The Great Schism 1378

The division of the Church or Schism that took place between 1378 and 1417 had no precedent in Christianity. No conclave since the twelfth century had acted as had those in April and September 1378, electing two concurrent popes. This crisis was neither an issue of the authority claimed by the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor nor an issue of authority and liturgy. The Great Western Schism was unique because it forced upon Christianity a rethinking of the traditional medieval mental frame. It raised question of personality, authority, human fallibility, ecclesiastical jurisdiction and taxation, and in the end responsibility in holding power and authority. This collection presents the broadest range of experiences, center and periphery, clerical and lay, male and female, Christian and Muslim. Theology, including exegesis of Scripture, diplomacy, French literature, reform, art, and finance all receive attention.

In Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski looks beyond the political and ecclesiastical storm and finds an outpouring of artistic, literary, and visionary responses to one of the great calamities of the late Middle Ages.

A new history of the Great Western Schism, focusing on social drama and the performance of legitimacy and papacy.

Through a focused and systematic examination of late medieval scholastic writers - theologians, philosophers and jurists - Joseph Canning explores how ideas about power and legitimate authority were developed over the 'long fourteenth century'. The author provides a new model for understanding late medieval political thought, taking full account of the intensive engagement with political reality characteristic of writers in this period. He argues that they used Aristotelian and Augustinian ideas to develop radically new approaches to power and authority, especially in response to political and religious crises. The book examines the disputes between King Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII and draws upon the writings of Dante Alighieri, Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham, Bartolus, Baldus and John Wyclif to demonstrate the variety of forms of discourse used in the period. It focuses on the most fundamental problem in the history of political thought - where does legitimate authority lie?

This book argues that during the Middle Ages there was a pillaging problem attached to ecclesiastical interregna, that the nature of ecclesiastical elections contributed to the problem, and the problem in turn contributed to the initiation of the Great Western Schism.

The Great Schism (1378–1417) divided Western Christendom into two groups: those who recognized a pope in Rome and those who recognized one in Avignon. It was a crisis of authority that brought with it spiritual anxiety and political uproar. This book presents the responses of two fascinating women whose experiences demonstrate the impact of the Schism on ordinary Christians. Constance de Rabastens (active 1384–1386), who lived in a village in rural Languedoc, had dramatic visions indicting the Avignon pope Clement VII, despite his being recognized in her region. Ursulina of Parma (1375–1408), a diminutive young woman from an urban milieu in Italy, believed that she was commanded by Christ to engage in shuttle diplomacy between the Roman and Avignon papacies in order to end the Schism. Two Women of the Great Schism translates an account of Constance’s visionary experiences as recorded by her confessor Raymond de Sabanac and a posthumous biography of Ursulina by Simone Zanacchi, a pious abbot who wrote some sixty years after his subject’s death. These texts bring to life the extraordinary spiritual and political engagement of two late medieval women who refused to be passive bystanders as rival papal factions tore Christendom apart.