The Church In The Later Middle Ages

Francis Oakley addresses late-medieval church history in its own terms, pointing out not only discontinuities but also continuities with earlier medieval experience. "By doing so," he writes, "I hope to have avoided the distortions and refractions that occur when that history is seen too obsessively through the lens of the Reformation."

The first systematic study of the financing and management of parish church construction in England in the Middle Ages.

This is a standard work of reference for the study of the religious history of western Christianity in the later middle ages which, since its original publication in French in 1981, has come to be regarded as one of the great contributions to medieval studies of recent times. Hagiographical texts and reports of the processes of canonisation - a mode of investigation into saints' lives and their miracles implemented by the popes from the end of the twelfth century - are here used for the first time as major source materials. The book illuminates the main features of the medieval religious mind, and highlights the popes' attempts to gain firmer control over the wide variety of expressions of faith towards the saints in order to promote a higher pattern of devotion and moral behaviour among Christians.

The Later Middle Ages (1300-1500 CE) have often been characterised as a period of decline for Christendom. The era seems to sit uncomfortably between the remarkable achievements of church and society in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the revivals of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century. The period has even been called a 'Babylonian Captivity' for the Church, echoing the struggles of the Israelites in exile, and reflecting the transferral of the papacy to Avignon in 1309.Norman Tanner challenges this negative view, examining a vibrant period of ecclesiastical history in its own right rather than just through the lenses of the centuries that preceded and succeeded it. He discusses the trials of the age in the form of the papal schism between 1378-1417, the heresies of Cathars, Lollards and Hussites, the Hundred Years' War, and the terror of the Black Death. Yet he focuses, too, on the great ecumenical councils, the flowering of intellectual life in the Renaissance and the extraordinarily rich spirituality of mystics like Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena and Meister Eckhart. What comes to light in this lively and readable volume is that the later medieval age was actually one of extraordinary achievement for the Church: of deepening and enrichment, as well as of schism and conflict.

The influence of the Church on medieval life was all-pervasive. Through the wealth of medieval imagery contained in illuminated manuscripts, Justin Clegg provides an overview of the structure and workings of the Church.

It is a medieval truism that the poet meddles with words, the lawyer with the world. But are the poet's words and the lawyer's world really so far apart? To what extent does the art of making poems share in the craft of making laws, and vice versa? Framed by such questions, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages examines the mutually productive interaction between literary and legal "makyngs" in England's great Middle English poem by William Langland. Focusing on Piers Plowman's preoccupation with wrongdoing in the B and C versions, Arvind Thomas examines the versions' representations of trials, confessions, restitutions, penalties, and pardons. Thomas explores how the "literary" informs and transforms the "legal" until they finally cannot be separated. Thomas shows how the poem's narrative voice, metaphor, syntax and style not only reflect but also act upon properties of canon law, such as penitential procedures and authoritative maxims. Langland's mobilization of juridical concepts, Thomas insists, not only engenders a poetics informed by canonist thought but also expresses an alternative vision of canon law from that proposed by medieval jurists and today's medievalists.

Read often, learn all that you can. Let sleep overcome you, the roll still in your hands; when your head falls, let it be on the sacred page. - St Jerome, 384 AD With these words, the Church Father Jerome exhorted the young Eustochium to find on the sacred page the spiritual nourishment that would give her the strength to live a life of chastity and to keep her monastic vows. His call to read does not stand alone. Books and reading have always played a pivotal role in early and medieval Christianity, often defined as 'a religion of the book'. A second important stage in the development of the 'religion of the book' can be attested in the late Middle Ages, when religious reading was no longer the exclusive right of men and women living in solitude and concentrating on prayer and meditation. Changes in the religious landscape and the birth of new religious movements transformed the medieval town into a privileged area of religious activity. Increasing literacy opened the door to a new and wider public of lay readers. This seminal transformation in the late medieval cultural horizon saw the growing importance of the vernacular, the cultural and religious emancipation of the laity, and the increasing participation of lay people in religious life and activities. This volume presents a new, interdisciplinary approach to religious reading and reading techniques in a lay environment within late medieval textual, social, and cultural transformations.