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Scholarship, Religion and the Church (Presidential Address)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Denys Hay
Denys Hay*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Extract

In choosing this subject (on which many speakers have touched in talking to this Society) I started by intending to be more precise in my topic, as well as to introduce the question of church reform. The scholarship I had in mind was classical scholarship and all that went with it in eloquence, enjoyment and understanding of ancient authors. Against this I wished to pit those proponents of a religious life who rejected antiquity and all it stood for. Not of course all of either kind, but some representative examples drawn from the later Middle Ages. In the event the task I had chosen proved much more intricate that I had supposed it would be, the emerging picture more blurred. This, as we all know, is a fairly familiar phenomenon. And as for reform it figures, I am afraid, rather incidentally in what follows.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 17: Religion and Humanism , 1981 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1981

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References

1 The subject treated in this brief lecture has, it must be stressed, been the subject of many books and articles.; I shall mention only one of what would otherwise have become an unmanageable bibliography: Cochrane, Charles Norris, Christianity and Classical Culture (Oxford rev. ed. 1944 Google Scholar, repr. 1972). Speculum perfectionis trans. Steel, R. (London 1903)Google Scholar. For a brief note on this work see Moorman p 596.

2 Rashdall, H., Medieval Universities, ed. Powicke and Emden, 3 vols (Oxford 1936)Google Scholar.

3 ‘Like their lay counterparts . . . churchmen were divided into two nations, of masters and men. The masters were the masters of arts’. McFarlane, K. B., John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (London 1952) p 14 Google Scholar.

4 De consideration, V.xiv in PL 182 p 805; trans Lewis, George (Oxford 1908)Google ScholarPubMed.

5 McConica, James, EHR 94 (1979) 291–397 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with many references to current literature.

6 Delaissé, L. M. J., Le manuscrit autographe de Thomas a Kempis et ‘L’imitation de Jesus Christ’, Publications de Scriptorium 2, in 2 vols (Paris-Bruxelles 1956)Google Scholar.

7 Delaissé II. 181, 182. The most recent trans, into English is by Betty Knott (London 1963) with a useful introduction which unaccountably neglects to refer to the work of Delaissé.

8 Delaissé I. 103n; Knott, intro. 34-6.

9 See in general Hyma, Albert, The Christian Renaissance, 2nd ed. (Hamden, Conn. 1965)Google Scholar passim; and Cassirer, Ernst, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. (Oxford 1964)Google Scholar.

10 A useful anthology in French, trans, and ed. Gandillac, M. de, Oeuvres choisies de Nicolas de Cues (Paris 1942)Google Scholar; the commentary on the Lord’s Prayer (1442), pp 106-171, was, despite its erudition, composed in German and presumably intended for a wider audience than the books.

11 Whitfield, Petrarch and the Renascence, p 63.

12 Ed. L. M. Capelli (Paris 1906); trans. Nachod, Hans in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Cassirer, , Kristeller, , Randall, (Chicago 1948) p 105 Google Scholar.

13 Whitfield, Petrarch, cap. iii.

14 A convenient summary of the patristic arguments in the first chapter of Harbison, E. Harris, The Christian scholar in the Age of the Reformation (New York 1956)Google Scholar; and see n. 1 above. For Boccaccio see the ed. by Romano, Vincenzio in ‘Scrittori d’Italia’, 2 vols. (Bari 1951), ii pp 679–785 Google Scholar.

15 See, for example, Hutton, Edward, Giovanni Boccaccio (London 1910) pp 246-7Google Scholar.

16 The Lumia noctis, ed. Hunt, E. (Notre Dame 1940)Google Scholar; convenient extracts from the Regola del governo in Varese, Claudio, ed. Prosatori volgari del quattrocento (Milan 1955), pp 24–40 Google Scholar.

17 Lumia noctis= firefly. The classical word for this is lampyris; see Novati, Francesco, ed., Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati in ‘Fonti per la storia d’Italia’, vol. iv (Rome 1905) p 209 Google Scholarn; for a further discussion of Salutati’s notes on the Dominici text see Ullman’s, B. L. paper in Medievalia et humanistica (1943) reprinted in Studies in the Italian Rennaissance (Rome 1973) pp 255-275Google Scholar. Cf. Hunt’s ed. p. vxi n. The allusion is to John 1.5: ‘And the light shineth in darkness and the darkness comprehended it not’.

18 On the varying reactions to Lorenzo Valla see most recently Trinkaus, Charles, In our Image and Likeness, 2 vols (London 1970)Google Scholar.

19 Trinkaus, I p 128.

20 Ibid.

21 Conveniently in Garin, E., ed., Prosatori latini del quattrocento (Milan 1952) pp 578-9Google Scholar

22 Allen, P. S., ed., Opus Epislolarum (Oxford 1906) ep. 1 Google Scholar; ‘Complete Works of Erasmus Translated into English’, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Mynors, R. A. B., Thomson, D. F. S. and Ferguson, W. K. (Toronto 1975), p 89 Google Scholar.

23 See Smalley, Beryl, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame 1964)Google Scholar; Loewe, Raphael, ‘The medieval history of the Latin Vulgate’, in Lampe, G. W. H., ed., Cambridge History of the Bible 2 (Cambridge 1969)Google Scholar.

24 Toronto version, vol 23. ed, and trans. Margaret Mann Phillips (Toronto 1978) p 95 Google Scholar.

25 Preserved Smith, p 15.

26 See above, n. 24.

27 Ibid. pp 46-48, 61.

28 It is customary to refer to the ed. by Friedberg, E., i (Leipzig 1879)Google Scholar, but of course the citations are in all the numerous editions.

29 Ed. Margaret Mann Phillips, p 83.

30 Ed. Chapman, R. W., The Misfortunes of Elphin and CroUhet Castle (Oxford 1924) pp 192-201Google Scholar.