Matthew Spinka, Howard Kaminsky, and the Future of the Medieval Hussites
Matthew Spinka, Howard Kaminsky, and the Future of the Medieval Hussites

Author: Thomas A. Fudge

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-07-07

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1793650810

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The Hussite movement is essential for understanding medieval Europe and the development of Western civilization. Matthew Spinka and Howard Kaminsky stand at the forefront of scholarship introducing this subject to the Anglophone world. Thomas A. Fudge argues their role in the religious historiography of late medieval Europe is a precursor to global medievalism. Combining commitment to the Christian faith with firm opposition to the Soviet-mandated Marxist-Communist ideology that dominated twentieth-century Czechoslovakia, Spinka strove to present Jan Hus as a medieval figure driven by religious devotion. Motivated by Jewish atheism and a modified form of Marxist analysis, Kaminsky rescued the medieval Hussites from oblivion and political agendas. Fudge explores biography, history, and historiography as an essential intellectual segue between medieval Hussites and modern scholarship. Matthew Spinka, Howard Kaminsky, and the Medieval Hussites considers biography, evaluates the work of both historians, elaborates their methods, assesses their interpretations, and analyzes their historiographical significance for the study of Hussite history.

The Christian Church
The Christian Church

Author: Hans Schwarz

Publisher: Fortress Press

Published: 2007-04-01

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9781451409291

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With thoroughness and clarity, Hans Schwarz presents a historical and systematic understanding of the church - its worship and piety, its traditions and doctrines, its forms and structures. This skilled assessment outlines the impact of the church today and analyzes its prospects for the future.

The Hussites
The Hussites

Author: Stephen E. Lahey

Publisher: Past Imperfect

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781641891622

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The Hussite movement was a historical watershed, in which popular and scholastic theology combined with a nascent Czech nationalism to produce a full-scale social revolution that presaged the Protestant Reformation and the birth of the modern nation state. The Hussites defeated the forces of the Empire and the Pope, and their king George Poděbrady was the first to advocate a trans-national European state. Jan Hus is remembered as a martyr for church reform, but his colleagues formulated a theology that scholars are now recognizing to have had influence on Luther and the birth of Protestantism. Another Bohemian associated with the movement, Petr Chelčick , was the first to advocate a radical pacifist Christian anarchism. This survey introduces the reader to the events, people, and ideas that define this remarkable movement.

Priests and Their Books in Late Medieval Eichstätt
Priests and Their Books in Late Medieval Eichstätt

Author: Matthew Wranovix

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-10-23

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1498548873

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This book analyzes the acquisition and use of texts by the parish clergy in the diocese of Eichstätt between 1400 and 1520 to refute the amusing, but misleading, image of the lustful and ignorant cleric so popular in the satirical literature of the period. By the fifteenth-century, more widely available local schooling and increasing university attendance had improved the educational level of the clergy; priests were bureaucrats as well as pastors and both roles required extensive use of the written word. What priests read is a question of fundamental importance to our understanding of the late medieval parish and the role of the clergy as communicators and cultural mediators. Priests were entrusted with saying the Mass, preaching doctrine and repentance, honoring the saints, plumbing the conscience, and protecting the legal rights of the Church. They baptized children, blessed the fields, and prayed for the souls of the dead. What priests read would have informed how they understood and how they performed their social and religious roles. By locating and contextualizing the manuscripts, printed books, and parish records that were once in the hands of priests in the diocese, the author has found evidence for the unexpected: the avid acquisition of books; a theological awareness; and an emerging professional identity. This marks an important revision to the conventional view of a dramatic era marked by both the transition from manuscripts to printed books and the outbreak of the Reformation.

Speculum Mortis
Speculum Mortis

Author: Daniela Rywiková

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-06-22

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1498586562

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This study analyzes late medieval paintings of personified death in Bohemia, arguing that Bohemian iconography was distinct from the body of macabre painting found in other Central European regions during the same period. The author focuses on a variety of images from late medieval Bohemia, examining how they express the imagination, devotion, and anxieties surrounding death in the Middle Ages.

The Social World of the Abbey of Cava, C. 1020-1300
The Social World of the Abbey of Cava, C. 1020-1300

Author: G. A. Loud

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 1783276320

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A pioneering, comprehensive investigation into a major Italian monastery. The Benedictine abbey of Holy Trinity, Cava, has had a continuous existence since its foundation almost exactly a thousand years ago. From its modest beginnings, it developed during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries into one of the wealthiest and most influential monasteries in southern Italy. This path-breaking study, based on many years research into the, largely unpublished, charters of Cava, begins by examining the growth of the abbey's congregation and property, and its struggle subsequently to defend its interests during the troubled thirteenth century. But, in addition, it uses the extensive evidence available to study its benefactors and dependents, administration and economy, and through this material to analyse the social and economic structures of the principality of Salerno. There is also a re-evaluation of the problem of forgery, practised on a large scale at Cava during the thirteenth century, a factor which has complicated and discouraged previous study of this important institution. A major advance both in the study of the south Italian Church and of the medieval Mezzogiorno during the central Middle Ages, the volume presents a vivid and detailed picture of local society and its workings, and of the families and individuals who had dealings with the abbey.

A History of the Middle Ages, 300–1500
A History of the Middle Ages, 300–1500

Author: John M. Riddle

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-02-25

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13: 1442246863

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This clear and comprehensive text covers the Middle Ages from the classical era to the late medieval period. Distinguished historian John Riddle provides a cogent analysis of the rulers, wars, and events—both natural and human—that defined the medieval era. Taking a broad geographical perspective, Riddle includes northern and eastern Europe, Byzantine civilization, and the Islamic states. Each, he convincingly shows, offered values and institutions—religious devotion, toleration and intolerance, laws, ways of thinking, and changing roles of women—that presaged modernity. In addition to traditional topics of pen, sword, and word, the author explores other driving forces such as science, religion, and technology in ways that previous textbooks have not. He also examines such often-overlooked issues as medieval gender roles and medicine and seminal events such as the crusades from the vantage point of both Muslims and eastern and western Christians. In addition to a thorough chronological narrative, the text offers humanizing features to engage students. Each chapter opens with a theme-setting vignette about the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people. The book also introduces students to key controversies and themes in historiography by featuring in each chapter a prominent medieval historian and how his or her ideas have shaped contemporary thinking about the Middle Ages. Richly illustrated with color plates, this lively, engaging book will immerse readers in the medieval world, an era that shaped the foundation for the modern world.