Inward Purity And Outward Splendour

Author : Judith Middleton-Stewart
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 346 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : History
ISBN : 9780851158204

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Inward Purity and Outward Splendour by Judith Middleton-Stewart Pdf

A record of material and spiritual gifts to churches, compiled from 3000 wills made over 180 years. Reads like a medieval detective story. A splendid book... should be treated as a companion volume to The Stripping of the Altars. JULIAN LITTEN, CHURCH TIMES In the late medieval churches of the former deanery of Dunwich there are many features which were provided by testamentary gifts; this study of three thousand wills from fifty-two Suffolk parishes, written between 1370 and 1547, records such material and spiritual bequests. Many purchased prayer (the prayers of the poor being particularly sought), vital for the swift passage of the soul through Purgatory; other testators left instructions for the acquisition of liturgical books, church plate and embroideredvestments. Gifts and outright donations also provided stained glass, seven-sacrament fonts and rood-screens which have survived. The wills give no hint of the destruction that was to come - a medieval chancel with vacant niches and whitewashed walls says more than the wills are prepared to tell - but the pennies and shillings which had helped towards building expenses in this coastal district of East Anglia produced at least two of the finest parish churches in the country within a few decades of the Reformation. The late JUDITH MIDDLETON-STEWART was a tutor for the Board of Continuing Education for the universities of Cambridge and East Anglia.

Author : Katherine L. French
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 351 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2013-02-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812201963

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The Good Women of the Parish by Katherine L. French Pdf

There was immense social and economic upheaval between the Black Death and the English Reformation, and contemporary writers often blamed this upheaval on immorality, singling out women's behavior for particular censure. Late medieval moral treatises and sermons increasingly connected good behavior for women with Christianity, and their failure to conform to sin. Katherine L. French argues, however, that medieval laywomen both coped with the chaotic changes following the plague and justified their own changing behavior by participating in local religion. Through active engagement in the parish church, the basic unit of public worship, women promoted and validated their own interests and responsibilities. Scholarship on medieval women's religious experiences has focused primarily on elite women, nuns, and mystics who either were literate enough to leave written records of their religious ideas and behavior or had access to literate men who did this for them. Most women, however, were not literate, were not members of religious orders, and did not have private confessors. As The Good Women of the Parish shows, the great majority of women practiced their religion in a parish church. By looking at women's contributions to parish maintenance, the ways they shaped the liturgy and church seating arrangements, and their increasing opportunities for collective action in all-women's groups, the book argues that gendered behavior was central to parish life and that women's parish activities gave them increasing visibility and even, on occasion, authority. In the face of demands for silence, modesty, and passivity, women of every social status used religious practices as an important source of self-expression, creativity, and agency.

Author : Gabriel Byng
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2017-12-14
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9781107157095

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Church Building and Society in the Later Middle Ages by Gabriel Byng Pdf

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

Author : Helen E. Lunnon
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2020
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9781783275267

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East Anglian Church Porches and Their Medieval Context by Helen E. Lunnon Pdf

Major interdisciplnary study of medieval church porches, bringing out their importance and significance.

Author : John Alfred Langford
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 1850
Category : Apologetics
ISBN : BL:A0018965034

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Religious Scepticism and Infidelity by John Alfred Langford Pdf

Author : J. Rosenthal
Publisher : Springer
Page : 379 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2010-08-16
Category : History
ISBN : 9780230111462

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Margaret Paston’s Piety by J. Rosenthal Pdf

Drawing on a close reading of nearly forty years' worth of personal letters and her will, and incorporating new archival material, Margaret Paston emerges from this study as the best example we have of how lay piety was negotiated and integrated into daily medieval life.

Author : Tom Johnson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 339 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2019-12-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780191088483

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Law in Common by Tom Johnson Pdf

There were tens of thousands of different local law-courts in late-medieval England, providing the most common forums for the working out of disputes and the making of decisions about local governance. While historians have long studied these institutions, there have been very few attempts to understand this complex institutional form of 'legal pluralism'. Law in Common provides a way of understanding this complexity by drawing out broader patterns of legal engagement. Tom Johnson first explores four 'local legal cultures' - in the countryside, in forests, in towns and cities, and in the maritime world- that grew up around legal institutions, landscapes, and forms of socio-economic practice in these places, and produced distinctive senses of law. Johnson then turns to examine 'common legalities', widespread forms of social practice that emerge across these different localities, through which people aimed to invoke the power of law. Through studies of the physical landscape, the production of legitimate knowledge, the emergence of English as a legal vernacular, and the proliferation of legal documents, the volume offers a new way to understand how common people engaged with law in the course of their everyday lives. Drawing on a huge body of archival research from the plenitude of different local institutions, Law in Common offers a new social history of law that aims to explain how common people negotiated the transformational changes of the long fifteenth century with, and through legality.

Author : R. N. Swanson
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 517 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2007-12-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521881203

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Indulgences in Late Medieval England by R. N. Swanson Pdf

This book presents a history of indulgences (or pardons) in late medieval England.

Author : Clive Burgess
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 492 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2018
Category : History
ISBN : 9781783273096

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'The Right Ordering of Souls' by Clive Burgess Pdf

The relationship between people and parish in the late medieval ages illuminated by this study of a remarkable survival from the period. In the two centuries preceding the Reformation in England, economic, political and spiritual conditions combined with constructive effect. Endemic plague prompted a demonstrative piety and, in a world enjoying rising disposable incomes, this linked with current teachings - especially the doctrine of Purgatory - to sustain a remarkable devotional generosity. Moreover, political conditions, and particularly war with France, persuaded the government to summonits subjects' assistance, including responses encouraged in England's many parishes. As a result, the wealthier classes invested in and worked for their neighbourhood churches with a degree of largesse - witnessed in parish buildings in many localities - hardly equalled since. Buildings apart, the scarcity of pre-Reformation parish records means, however, that the resonances of this response, and the manner in which parishioners organised their worship, are ordinarily lost to us. This book, using the remarkable survival of records for one parish - All Saints', Bristol, in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries - scrutinises the investment that the faithful made. Ifnot necessarily typical, it is undeniably revealing, going further than any previous study to expose and explain parishioners' priorities, practices and achievements in the late Middle Ages. In so doing, it also charts a world that would soon vanish. Dr CLIVE BURGESS holds a Senior Lectureship in late medieval history at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Author : Irena Tina Marie Larking
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2020-05-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9781527551411

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Renovating the Sacred by Irena Tina Marie Larking Pdf

The English Reformation was no bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky. Nor was it an event that was inevitable, smooth, or predictable. Rather, it was a process that had its turbulent beginnings in the late medieval period and extended through until the Restoration. This book places the emphasis not just on law makers or the major players, but also, and more importantly, on those individuals and parish communities that lived through the twists and turns of reform. It explores the unpredictable process of the English Reformation through the fabric, rituals and spaces of the parish church in the Diocese of Norwich c. 1450–1662, as recorded, through the churchwardens’ accounts and the material remains of the late medieval and early modern periods. It is through the uses and abuses of the objects, rituals, spaces of the parish church that the English Reformation became a reality in the lives of these faith communities that experienced it.

Author : Keith Thomas
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2010-02-25
Category : History
ISBN : 9780191623462

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The Ends of Life by Keith Thomas Pdf

How should we live? That question was no less urgent for English men and women who lived between the early sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries than for this book's readers. Keith Thomas's masterly exploration of the ways in which people sought to lead fulfilling lives in those centuries between the beginning of the Reformation and the heyday of the Enlightenment illuminates the central values of the period, while casting incidental light on some of the perennial problems of human existence. Consideration of the origins of the modern ideal of human fulfilment and of obstacles to its realization in the early modern period frames an investigation that ranges from work, wealth, and possessions to the pleasures of friendship, family, and sociability. The cult of military prowess, the pursuit of honour and reputation, the nature of religious belief and scepticism, and the desire to be posthumously remembered are all drawn into the discussion, and the views and practices of ordinary people are measured against the opinions of the leading philosophers and theologians of the time. The Ends of Life offers a fresh approach to the history of early modern England, by one of the foremost historians of our time. It also provides modern readers with much food for thought on the problem of how we should live and what goals in life we should pursue.

Author : Amy Appleford
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812246698

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Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540 by Amy Appleford Pdf

Taking as her focus a body of writings in poetic, didactic, and legal modes that circulated in England's capital between the 1380s—just a generation after the Black Death—and the first decade of the English reformation in the 1530s, Amy Appleford offers the first full-length study of the Middle English "art of dying" (ars moriendi). An educated awareness of death and mortality was a vital aspect of medieval civic culture, she contends, critical not only to the shaping of single lives and the management of families and households but also to the practices of cultural memory, the building of institutions, and the good government of the city itself. In fifteenth-century London in particular, where an increasingly laicized reformist religiosity coexisted with an ambitious program of urban renewal, cultivating a sophisticated attitude toward death was understood as essential to good living in the widest sense. The virtuous ordering of self, household, and city rested on a proper attitude toward mortality on the part both of the ruled and of their secular and religious rulers. The intricacies of keeping death constantly in mind informed not only the religious prose of the period, but also literary and visual arts. In London's version of the famous image-text known as the Dance of Death, Thomas Hoccleve's poetic collection The Series, and the early sixteenth-century prose treatises of Tudor writers Richard Whitford, Thomas Lupset, and Thomas More, death is understood as an explicitly generative force, one capable (if properly managed) of providing vital personal, social, and literary opportunities.

Author : Martin Heale
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 404 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 184383054X

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The Dependent Priories of Medieval English Monasteries by Martin Heale Pdf

"This study charts for the first time the history of the 140 or so daughter houses of English monasteries, which have always been overshadowed by the French cells in England, the so-called alien priories. The first part of the book examines the reasons for the foundation of these monasteries and the relations between dependent priories and their mother houses, bishops and patrons. The second part investigates everyday life in cells, the priories' interaction with their neighbours and their economic viability. The unusual pattern of dissolution of these houses is also revealed. Because of the tremendous bulk of material to survive for English dependencies, this is the most detailed account of a group of small monasteries yet written. Although daughter houses are in many ways unrepresentative of other lesser monasteries, their experience sheds a great deal of light on the world of the small religious house, and suggests that these shadowy institutions were far more central to medieval religion and society than has been appreciated."--BOOK JACKET

Author : James G. Clark
Publisher : Boydell Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : History
ISBN : 1843833212

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The Culture of Medieval English Monasticism by James G. Clark Pdf

Examinations of the culture - artistic, material, musical - of English monasteries in the six centuries between the Conquest and the Dissolution. The cultural remains of England's abbeys and priories have always attracted scholarly attention but too often they have been studied in isolation, appreciated only for their artistic, codicological or intellectual features and notfor the insights they offer into the patterns of life and thought - the underlying norms, values and mentalité - of the communities of men and women which made them. Indeed, the distinguished monastic historian David Knowles doubted there would ever be sufficient evidence to recover "the mentality of the ordinary cloister monk". These twelve essays challenge this view. They exploit newly catalogued and newly discovered evidence - manuscript books, wall paintings, and even the traces of original monastic music - to recover the cultural dynamics of a cross-section of male and female communities. It is often claimed that over time the cultural traditions of the monasteries were suffocated by secular trends but here it is suggested that many houses remained a major cultural force even on the verge of the Reformation. James G. Clark is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. Contributors: DAVID BELL, ROGER BOWERS, JAMES CLARK, BARRIE COLLETT, MARY ERLER, G. R. EVANS, MIRIAM GILL, JOAN GREATREX, JULIAN HASELDINE, J. D. NORTH, ALAN PIPER, AND R. M. THOMSON.

Author : Paul Dalton,Charles Insley,Louise J. Wilkinson
Publisher : Boydell Press
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9781843836209

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Cathedrals, Communities and Conflict in the Anglo-Norman World by Paul Dalton,Charles Insley,Louise J. Wilkinson Pdf

The true importance of cathedrals during the Anglo-Norman period is here brought out, through an examination of the most important aspects of their history. Cathedrals dominated the ecclesiastical (and physical) landscape of the British Isles and Normandy in the middle ages; yet, in comparison with the history of monasteries, theirs has received significantly less attention. This volume helps to redress the balance by examining major themes in their development between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. These include the composition, life, corporate identity and memory of cathedral communities; the relationships, sometimes supportive, sometimes conflicting, that they had with kings (e.g. King John), aristocracies, and neighbouring urban and religious communities; the importance of cathedrals as centres of lordship and patronage; their role in promoting and utilizing saints' cults (e.g. that of St Thomas Becket); episcopal relations; and the involvement of cathedrals in religious and political conflicts, and in the settlement of disputes. A critical introduction locates medieval cathedrals in space and time, and against a backdrop of wider ecclesiastical change in the period. Contributors: Paul Dalton, Charles Insley, Louise J. Wilkinson, Ann Williams, C.P. Lewis, RichardAllen, John Reuben Davies, Thomas Roche, Stephen Marritt, Michael Staunton, Sheila Sweetinburgh, Paul Webster, Nicholas Vincent