Ideas and Solidarities of the Medieval Laity

Ideas and Solidarities of the Medieval Laity

Author: Susan Reynolds

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-05-29

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1000683516

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This book contains essays written over the past 25 years about medieval urban communities and about the loyalties and beliefs of medieval lay people in general. Most writing about medieval religious, political, legal, and social ideas starts from treatises written by academics and assumes that ideas trickled down from the clergy to the laity. Susan Reynolds, whether writing about the struggles for liberty of small English towns, the national solidarities of the Anglo-Saxons, or the capacity of medieval peasants to formulate their own attitudes to religion, rejects this assumption. She suggests that the medieval laity had ideas of their own that deserve to be taken seriously.


Medieval Christianity

Medieval Christianity

Author: Kevin Madigan

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2015-01-01

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 0300158726

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A new narrative history of medieval Christianity, spanning from A.D. 500 to 1500, focuses on the role of women in Christianity; the relationships among Christians, Jews and Muslims; the experience of ordinary parishioners; the adventure of asceticism, devotion and worship; and instruction through drama, architecture and art.


Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages

Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages

Author: Sabrina Corbellini

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13:

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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.


Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages

Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages

Author: Andri Vauchez

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-02-17

Total Pages: 720

ISBN-13: 9780521619813

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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.


Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages

Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages

Author: Brett Edward Whalen

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2019-02-06

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 1442603844

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Pilgrimage inspired and shaped the distinct experiences of commoners and nobles, men and women, clergy and laity for over a thousand years. Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Reader is a rich collection of primary sources for the history of Christian pilgrimage in Europe and the Mediterranean world from the fourth through the sixteenth centuries. The collection illustrates the far-reaching significance and consequences of pilgrimage for the culture, society, economics, politics, and spirituality of the Middle Ages. Brett Edward Whalen focuses on sites within Europe and beyond its borders, including the holy places of Jerusalem, and provides documents that shed light upon Eastern Christian, Jewish, and Islamic pilgrimages. The result is an innovative sourcebook that offers a window into broader trends, shifts, and transformations in the Middle Ages.


The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages

The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages

Author: Mary Dzon

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2017-01-25

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 0812293703

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Beginning in the twelfth century, clergy and laity alike started wondering with intensity about the historical and developmental details of Jesus' early life. Was the Christ Child like other children, whose characteristics and capabilities depended on their age? Was he sweet and tender, or formidable and powerful? Not finding sufficient information in the Gospels, which are almost completely silent about Jesus' childhood, medieval Christians turned to centuries-old apocryphal texts for answers. In The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages, Mary Dzon demonstrates how these apocryphal legends fostered a vibrant and creative medieval piety. Popular tales about the Christ Child entertained the laity and at the same time were reviled by some members of the intellectual elite of the church. In either case, such legends, so persistent, left their mark on theological, devotional, and literary texts. The Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx urged his monastic readers to imitate the Christ Child's development through spiritual growth; Francis of Assisi encouraged his followers to emulate the Christ Child's poverty and rusticity; Thomas Aquinas, for his part, believed that apocryphal stories about the Christ Child would encourage youths to be presumptuous, while Birgitta of Sweden provided pious alternatives in her many Marian revelations. Through close readings of such writings, Dzon explores the continued transmission and appeal of apocryphal legends throughout the Middle Ages and demonstrates the significant impact that the Christ Child had in shaping the medieval religious imagination.


Law, laity and solidarities

Law, laity and solidarities

Author: Pauline Stafford

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2020-01-03

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1526148285

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The primary focus of this collection by leading medieval historians is the laity, in particular the ideas and ideals of lay people. The contributors explore lay attitudes as expressed in legal cases, charters, chronicles and collective activities. Highlights the centrality of kinship, whilst stressing its limitations as an all purpose social bond. Ranges chronologically and geographically from the seventh century to the eve of the Reformation, from Western Britain to papal and urban Italy, from Carolingian dynastic politics to the decline of medieval pilgrimage in the sixteenth century, and from the courts of twelfth-century France to the fifteenth-century wards of London.


Religious and Laity in Western Europe, 1000-1400

Religious and Laity in Western Europe, 1000-1400

Author: Emilia Jamroziak

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13:

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This volume examines forms of interaction between monastic or mendicant communities and lay people in the high Middle Ages in Britain, France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia. The nineteen papers explore these issues in geographically and chronologically diverse settings in a way that no English-language collection has yet attempted. It brings together the latest research from established as well as younger historians. The first section, 'Patrons and Benefactors: power, fashion, and mutual expectations', examines lay involvement in foundations, the rights held by patrons, and how they used these powers as well as networks of relationships with broader groups of benefactors. The authors demonstrate how changing fashions shaped the fortunes of particular orders and houses and explore how power relations between different types of patrons and benefactors - royal figures, kinship, and other social groupings - affected the mutual expectations of the various parties. The second section of the volume, entitled 'Lay and Religious: negotiation, influence, and utility', shows how lay people's ideas of the role of religious houses could impact upon their patronage of, and support for, monastic or mendicant institutions. Conversely, religious communities offered multi-faceted benefits - practical, intellectual, or spiritual - for the secular world. The book concludes by focusing on the rapid growth of confraternities, their relation to their urban mendicant and monastic contexts, and how the role and forms of confraternities evolved in the late medieval period.