Wycliffite Spirituality

Wycliffite Spirituality

Author: J. Patrick Hornbeck (II)

Publisher: Paulist Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 489

ISBN-13: 0809147653

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In one series, the original writings of the universally acknowledged teachers of the Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, and Islamic traditions have been critically selected, translated, and introduced by internationally recognized scholars and spiritual leaders. Until now, the mainstream historiography of Wycliffism has largely ignored the positive spirituality that Wycliffite dissenters associated with their faith. Even anthologies of Wycliffite writings have focused on their key polemical tenets rather than their spirituality. Wycliffite Spirituality offers a new, refreshing approach with a collection of texts showing that Wycliffites were as keenly interested in the spiritual life as many of their contemporaries and that Wycliffites reflected at length on such questions as how best to live a virtuous active life in the world, how most appropriately to approach God in prayer, how to understand traditional prayers such as the Our Father and Ave Maria, and how to live up to Christ's expectations for ministers and others in the church. WyclifÆs writings on spirituality, the English texts composed by his followers, and records from heresy trials that disclose information about suspects' spiritual practices and devotional lives reveal that late medieval dissenters practiced a vibrant Christianity deserving of further study. Book jacket.


Translation and Nation

Translation and Nation

Author: Roger Ellis

Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9781853595172

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This text focuses on the construction of Englishness through vernacular translations. It suggests ways of looking at the questioning of the English subject through texts that engage with translation in differing ways.


Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England

Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England

Author: Helen Barr

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2001-12-06

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0191540862

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Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England bridges the disciplines of literature and history by examining various kinds of literary language as examples of social practice. Readings of both English and Latin texts from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries are grounded in close textual study which reveals the social positioning of these works and the kinds of ideological work they can be seen to perform. Distinctive new readings of texts emerge which challenge received interpretations of literary history and late medieval culture. Canonical authors and texts such as Chaucer, Gower, and Pearl are discussed alongside the less familiar: Clanvowe, anonymous alliterative verse, and Wycliffite prose tracts.


The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture

The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture

Author: Laura Varnam

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2018-01-11

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1526121824

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This book presents an exciting new approach to the medieval church by examining the role of literary texts, visual decorations, ritual performance and lived experience in the production of sanctity. The meaning of the church was intensely debated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This book explores what was at stake not only for the church’s sanctity but for the identity of the parish community as a result. Focusing on pastoral material used to teach the laity, it shows how the church’s status as a sacred space at the heart of the congregation was dangerously – but profitably – dependent on lay practice. The sacred and profane were inextricably linked and, paradoxically, the church is shown to thrive on the sacrilegious challenge of lay misbehaviour and sin.


Christ the Physician in Late-Medieval Religious Controversy

Christ the Physician in Late-Medieval Religious Controversy

Author: Patrick Outhwaite

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2024-05-28

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1914049268

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A consideration of the allegory of Christ the Divine Physician in medical and religious writings. Discourses of physical and spiritual health were intricately entwined in the Middle Ages, shaping intellectual concepts as well as actual treatment. The allegory of Christ as Divine Physician is an example of this intersection: it appears frequently in both medical and religious writings as a powerful figure of healing and salvation, and was invoked by dissidents and reformists in religious controversies. Drawing on previously unexplored manuscript material, this book examines the use of the Christus Medicus tradition during a period of religious turbulence. Via an interdisciplinary analysis of literature, sermons, and medical texts, it shows that Wycliffites in England and Hussites in Bohemia used concepts developed in hospital settings to press for increased lay access to Scripture and the sacraments against the strictures of the Church hierarchy. Tracing a story of reform and controversy from localised institutional contexts to two of the most important pan-European councils of the fifteenth century, Constance and Basel, it argues that at a point when the body of the Church was strained by multiple popes, heretics and schismatics, the allegory came into increasing use to restore health and order.


Feeling Like Saints

Feeling Like Saints

Author: Fiona Somerset

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2014-05-08

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 0801470986

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"Lollard" is the name given to followers of John Wyclif, the English dissident theologian who was dismissed from Oxford University in 1381 for his arguments regarding the eucharist. A forceful and influential critic of the ecclesiastical status quo in the late fourteenth century, Wyclif's thought was condemned at the Council of Constance in 1415. While lollardy has attracted much attention in recent years, much of what we think we know about this English religious movement is based on records of heresy trials and anti-lollard chroniclers. In Feeling Like Saints, Fiona Somerset demonstrates that this approach has limitations. A better basis is the five hundred or so manuscript books from the period (1375–1530) containing materials translated, composed, or adapted by lollard writers themselves.These writings provide rich evidence for how lollard writers collaborated with one another and with their readers to produce a distinctive religious identity based around structures of feeling. Lollards wanted to feel like saints. From Wyclif they drew an extraordinarily rigorous ethic of mutual responsibility that disregarded both social status and personal risk. They recalled their commitment to this ethic by reading narratives of physical suffering and vindication, metaphorically martyring themselves by inviting scorn for their zeal, and enclosing themselves in the virtues rather than the religious cloister. Yet in many ways they were not that different from their contemporaries, especially those with similar impulses to exceptional holiness.


A Companion to Middle English Prose

A Companion to Middle English Prose

Author: Anthony Stockwell Garfield Edwards

Publisher: DS Brewer

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9781843840183

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The essays in this volume provide an up-to-date and authoritative guide to the major prose Middle English authors and genres. Each chapter is written by a leading authority on the subject and offers a succinct account of all relevant literary, history and cultural factors that need to considered, together with bibliographical references. Authors examined include the writers of the Ancrene Wisse, the Katherine Group and the Wohunge Group; Richard Rolle; Walter Hilton; Nicholas Love; Julian of Norwich; Margery Kempe; "Sir John Mandeville"; John Trevisa, Reginald Pecock; and John Fortescue. Genres discussed include romances, saints' lives, letters, sermon literature, historical prose, anonymous devotional writings, Wycliffite prose, and various forms of technical writing. The final chapter examines the treatment of Middle English prose in the first age of print. Contributors: BELLA MILLETT, RALPH HANNA III, AD PUTTER, KANTIK GHOSH, BARRY A. WINDEATT, A.C. SPEARING, IAN HIGGINS, A.S.G. EDWARDS, VINCENT GILLESPIE, HELEN L. SPENCER, ALFRED HIATT, FIONA SOMERSET, HELEN COOPER, GEORGE KEISER, OLIVER S. PICKERING, JAMES SIMPSON, RICHARD BEADLE, ALEXANDRA GILLESPIE.


Fallible Authors

Fallible Authors

Author: Alastair Minnis

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-02-12

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 0812205715

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Can an outrageously immoral man or a scandalous woman teach morality or lead people to virtue? Does personal fallibility devalue one's words and deeds? Is it possible to separate the private from the public, to segregate individual failing from official function? Chaucer addressed these perennial issues through two problematic authority figures, the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath. The Pardoner dares to assume official roles to which he has no legal claim and for which he is quite unsuited. We are faced with the shocking consequences of the belief, standard for the time, that immorality is not necessarily a bar to effective ministry. Even more subversively, the Wife of Bath, who represents one of the most despised stereotypes in medieval literature, the sexually rapacious widow, dispenses wisdom of the highest order. This innovative book places these "fallible authors" within the full intellectual context that gave them meaning. Alastair Minnis magisterially examines the impact of Aristotelian thought on preaching theory, the controversial practice of granting indulgences, religious and medical categorizations of deviant bodies, theological attempts to rationalize sex within marriage, Wycliffite doctrine that made authority dependent on individual grace and raised the specter of Donatism, and heretical speculation concerning the possibility of female teachers. Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath are revealed as interconnected aspects of a single radical experiment wherein the relationship between objective authority and subjective fallibility is confronted as never before.


Through A Classical Eye

Through A Classical Eye

Author: Andrew Galloway

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2009-04-15

Total Pages: 758

ISBN-13: 1442693231

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As students and scholars of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Dante know, late medieval writers were influenced greatly by the work of peers that crossed historical, national, cultural, linguistic boundaries. Through a Classical Eye contains first-rate essays that demonstrate a range of strategies for undertaking transcultural and transhistorical studies of the late medieval period, and examines medieval literature and culture where English, Italian, and Latin materials overlap. Written in honour of the groundbreaking contributions that Winthrop Wetherbee made to this growing area of study, the volume's contributors advance his legacy and add to the burgeoning interest in setting medieval literary studies into wide intellectual and historical horizons. Divided into three illuminating sections on Medieval Latin authorship, Italy and the world, and England and beyond, and including a personal reminiscence of Wetherbee by the noted novelist Robert Morgan, Through a Classical Eye is an outstanding collection that provides key insights into medieval literature and culture.