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Triple-Deckers and Eagle Lecterns: Church Furniture for the Book in Late Medieval and Early Modern England1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Susan Wabuda*
Affiliation:
Fordham University

Extract

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me: because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek.’ When Jesus stood up to read these verses from Isaiah at the start of his public ministry, as he began to reveal himself as the Word in the synagogue of Nazareth, the book ‘he had opened’ at the reading desk was one of the Torah scrolls, brought out for him from the Ark of the Law, the imposing reserve which is, from age to age, the most sacred part of any synagogue. Holy Scripture has always been a public book, a treasure for each synagogue, and for the commonwealth of the Christian community sacred as text and object. But the mystical sanctity of the Bible, and holy books in general, has raised a perennial problem. Precious books have usually been hedged round by restrictions to protect them from the profane, even at the cost of obscuring the public approach which is a necessary part of assembled worship. In this episode in the life of Christ, when the listeners grew too ‘filled with wrath’ for him to continue, we meet the deep and recurrent tension between the community’s need to hear the Word, and the conflicting desire to shield its essential sanctity, which accompanied the book from Judaism in transition to the Christian Church.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004

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Footnotes

1

Some of the themes of this paper are amplified in my monograph Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2002). Continued thanks are due to Prof. Patrick Collinson, Maria Dowling, and Alexandra Walsham (for suggesting this topic).

References

2 Isa. 61.1-2, 58.6; Luke 4.16-30; Encyclopedia Judaica Jerusalem, 1971), sub ‘Ark’, ‘Torah Ornaments’, ‘Word’, and ‘Yad’.

3 Aston, Margaret, ‘Devotional literacy’, in her Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (1984), 10133, esp. pp. 108113 Google Scholar; Cressy, David, ‘Books as totems in seventeeuth-century England and New England’, Journal of Library History, 21 (1986), 92106 Google Scholar; Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), 45–6, 118–19, 214 Google Scholar; Wabuda, Susan, ‘The woman with the rock’, in Wabuda, Susan and Litzenberger, Caroline, eds, Belief and Practice in Reformation England (Aldershot, 1998), 43 Google Scholar; Walsham, Alexandra, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 332.Google Scholar

4 Subordination: Jungman, Joseph A., The Mass of the Roman Rite, tr. Brunner, Francis A., rev. edn (New York, 1980), 53, 26973 Google Scholar. Donations of pulpits: Cox, J. Charles, Pulpits, Lecterns, and Organs in English Churches (1915), 42, 62, 70, 80 Google Scholar; Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c. 1450 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992), 110–16, 124–5, 134, 153–4. 3345.Google Scholar

5 [Standish, John], A Discourse wherin is Debated whether it be Expedient that the Scripture shoulde he in English (1554), ST Google Scholar 23207, sigs E5r-E9r, K3V-K4H Duffy, Stripping, 53–130, 157–60, 213–32; Collinson, Patrick, ‘The coherence of the text: how it hangeth together: the Bible in Reformation England’, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Supplement series, 105 (Sheffield, 1995), 84108, esp. 84Google Scholar; Aston, , ‘Devotional literacy’, 109 Google Scholar; Hudson, Anne, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988), 278389 Google Scholar; Wabuda, ‘Rock’, 46.

6 Jungmann, Mass, 273–5, 283–92; Rito of Durham, ed. J.T. Fowler, Surtees Society, 107 (1903), 8–9; Aston, Margaret, ‘Segregation in church’, SCH, 27 (1990), 23794, csp. 242–50Google Scholar. For much of what follows, Cox, Pulpits, esp. chs 3–4, 8–9. See also the paper by Alexandra Walsham elsewhere in this volume.

7 Cox, Pulpits, 36–81.

8 Pelicans: Rites of Durham, 1–9; Cox, Pulpits, 163–5; Blench, J.W., Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: a Study of English Sermons, 1450-c.1600 (Oxford, 1964), 16 Google Scholar; Rubin, Miri, Corpus Christi: the Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991), 31012 Google Scholar. For the ambo, see Cox, Pulpits, 28; Jungmann, Mass, 269–73.

9 Cox, Pulpits, 28; Jungmann, Mass, 53, 269–73.

10 Brown, Peter, Augustine of Hippo: a Biography (Berkeley, CA, 1967), 251.Google Scholar

11 Lyndwood, William, Provinciale (Oxford, 1679)Google Scholar, III.4 (133, f); Cox, Pulpits, 32.

12 My thanks are due to the staffs of the cathedrals at Rochester and Strasbourg for my visits in the summers of 2000 and 1978.

13 Matt. 23.2; Neh. 8.1-5; Sermons by Hugh Latimer, ed. George Elwes Corrie, PS (Cambridge, 1844), 85–6, 206–7; Collinson, ‘Coherence of the text’, 107; Spencer, H. Leith, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford, 1993), 64 Google Scholar; Leader, Damian Richl, A History of Cambridge, I, The University to 1546 (Cambridge, 1988), 100 Google Scholar; Dowling, Maria, Fisher of Men: a Life of John Fisher, 1469–1535 (1999), 76 Google Scholar. My thanks also to Fr Louis Pascoc, S.J.

14 Cox, Pulpits, chs 3–4, 8–9; Duffy, Stripping, 57–8, 334. See also Dollmanxs, Francis T., Examples of Antient Pulpits (1849)Google Scholar; Owst, G.R., Preaching in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1926), 199.Google Scholar

15 Cox prints a finer example at Monksilvcr in Somerset, Pulpits, [62-3. Also, Duffy, Eamon, ‘Holy maydens, holy wyfes: the cult of women saints in fifteenth- and sixteenth- century England’, SCH, 27 (1990), 175196 Google Scholar; idem, Stripping, 110–16; McCullough, Peter E., Sermons at Court (Cambridge, 1998), 234 Google Scholar; Aston, ‘Devotional literacy’, 109. My thanks to the parishes of Clare and Kedington for my visits in 1997.

16 Pulpit notes: The Records of Two City Parishes, ed. William McMurray (1925), 1–14, 22. Crucifix: see Origo, Iris, The World of San Bernardino (New York, 1962), 1142 Google Scholar, or The English Works of John Fisher, ed. John E.J. Mayor, EETS, c.s., 27 (1876), 388–428.

17 Cox, Pulpits, 42, 62, 70, 80; Duffy, Stripping, 110–16, 124–5, 134, 153–4, 334–5; Scarisbrick, J.J., The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), 45.Google Scholar

18 Fisher, Works, 281. Lane: PRO, PROB 11/23, fols 29r-v; Whiting, Robert, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English People (Cambridge, 1989), 1920, 237.Google Scholar

19 Aston, , ‘Lollard women priests?’ in Lollards and Reformers, 4970 Google Scholar; Wabuda, , ‘sRock’, 55 Google Scholar.

20 Foxe, John, Acts and Monuments, ed. Townsend, George, 8 vols (1843–9), 4:627 Google Scholar; and similarly for Hugh Latimer in Exeter: Gleanings from the Common Place Book of John Hooker, ed. Walter J. Harte (Exeter, nd), 13–14.

21 Latimer, Sermons, 85–6, 206–7; Matt. 23.2; Neh. 8.1-5. Man: Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 4:209. Bilney: ibid., 4:642. Legend suggests that St Bernardino delivered one of his first sermons from the branches of an olive tree: Origo, San Bernardino, 26.

22 Rom. 10.17.

23 Cameron, Euan, The European Reformation (Oxford, 1991), 11149 Google Scholar; MacCulloch, Diarmaid, ‘The myth of the English Reformation’, JBS, 30 (1991), 119 Google Scholar; Wabuda, ‘Rock’, 40–59.

24 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, Thomas Cranmer: a Life (New Haven, CT, and London, 1996), 50811 Google Scholar; Duffy, Stripping, 473–5.

25 My thanks to Maria Dowling for advice on this point, and to the parish for the opportunity for a close inspection of the pulpit in 1997. Strype, John, The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker, 3 vols (Oxford, 1821), 1:15-18, 445.Google Scholar

26 Cox, Pulpits, 62, 80, 94, 106, 134, and ch. 7. Also MacCulloch, Diarmaid, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (1999), 162 Google Scholar. My thanks to Prof. Collinson for our visit to Rotherham in 1999.

27 Spicer, Andrew, ‘Rebuilding Solomon’s Temple? The architecture of Calvinism’, SCH, 36 (2000), 27587.Google Scholar

28 Cox, Pulpits, 96.

29 Blunt, Anthony, Borromini (1979), 67, 11418 Google Scholar; Kaufman, Thomas DeCosta, Court, Cloister, and City: the Art and Culture of Central Europe 1450–1800 (Chicago, 1995), 21718.Google Scholar