The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England

The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Ian Forrest
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199286922
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Heresy was the most feared crime in the medieval moral universe. By examining the drafting, publicizing, and implementing of new laws against heresy in the 14th and 15th centuries, this text presents a general study of inquisition in medieval England.

The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England

The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Ian Forrest
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199286922
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
Heresy was the most feared crime in the medieval moral universe. By examining the drafting, publicizing, and implementing of new laws against heresy in the 14th and 15th centuries, this text presents a general study of inquisition in medieval England.

The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England

The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Ian Forrest
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191536873
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Heresy was the most feared crime in the medieval moral universe. It was seen as a social disease capable of poisoning the body politic and shattering the unity of the church. The study of heresy in late medieval England has, to date, focused largely on the heretics. In consequence, we know very little about how this crime was defined by the churchmen who passed authoritative judgement on it. By examining the drafting, publicizing, and implementing of new laws against heresy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, using published and unpublished judicial records, this book presents the first general study of inquisition in medieval England. In it Ian Forrest argues that because heresy was a problem simultaneously national and local, detection relied upon collaboration between rulers and the ruled. While involvement in detection brought local society into contact with the apparatus of government, uneducated laymen still had to be kept at arm's length, because judgements about heresy were deemed too subtle and important to be left to them. Detection required bishops and inquisitors to balance reported suspicions against canonical proof, and threats to public safety against the rights of the suspect and the deficiencies of human justice. At present, the character and significance of heresy in late medieval England is the subject of much debate. Ian Forrest believes that this debate has to be informed by a greater awareness of the legal and social contexts within which heresy took on its many real and imagined attributes.

The Late Medieval English Church

The Late Medieval English Church PDF Author: G.W. Bernard
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300179979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The later medieval English church is invariably viewed through the lens of the Reformation that transformed it. But in this bold and provocative book historian George Bernard examines it on its own terms, revealing a church with vibrant faith and great energy, but also with weaknesses that reforming bishops worked to overcome. Bernard emphasizes royal control over the church. He examines the challenges facing bishops and clergy, and assesses the depth of lay knowledge and understanding of the teachings of the church, highlighting the practice of pilgrimage. He reconsiders anti-clerical sentiment and the extent and significance of heresy. He shows that the Reformation was not inevitable: the late medieval church was much too full of vitality. But Bernard also argues that alongside that vitality, and often closely linked to it, were vulnerabilities that made the break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries possible. The result is a thought-provoking study of a church and society in transformation.

Trustworthy Men

Trustworthy Men PDF Author: Ian Forrest
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691204047
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
The medieval church was founded on and governed by concepts of faith and trust--but not in the way that is popularly assumed. Offering a radical new interpretation of the institutional church and its social consequences in England, Ian Forrest argues that between 1200 and 1500 the ability of bishops to govern depended on the cooperation of local people known as trustworthy men and shows how the combination of inequality and faith helped make the medieval church. Trustworthy men (in Latin, viri fidedigni) were jurors, informants, and witnesses who represented their parishes when bishops needed local knowledge or reliable collaborators. Their importance in church courts, at inquests, and during visitations grew enormously between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The church had to trust these men, and this trust rested on the complex and deep-rooted cultures of faith that underpinned promises and obligations, personal reputation and identity, and belief in God. But trust also had a dark side. For the church to discriminate between the trustworthy and untrustworthy was not to identify the most honest Christians but to find people whose status ensured their word would not be contradicted. This meant men rather than women, and—usually—the wealthier tenants and property holders in each parish. Trustworthy Men illustrates the ways in which the English church relied on and deepened inequalities within late medieval society, and how trust and faith were manipulated for political ends.

The Culture of Inquisition in Medieval England

The Culture of Inquisition in Medieval England PDF Author: Mary Catherine Flannery
Publisher: D. S. Brewer
ISBN: 1843843366
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Groundbreaking essays show the variety and complexity of the roles played by inquisition in medieval England. Inquisition in medieval and early modern England has typically been the subject of historical rather than cultural investigation, and focussed on heresy. Here, however, inquisition is revealed as playing a broader role in medievalEnglish culture, not only in relation to sanctions like excommunication, penance and confession, but also in the fields of exemplarity, rhetoric and poetry. Beyond its specific legal and pastoral applications, inquisitio was a dialogic mode of inquiry, a means of discerning, producing or rewriting truth, and an often adversarial form of invention and literary authority. The essays in this volume cover such topics as the theory and practice ofcanon law, heresy and its prosecution, Middle English pastoralia, political writing and romance. As a result, the collection redefines the nature of inquisition's role within both medieval law and culture, and demonstrates the extent to which it penetrated the late-medieval consciousness, shaping public fame and private selves, sexuality and gender, rhetoric, and literature. Mary C. Flannery is a lecturer in English at the University of Lausanne; Katie L. Walter is a lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. Contributors: Mary C. Flannery, Katie L. Walter, Henry Ansgar Kelly, Edwin Craun, Ian Forrest, Diane Vincent, Jenny Lee, James Wade, Genelle Gertz, Ruth Ahnert, Emily Steiner

The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity

The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity PDF Author: John Arnold
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199582130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 609

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity takes as its subject the beliefs, practices, and institutions of the Christian Church between 400 and 1500AD. It addresses topics ranging from early medieval monasticism to late medieval mysticism, from the material wealth of the Church to the spiritual exercises through which certain believers might attempt to improve their souls. Each chapter tells a story, but seeks also to ask how and why "Christianity" took particular forms at particular moments in history, paying attention to both the spiritual and otherwordly aspects of religion, and the material and political contexts in which they were often embedded. This Handbook is a landmark academic collection that presents cutting-edge interpretive perspectives on medieval religion for a wide academic audience, drawing together thirty key scholars in the field from the United States, the UK, and Europe. Notably, the Handbook is arranged thematically, and focusses on an analytical, rather than narrative, approach, seeking to demonstrate the variety, change, and complexity of religion throughout this long period, and the numerous different ways in which modern scholarship can approach it. While providing a very wide-ranging view of the subject, it also offers an important agenda for further study in the field.

The Abbots and Priors of Late Medieval and Reformation England

The Abbots and Priors of Late Medieval and Reformation England PDF Author: Martin Heale
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191006963
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
The importance of the medieval abbot needs no particular emphasis. The monastic superiors of late medieval England ruled over thousands of monks and canons, who swore to them vows of obedience; they were prominent figures in royal and church government; and collectively they controlled properties worth around double the Crown's annual ordinary income. Moreover, as guardians of regular observance and the primary interface between their monastery and the wider world, abbots and priors were pivotal to the effective functioning and well-being of the monastic order. The Abbots and Priors of Late Medieval and Reformation England provides the first detailed study of English male monastic superiors, exploring their evolving role and reputation between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Individual chapters examine the election and selection of late medieval monastic heads; the internal functions of the superior as the father of the community; the head of house as administrator; abbatial living standards and modes of display; monastic superiors' public role in service of the Church and Crown; their external relations and reputation; the interaction between monastic heads and the government in Henry VIII's England; the Dissolution of the monasteries; and the afterlives of abbots and priors following the suppression of their houses. This study of monastic leadership sheds much valuable light on the religious houses of late medieval and early Tudor England, including their spiritual life, administration, spending priorities, and their multi-faceted relations with the outside world. The Abbots and Priors of Late Medieval and Reformation England also elucidates the crucial part played by monastic superiors in the dramatic events of the 1530s, when many heads surrendered their monasteries into the hands of Henry VIII.

Cultural Reformations

Cultural Reformations PDF Author: Brian Cummings
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199212481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 702

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Book Description
The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the medieval and the early modern. 'Cultural Reformations' initiates discussion on many fronts in which both periods look different in dialogue with each other.

Treason and Masculinity in Medieval England

Treason and Masculinity in Medieval England PDF Author: E. Amanda McVitty
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783275553
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Groundbreaking new approach to the idea of treason in medieval England, showing the profound effect played by gender.

Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540

Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540 PDF Author: Amy Appleford
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812246691
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Taking as her focus a body of writings in poetic, didactic, and legal modes that circulated in England's capital between the 1380s—just a generation after the Black Death—and the first decade of the English reformation in the 1530s, Amy Appleford offers the first full-length study of the Middle English "art of dying" (ars moriendi). An educated awareness of death and mortality was a vital aspect of medieval civic culture, she contends, critical not only to the shaping of single lives and the management of families and households but also to the practices of cultural memory, the building of institutions, and the good government of the city itself. In fifteenth-century London in particular, where an increasingly laicized reformist religiosity coexisted with an ambitious program of urban renewal, cultivating a sophisticated attitude toward death was understood as essential to good living in the widest sense. The virtuous ordering of self, household, and city rested on a proper attitude toward mortality on the part both of the ruled and of their secular and religious rulers. The intricacies of keeping death constantly in mind informed not only the religious prose of the period, but also literary and visual arts. In London's version of the famous image-text known as the Dance of Death, Thomas Hoccleve's poetic collection The Series, and the early sixteenth-century prose treatises of Tudor writers Richard Whitford, Thomas Lupset, and Thomas More, death is understood as an explicitly generative force, one capable (if properly managed) of providing vital personal, social, and literary opportunities.