remains close to the original address, with the addition of selected primary and secondary literature. On “lateness” as a historiographical notion, and the late Middle Ages in particular, see Erich Meuthen, “Gab es ein spätes Mittelalter?” in Spätzeit: Studien zu den Problemen eines historischen Epochenbegriffs, ed. J. Kunisch (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1990), 91–135.

² For recent challenges to what were regarded as self-evident truths, see Peter Shuster, “Die Krise des Spätmittelalters: Zur Evidenz eines sozial- und wirtschaftsgeschichtlichen Paradigmas in der Geschichtsschreibung des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Historische Zeitschrift 269 (1999): 19–55; and Howard Kaminsky, “From Lateness to Waning to Crisis: The Burden of the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Early Modern History 4 (2000): 85–125.

³ In the multi-volume “History of the Church” undertaken by Philip Schaff (1819–1893), founding president of the American Society of Church History, the late medieval volume was left unfinished, then issued in 1910 by his son David under the title The Middle Ages: From Boniface VIII, 1294, to the Protestant Reformation, 1517 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995 [1920]), with an image of Wyclif opposite the title page. A thick volume, it surveys, relatively even-handedly, most issues still dealt with in surveys of the late medieval church. The basic one-volume survey for the past thirty years has been Francis Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979). The collaborative multivolume “Histoire du christianisme” of the 1980s titled its sixth (and generally quite fine) volume Un temps d'épreuves (1274–1449), ed. Michel Mollat and André Vauchez (Paris: Desclée; Fayard, 1990). I treated this period first in “The Church in the Fifteenth Century” in Handbook of European History in the Later Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, ed. Thomas Brady, Jr., Heiko Oberman, and James Tracy (Leiden: Brill, 1994): 305–330.

⁴ In an enormous literature, I note as representative for each: Josef Lortz, The Reformation in Germany (2 vols., New York: Herder and Herder, 1968; German original 1941); Bernd Moeller, “Frömmigkeit in Deutschland um 1500,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 56 (1965): 3–31; R. W. Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon, 1987).

⁵ In his The Harvest of Medieval Theology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), Heiko Oberman, consciously playing on the original Dutch (Herfstij = autumn) of Johan Huizinga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), transformed the autumnal theme into one of fruition, here for philosophy and theology, topics Huizinga barely treated. Now in the fourth volume of his history of western Christian mysticism, Bernard McGinn has employed the same image and theme for figures from Eckhardt (d. 1328) to Cusa (d. 1464) in his The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (New York: Paulist Press, 2005). For essays examining Huizinga's “autumn,” predominantly in the fields of philosophy and spirituality, see “Herbst des Mittelalters?” ed. Jan Aertsen and Martin Pickavé, Miscellanea Mediaevalia 31 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004).

⁶ To be fair, Reformation historians now nearly always open with a chapter on the late Middle Ages and acknowledge the medieval inheritance, thus Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Penguin, 2003), and Scott Hendrix, Recultivating the Vineyard: The Reformation Agendas of Christianization (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004).

⁷ Students of English literature have noted of late the troubled medieval/Renaissance/Reformation divide. The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2007) devoted a thematic issue to “Medieval/Renaissance: After Periodization,” with Margaret de Grazia, “The Modern Divide: From Either Side,” 453–467, for instance, acknowledging the problematic theoretical origins of any “modern” claim but concluding that one could finally only acknowledge the problem. The latest Oxford Literary History for this period, James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) told its story in reverse, from the 1530s to the 1370s. Elizabeth A. R. Brown (“On 1500” in The Medieval World, ed. Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson [London: Routledge, 2001]: 691–710), a historian focusing on politics, society, and law, suggests that the terms “medieval” and “renaissance” be strictly avoided. On the art history side, some have begun to redraw the balance between Huizinga's autumn and Burckhardt's Renaissance; see Marina Belozerskaya, Rethinking the Renaissance: Burgundian Arts across Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). And in religious history, see, representatively, Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990).

⁸ Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), which, though often critiqued as one-sided, moved historians to look anew at fifteenth-century religion.

⁹ See, representatively, The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety: Essays by Berndt Hamm, ed. Robert Bast (Leiden: Brill, 2004). See as well the essays in Spätmittelalterliche Frömmigkeit zwischen Ideal und Praxis, ed. Berndt Hamm and Thomas Lentes (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), and Frömmigkeit—Theologie—Frömmigkeitstheologie: Contributions to European Church History, Festschrift für Berndt Hamm zum 60. Geburtsstag, ed. Gudrun Litz, Heidrum Munzert, and Roland Leibenberg (Leiden: Brill, 2005). Hamm's work is now among the most creative on the fifteenth century, at least from the vantage point of theology and devotion, though its influence has only begun to enter the English-speaking world.

¹⁰ For two representative surveys of fifteenth-century history, see The New Cambridge Medieval History VII c. 1415–c. 1500, ed. Christopher Allmand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Erich Meuthen, Das 15. Jahrhundert, Oldenbourg Grundriss der Geschichte 9 (3rd ed. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1996), both with extensive bibliographies.

¹¹ But see Miri Rubin, “Europe Remade: Purity and Danger in Late Medieval Europe,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, 11 (2000): 101–124, who emphasizes still the notion of crisis but tries to break out of the old frame by pointing to multiplicity and creativity.

¹² No textbook or narrative, in my view, properly frames this period and its unusual energies in their own right. With respect to theology and the university, see now William J. Courtenay, Changing Approaches to Fourteenth-Century Thought, The Étienne Gilson series 29 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2007), whose rich exposition (much stemming from his own research) would largely fit my suggested chronology, and as well Marcia L. Colish, Remapping Scholasticism, The Étienne Gilson series 21 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2000).

¹³ While studies of fifteenth-century religious phenomena are multiplying, presentations of the whole, apart from directions signaled by Duffy and Hamm, mostly find it hard to avoid slipping into the old autumnal or pre-reform paradigms. For a brief attempt to characterize this period more openly and diversely, see Francis Rapp, “Religious Belief and Practice,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History VII: 205–219, and earlier his “Christianisme et vie quotidienne dans las pays germanique au XVe siècle: L'empreinte du sacré sur le temps,” in Histoire vécue du peuple Chrétien, ed. Jean Delumeau (Toulouse: Privat, 1979): 335–364. Importantly, Caroline Walker Bynum (Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007]) has now self-consciously attempted to discern fifteenth-century distinctives in her study of this cult.

¹⁴ See Giuseppe Alberigo, “The Reform of the Episcopate in the Libellus to Leo X by the Camaldolese Hermits Vincenzo Querini and Tommaso Giustiniani,” in Reforming the Church Before Modernity, ed. Christopher Bellitto and Louis Hamilton (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005): 139–152, here 149–150.

¹⁵ Erich Meuthen, “Das Basler Konzil als Forschungproblem der europäischen Geschichte,” Rheinisch-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vorträge G 274 (Düsseldorf: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1985); and “Kommunikation und intellektueller Fortschritt auf den Grosstagungen” in University, Council, City: Intellectual Culture on the Rhine (1300–1500): Acts of the XIIth International Colloquium of the Société Internationale pour l'Etude de la Philosophie Médiévale, Freiburg im Breisgau, 27–29 October 2004 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006): 291–322.

¹⁶ See now Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2009).

¹⁷ This observation is usually taken negatively, as evidence of things falling apart, thus Ferdinand Seibt, “Zu einem neuen Begriff von der “Krise des Spätmittelaters” in his introduction to the volume of essays Europa 1400: Die Krise des Spätmittelalters, ed. Ferdinand Seibt and Winfried Eberhard (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984) where he renders the notion of “crisis” as “disfunctionality” (13ff.). Introducing a follow-up volume of essays (Europa 1500: Integrationsprozesse im Widerstreit: Staaten, Regionen, Personenverbände, Christenheit, ed. Ferdinand Seibt and Winfried Eberhard [Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987]), he then speaks of a “new integration” or “integrating processes” on the eve of the sixteenth century, not so unlike Hamm's notion of a “normative centering” in later fifteenth-century devotion and theology. More nuanced, but also pointing toward movement in the late Middle Ages in German lands from an “open constitution” to “structured density,” is Peter Moraw, Von offener Verfassung zu gestalteter Verdichtung: Das Reich im späten Mittelalter, 1250–1490 (Berlin: Propyläen, 1985).

¹⁸ A more secular version of this, if framed still by notions of an expanding single Christendom, drives the narrative theme in Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change 950–1350 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), an expansion here, ultimately by arms and social power, of a distinctively “European” way of life, moving outward from a Frankish center to Europe's western, eastern, and southern peripheries.

¹⁹ John Van Engen, “Illicit Religion: The Case of Friar Matthew Grabow O.P.,” in Law and the Illicit in Medieval Europe, ed. Joel Kaye, Ann Matter, and Ruth M. Karras (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

²⁰ Katherine French, The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English Diocese (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Beat Kümin, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish c. 1400–1600 (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1996); A. J. Bijsterveld, Laverend tussen kerk en wereld: De pastoors in Noord-Brabant 1400–1570 (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 1993); D. Catherine Brown, Pastor and Laity in the Theology of Jean Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); The Parish in Late Medieval England, ed. Clive Burgess and Eamon Duffy (Donington: Shaun Dyas, 2006).

²¹ Dietrich Kurze, Pfarrerwahlen im Mittelalter: Ein Betrag zur Geschichte der Gemeinde und des Niederkirchenwesens (Cologne: Böhlau, 1966); Peter Blickle, Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1992; German original 1985), which casts the notion of community almost entirely forward into the sixteenth century and the Reformation.

²² A rich and still unevenly explored topic; first orientation in Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988): 344.

²³ Orientation, with literature, in Shannon McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities 1420–1530 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).

²⁴ See my “Managing the Common Life: The Brothers at Deventer and the Codex of the Household (The Hague, MS KB 70 H 75)” in Schriftlichkeit und Lebenspraxis im Mittelalter, ed. Hagen Keller, Christel Meier, and Thomas Scharff (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1999): 111–169.

²⁵ See now Thomas Luongo, The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), who also uses the term “pious networks.”

²⁶ Christoph Burger, Aedificatio, Fructus, Utilitas: Johannes Gerson als Professor der Theologie und Kanzler der Universität Paris, Beiträge zur Historischen Theologie 70 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986): 178–183; also Van Engen, “Illicit Religion.”

²⁷ A point noted by several historians, though with few penetrating reflections; but see John Henderson, Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 411–442.

²⁸ See now the exhibition catalogue Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych, ed. John Oliver Hand, Catherine A. Metzger, and Ron Spronk (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), and the accompanying volume of essays, especially Maximiliaan P. J. Martens, “Some Reflections on the Social Function of Diptychs,” in Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006): 84–91.

²⁹ Thomas, Imitatio Christi I.1, its first book properly titled “Admonitiones ad spiritualem uitam utiles.”

³⁰ See Sven Grosse, Heilsungewissheit und Scrupulositas im späten Mittelalter: Studien zu Johannes Gerson und Gattungen der Frömmigkeitstheologie seiner Zeit, Beiträge zur Historischen Theologie 85 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994): 15–16, these observations made in tractates in both Latin and French offering “remedies for the weak-souled.”

³¹ For theological reflections on the meaning of Omnis utriusque, incorporated into church law as Decretales V.38.12 (“on penances”), see Thomas Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), and Martin Ohst, Pflichtbeichte: Untersuchungen zum Busswesen im Hohen und Späten Mittelalter, Beiträge zur Historischen Theologie 89 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995).

³² The Book of Margery Kempe 1, ed. Lynn Staley (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996): 21–22.

³³ See the kinds of cases assembled by Anton Störmann, Die städtischen Gravamina gegen den Klerus am Ausgange des Mittelalters und in der Reformationszeit, Reformationsgeschichtliche Studien und Texte 24–26 (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1916): 51–74.

³⁴ For all these matters, see my forthcoming book, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), here esp. chapters 3 and 6.

³⁵ Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. Anne Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978): 21.

³⁶ See, representatively, Roger S. Wieck, Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (New York: Braziller, 2001), and now Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers 1240–1570 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006).

³⁷ For indulgences, now Robert Shaffern, The Penitents' Treasury: Indulgences in Latin Christendom, 1175–1375 (Scranton, Pa.: University of Scranton Press, 2007), and R. N. Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

³⁸ The religious intersection was worked out on a broad canvas by Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999).

³⁹ See my “Devout Communities and Inquisitorial Orders: The Legal Defense of the New Devout,” in Reform von unten: Gerhart Zerbolt von Zutphen und die Brüder vom Gemeinsamen Leben, ed. Nikolaus Staubach (Frankfurt, Peter Lang, 2004): 44–101, and my forthcoming Sisters and Brothers, passim.

⁴⁰ John Van Engen, “Friar Johannes Nyder on Laypeople Living as Religious in the World,” in Vita Religiosa im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Kaspar Elm zum 70. Geburtstag (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999): 583–615.

⁴¹ A matter well-known to later medieval historians but perhaps not yet sufficiently cast on a broad canvas; for one good recent attempt, see Daniel Lord Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264–1423 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003).

⁴² Brian Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory: The Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism, enlarged edition (Leiden: Brill, 1998 [1955]). For a lucid and engaged introduction to a vast and controversial literature, see Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Precisely owing to its continuing relevance for members of the Roman Catholic church, conciliar theory often gets cast as a centuries-long tradition (also true) but without due attention to the amazingly creative (and also contradictory) dimensions of its fifteenth-century emergence. For a response to charges of total ineffectiveness, see Phillip H. Stump, The Reforms of the Council of Constance (1414–1418) (Leiden: Brill, 1994).

⁴³ See, for instance, Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002).

⁴⁴ I developed this theme more fully in “Conversion and Conformity in the Early Fifteenth Century,” in Conversion: Old Worlds and New, ed. Anthony Grafton and Kenneth Mills (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2003): 30–65.

⁴⁵ A theme insufficiently understood, in my view, whether by those who approach Wyclif and Lollards as “subversives” or as “premature Protestants”; but see Stephen Lahey, Philosophy and Politics in the Thought of John Wyclif (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and Kantik Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

⁴⁶ See James Mixson, Poverty's Proprietors: Ownership and Mortal Sin at the Origins of the Observant Movement (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2009).

⁴⁷ In a large and ever-growing literature, the best recent studies are of Italian confraternities: John Henderson, Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), and Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

⁴⁸ The key work on this theme, and on the mechanism and its records, was done by Ludwig Schmugge, Kirche, Kinder, Karrieren: Päpstliche Dispense von der unehelichen Geburt im Spätmittelalter (Zurich: Artemis & Winkler, 1995); and Illigitimität im Spätmittelalter, Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 29, ed. Ludwig Schmugge (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1994). For this world of individual privileges, see too my “Privileging the Devout: A Text from the Brothers at Deventer,” in Roma, magistra mundi, Itineraria culturae medievalis: Mélanges offerts au Père L.E. Boyle à l'occasion de son 75e anniversaire (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998): 951–963.

⁴⁹ A point generally overlooked by literary historians; see my forthcoming Sisters and Brothers.

⁵⁰ No new observation, though often read as an extension of mendicant activity or an anticipation of Protestant preoccupations. There is an immense literature. For the fifteenth-century world, see representatively H. Leith Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), Larissa Taylor, Soldiers of Christ: Preachers and Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

⁵¹ For Dutch, see the essays in Boeken voor de eeuwigheit: Middelnederlands geestelijk proza, ed. Thom Mertens (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1993).

⁵² For the enormous literature generated of late on the subject of Lollards, see the running bibliography at http://lollardsociety.org/bibhome.

⁵³ For changing approaches to this topic, and to fifteenth-century religion in general, see now Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).

⁵⁴ Basic approach now (with texts and bibliography) in Nikolaus Staubach, “Gerhard Zerbolt von Zutphen und die Apologie der Laienlektüre in der Devotio moderna,” in Laienlektüre und Buchmarkt im späten Mittelalter, ed. Thomas Kock and Rita Schlusemann (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997): 221–289. See also, for a slightly different emphasis, my Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life.

⁵⁵ Mary A. and Richard H. Rouse, Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990): 449–467.

⁵⁶ For general introductions with literature, see also Richard Kieckhefer, “Major Currents in Late Medieval Devotion,” and Caroline Walter Bynum, “Religious Women in the Later Middle Ages,” in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, ed. Jill Raitt, with Bernard McGinn and John Meyendorf (New York: Crossroad, 1987): 75–108, 121–139.

⁵⁷ To stand in for an immense literature I cite representatively Jeffrey Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

⁵⁸ Bynum's Wonderful Blood reconstructs the remaining evidence about those shrines.

⁵⁹ Gerhart Zerbolt of Zutphen, Tractatus devotus de reformacione virium anime, 18–34, ed. Francis Joseph Legrand (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001): 151–227.

⁶⁰ Schwesternbuch und Statuten des St. Agnes-Konvents in Emmerich 6, ed. Anne Bollmann and Nikolaus Staubach (Emmerich: Geschichtsverein, 1998): 86.

⁶¹ One of the real commonplaces about later medieval church history, going back at least a century, perpetuated for their differing purposes by older Protestant and Catholic scholars alike. Compare William J. Courtenay, “Spirituality and Late Scholasticism,” in Christian Spirituality, 109–120.

⁶² Daniel Hobbins, “The Schoolman as Public Intellectual: Jean Gerson and the Late Medieval Tract,” The American Historical Review 108 (2003): 1308–1335; Daniel Hobbins, “Jean Gerson's Authentic Tract on Joan of Arc: Super facto puellae et credulitate sibi praestanda (14 May 1429),” Mediaeval Studies 67 (2005): 99–155.

⁶³ Bynum, Wonderful Blood (exemplary for lifting out the theological engagement with issues of devotion and practice).

⁶⁴ For entry to a now burgeoning field, see, for instance, J. Allan Mitchel, Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower (Rochester, N.Y.: Brewer, 2004). An example from the German world: Franz-Josef Schweitzer, Tugend und Luster in illustrierten didaktischen Dichtungen des späten Mittelalters (Hildesheim: Olms Weidemann, 1993).

⁶⁵ P. Bange, Spiegels der Christenen: Zelfreflectie en ideaalbeeld in laat-middeleeuwse moralistisch-didactische traktaten (Nijmegen: Centrum voor Middeleeuwse Studies, 1986).

⁶⁶ The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Staley: 17.

⁶⁷ Thomas, Imitatio Christi II.3, II.1.