Medieval Church Studies

This volume fills an important gap in the study of medieval English sanctity. Focused on the period 1150-1550 it examines later manifestations of pre-conquest northern English cults (John of Beverley Oswald Hilda Ætheldreda etc.) and the establishment and development of many more during the twelfth to fifteenth centuries (Godric of Finchale Robert of Knaresborough Oswine of Tynemouth Æbbe of Coldingham Bega of Copeland William of York etc.). It showcases the diversity of new northern cults that emerged after 1150 and pays particular attention to cultures of episcopal and eremitic devotion and hagiographic production in Yorkshire Cumbria and Lincolnshire.

Divided into five subsections the volume opens by exploring the relation of sanctity to constructions of northern identity through targeted examinations of northern textual and material cultures. It then turns to a series of case studies of northern saints’ cults grouped with reference to the eremitic life female networks and locations and the contextualisation of northern sanctity within national transnational and post-medieval currents of veneration. Underlying all these essays is a concern with the conflicted idea of ‘northernness’. This collection argues for a northern sanctity that is imagined in varying ways by different communities (monastic diocesan national etc.) allied to a series of conceptual ‘norths’ that differ significantly in accordance with the bodies of evidence under survey.

Bishops were powerful individuals who had considerable spiritual economic and political power. They were not just religious leaders; they were important men who served kings and lords as advisers and even diplomats. They also controlled large territories and had significant incomes and people at their command. The nature of the international Church also meant that they travelled and had connections well beyond their home countries were players on an increasingly international stage and were key conduits for the transfer of ideas.

This volume examines the identities and networks of bishops in medieval Europe. The fifteen papers explore how senior clerics attained their bishoprics through their familial social and educational networks their career paths relationships with secular lords and the papacy. It brings together research on bishops in central southern and northern Europe by early career and established scholars. The first part features five case-studies of individual bishops’ identities careers and networks. Then we turn to examine contact with the papacy and its role in three regions: northern Italy the archbishopric of Split and Sweden. Part III focuses on five main issues: royal patronage reforming bishops nepotism social mobility and public assemblies. Finally Part IV explores how episcopal networks in Poland Sigüenza and the Nidaros church province helped candidates achieve promotion. These contributions will thus enhance of our understanding of how bishops fit into the religious political social and cultural fabrics of medieval Europe.

Recent scholarship on the Middle Ages has highlighted the importance of individualistic tendencies in devotion in both the lay world and religious communities. This interaction between individualization and religious agency has been scrutinized in numerous studies focusing on the beginnings during the so-called ‘Twelfth- Century Renaissance’ and further development in the later medieval and early modern periods.

However there has hitherto been relatively little scholarship on the phenomenon in the Devotio Moderna: the flourishing of more personalized forms of devotion in north-western Europe during the later Middle Ages. The essays in this volume redress this gap by exploring the processes of inwardness and the emergent individualization of religious practices in the late medieval Low Countries. The essays explore issues including the early impact of the printing press on devotion; meditational aids such as identification with Christ prayer cycles practices of remembrance and devout songs; and the tension between inner devotion and the ideal of communal piety in male and female religious communities. They also discuss some leading individuals of the Devotio movement.

This book explores the fifteenth-century translations of Richard Rolle’s Latin and English writings into English and Latin respectively raising questions about the impact of translation on an author’s legacy through the editorial activity of his translators. The volume also discusses Rolle’s sensory mysticism - which was criticized by the ensuing generation of mystics - whilst looking into the ways in which translations of his work create a fifteenth-century version of Rolle. While the fifteenth-century translations did not represent the standard means of shaping Rolle’s authority this study illustrates individual encounters with Rolle’s writings in which interpretation was much more overt than in the devotional reuse of untranslated Rollean material. The volume asks if alternative and perhaps controversial portraits of the same author arise from the translations.

Richard Rolle has received many often conflicting labels in scholarship: the father of English prose the first medieval English author the first known mystic of English literature the runaway Oxford man the non-conformist hermit and the misogynist. This book is located in the context of the late medieval censorship culture which inevitably impacted the translators’ treatment of authority revelatory writing and theological speculations. The analysis of Rolle in translation highlights the various meanings practices and implications of translation in the fifteenth century.

During the seventh and early eighth centuries a number of influential saints’ cults were established within the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria most notably the cult of St Cuthbert served by the monks of Lindisfarne. Reacting to the Danish incursions of the ninth century the Lindisfarne community gradually migrated south to Durham where in the early eleventh century the relics of further Northumbrian saints were collected to join those of Cuthbert. Following the re-foundation of the Durham church as a Benedictine house in 1083 the community sought to legitimise itself by stressing its links with an ancient saintly past. A century later the cults of new hermit saints such as Godric of Finchale and Bartholomew of Farne extensively modelled on St Cuthbert’s example were added to the north-eastern Durham familia.

This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to these north-eastern saints offering a comprehensive snapshot of new scholarship within the field. The first section focuses on the most eminent saints and hagiographers of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria: Cuthbert Wilfrid and Bede. The second section examines their utility for the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman community at Durham and surveys the cults which emerged alongside including the early saint-bishops of Hexham Augustinian priory. The third section reviews the material culture which developed around these saints in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: their depiction in stained glass their pilgrimages and processions and the use of their banners in the Anglo-Scottish wars. A concluding essay re-evaluates the north-eastern cult of saints from post-Reformation perspectives.

This book portrays a little-known phenomenon in Bohemian cultural and political history - the visual culture that grew up in the environment of Reformation churches in Bohemia from the time of the Hussites until the defeat of the Estates by the Habsburg coalition at White Mountain in 1620. It provides the first comprehensive overview of a forgotten era of artistic production over a period of approximately two hundred years when most of the population of Bohemia professed non-Catholic faiths.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a unique situation arose in Bohemia with five main Christian denominations (Utraquists Lutherans the Unity of Brethren Calvinists and Catholics) gradually coming to function alongside each other with a number of other religious groups also active. The main churches which had a fundamental influence on political stability in the state were the majority Utraquists and the minority Catholics. Yet the essays of this book establish that despite the particularities of the Bohemian situation the religious trends of Bohemia were an integral part of the process of Reformation across Europe.

Featuring over fifty illustrations including manuscript illumination panel painting and architecture the book also presents the surviving cultural products of the four non-Catholic Christian denominations ranging from the more moderate to radical Reformation cultures. The book also analyses the attitudes of these denominations to religious representations and illuminates their uses of visual media in religious and confessional communication. The book thus opens up both the Reformation culture of Bohemia and its artistic heritage to an international audience.

Medieval and early modern cultural history has witnessed a recent shift from the study of manuscripts and early printed books as vehicles of texts and images towards their study as cultural objects in their own right. Rather than focusing solely on original authorship scholars have turned to subjects such as the patronage production circulation and consumption of texts. Codicological features annotations glosses ownership notes deeds of sale and other traces have revealed countless insights into the social worlds of texts - their patrons producers and readers.

This book contributes to this area of scholarship with respect to Jewish texts and Jewish social contexts by focusing on select cases in the production of Bibles Haggadot religious poetry and translations of and commentaries on scripture in the Eastern and Western Mediterranean between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. Individual essays consider models of patron-client relationships interconfessional patronage scenarios manuscript production through ‘multiple hands’ the (incomplete) transition from manuscript production to printed books and relationships among text image and reader as suggested by codicological features.

This volume presents a study of the library of the Cistercian abbey of La Trappe in Normandy from the twelfth century to the French Revolution together with an annotated edition of the library catalogue of 1752. The abbey was founded as a Savigniac house became Cistercian in 1147 and is inseparably linked with the name of Armand-Jean de Rancé the great monastic reformer and founder of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance. When he became abbot of La Trappe in 1664 he brought with him many of his own books and had a new library built to house the monastic collection. Rancé died in 1700. Other books were then added over time until in 1752 the abbey possessed about 4300 volumes. The detailed catalogue is divided into two parts. The first part lists the books by subject beginning as might be expected with bibles; the second part lists the same books by author. The information presented in this study of the abbey and its library is of first importance not only for understanding the nature and development of Cistercian intellectual and spiritual life but also for the history of early modern libraries and the development of library cataloguing.

The psalms are at the heart of Christian devotion in the Middle Ages and still today. Learned early and sung weekly by every medieval monastic and cleric the psalms were the language Christ and his ancestor David used to speak to God. Powerful and plaintive angry and anguished laudatory and lamenting: the psalms expressed the feelings and thoughts of the individuals who devised them and those who sang them privately or publicly in Anglo-Saxon England many generations later. Psalters from Anglo-Saxon England are the largest surviving single group of manuscripts and also form a very significant percentage of the fragments of manuscripts extant from the period. Psalters were central to the liturgy particularly for the daily Office and were the first schoolbooks for the learning of Latin and Christian doctrine. Moreover from Anglo-Saxon England comes the earliest complex of vernacular psalter material including glossed and bilingual psalters complete psalter translations and poems based on individual psalms and on psalmic structures. The lament psalms are remarkably similar to the Old English elegies in both form and imagery and the freedom with which vernacular adaptors of the psalms went about their work in Anglo-Saxon England suggests an appropriation of the psalter not as the sacred and unchanging Word but as words that could be turned to use for meditation study reading and private prayer. Worth investigation are both individual figures who used the psalms such as Bede Alfred and Ælfric and also the unknown compilers and scribes who developed new layouts for psalter manuscripts and repurposed earlier or Continental manuscripts for use in Anglo-Saxon England. In Latin and in the vernacular these codices were central to Anglo-Saxon spirituality while some of them also continued to be used well into the later Middle Ages.

This book gathers new work by scholars who share a common interest not only in the controversial texts of the period between 1378 and 1536 but also in how the use geographical movement and manipulation of texts contributed materially to the formation of groups and group identities. The period covered spans the traditional medieval/early modern divide and the concomitant transition from manuscript to print. The years between the eruption of the Great Schism and the outbreak of European reformations witnessed unprecedented rifts in communities institutions and alliances. Yet while the crises of this period gave rise to division they also prompted new groups to coalesce resulting in realignments of communication networks readership and textual circulation in Europe. The Councils of Constance and Basel facilitated the production and dissemination of vast quantities of documents. Movements challenging the Roman Church and efforts to reform the Church from within provoked a torrent of persuasive and polemical writings which gained further momentum with the introduction of printing. These new situations also fostered the development and expression of group identities defined by doctrine opposition vernacularity and a burgeoning sense of national self-consciousness. Religious Controversy in Europe 1378-1536 examines the textual and material circumstances of these developments.