scholarly journals What Is Charity? William Langland’s Answers with Some Diachronic Questions

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 458
Author(s):  
David Aers
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Piers Plowman ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Medieval Christianity ◽  
Ethics And Politics

Charity turns out to be the virtue which is both the root and the fruit of salvation in Langland’s Piers Plowman, a late fourteenth-century poem, the greatest theological poem in English. It takes time, suffering and error upon error for Wille, the central protagonist in Piers Plowman, to grasp Charity. Wille is both a figure of the poet and a power of the soul, voluntas, the subject of charity. Langland’s poem offers a profound and beautiful exploration of Charity and the impediments to Charity, one in which individual and collective life is inextricably bound together. This exploration is characteristic of late medieval Christianity. As such it is also an illuminating work in helping one identify and understand what happened to this virtue in the Reformation. Only through diachronic studies which engage seriously with medieval writing and culture can we hope to develop an adequate grasp of the outcomes of the Reformation in theology, ethics and politics, and, I should add, the remakings of what we understand by “person” in these outcomes. Although this essay concentrates on one long and extremely complex medieval work, it actually belongs to a diachronic inquiry. This will only be explicit in some observations on Calvin when I consider Langland’s treatment of Christ’s crucifixion and in some concluding suggestions about the history of this virtue.

Practices of Satisfaction, 1215–1700

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 106-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bossy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
General Public ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Oxford English Dictionary ◽  
Short History ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Professional Fields

The title, and subject, of this piece is ‘satisfaction’, though its main locus in time is the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I chose the subject because it fitted in with our president’s preoccupations, and because it interested me; it turns out, to my surprise, to jog our elbow about some contemporary matters, as I guess he wished.We had better start with the word, where there are two distinctions to be considered. The obvious one is between making up for, paying for, making amends, making reparation; and contentment, gratified desire, giving satisfaction, what you can’t get none of. I shall say that the first is the strong meaning, the second the weak one. The first is always other-directed, and entails an offence previously committed; the second is principally self-directed. ‘To content’ is a classical meaning of satisfacere, but it means to content someone else: to do something (facere), as against receiving something. A short history of the word in Latin and English records that the strong meaning emerged into late Latin as a description of church penance, and so passed into English in the fourteenth century. Its heyday was from then until the eighteenth. It referred to ecclesiastical penance (interrupted by the Reformation), the theology of the Redemption (encouraged by the Reformation), and in general public usage to the meeting of any kind of obligation, payment, atonement or compensation. From the eighteenth century it passed from public use, superseded by the weak meaning except in technical or professional fields. One professional usage, to which The Oxford English Dictionary gives a good deal of attention, is ‘to satisfy the examiners’: they think it is a case of ‘content’; may it be a case of ‘avert wrath’?

At the Edge of Reformation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Linehan
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Black Death ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Portuguese Society ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

This book springs from its author’s continuing interest in the history of Spain and Portugal—on this occasion in the first half of the fourteenth century between the recovery of each kingdom from widespread anarchy and civil war and the onset of the Black Death. Focussing on ecclesiastical aspects of the period in that region (Galicia in particular) and secular attitudes to the privatization of the Church, it raises inter alios the question why developments there did not lead to a permanent sundering of the relationship with Rome (or Avignon) two centuries ahead of that outcome elsewhere in the West. In addressing such issues, as well as of neglected material in Spanish and Portuguese archives, use is made of the also unpublished so-called ‘secret’ registers of the popes of the period. The issues it raises concern not only Spanish and Portuguese society in general but also the developing relationship further afield of the components of the eternal quadrilateral (pope, king, episcopate, and secular nobility) in late medieval Europe, as well as of the activity in that period of those caterpillars of the commonwealth, the secular-minded sapientes. In this context, attention is given to the hitherto neglected attempt of Afonso IV of Portugal to appropriate the privileges of the primatial church of his kingdom and to advance the glorification of his Castilian son-in-law, Alfonso XI, as God’s vicegerent in his.

IV. John Lingard and the Simancas Archives

1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76
Author(s):  
Edwin Jones
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
English History ◽  
Parish Priest ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
State Archives ◽  
Source Materials

John Lingard (1771–1851) was the first English historian to attempt to look at the history of England in the sixteenth century from an international point of view. He was unconvinced by the story of the Reformation in England as found in the works of previous historians such as Burnet and Hume, and believed that new light needed to be thrown on the subject. One way of doing this was to look at English history from the outside, so to speak, and Lingard held it to be a duty of the historian ‘to contrast foreign with native authorities, to hold the balance between them with an equal hand, and, forgetting that he is an Englishman, to judge impartially as a citizen of the world’. In pursuit of this ideal Lingard can be said to have given a new dimension to the source materials for English history. As parish priest in the small village of Hornby, near Lancaster, Lingard had few opportunities for travel. But he made good use of his various friends and former pupils at Douai and Ushaw colleges who were settled now in various parts of Europe. It was with the help of these friends that Lingard made contacts with and gained valuable information from archives in France, Italy and Spain. We shall concern ourselves here only with the story of Lingard's contacts with the great Spanish State Archives at Simancas.

Idleness

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kearney
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Human Labor ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Thought

This essay examines the role that the specter of idleness played in the ongoing transformation of labor in England during the late medieval and early modern periods. It begins by tracing an historical shift in Christian conceptions of labor through a knotty genealogy of ideas about labor and idleness that extends from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The essay then turns to an early sixteenth-century text that is not often considered in either medieval or early modern histories of Christian thought about labor: Thomas More’sUtopia(1516). The essay contends thatUtopiais fundamentally shaped by More’s meditation on labor and idleness and that that meditation opens the utopian text out toward a vexed history of ideas concerning human work that extends forward from the fourteenth century. With its idiosyncratic but historically resonant meditation on human labor, More’sUtopiarepresents a particularly useful vantage point from which to address the ongoing transformation of Christian conceptions of work in late medieval and early modern England.

Melancthon's “Synergism.”

1889 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 185-204
Author(s):  
Frank Hugh Foster
Keyword(s):  
Large Degree ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Evangelical Church ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Great Mind ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Reformation Theology ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The problems of anthropology depend for their solution in an unusually large degree upon psychology. While the evangelical church looks to the Bible for the materials of its theology, it still depends upon the use of human reason in the interpretation and adjustment of the materials there presented. Especially is this true in the matter of conversion and related doctrines. The language of the Bible is general, rhetorical, theological, practical, or popular, as you may choose to call it, but not strict, philosophical, theoretical, or scientific. The ultimate facts of the doctrine may be perfectly clear to the biblical student, but the adjustment of those facts in a dogmatic system will depend largely upon his ability as a thinker to see in the facts what the biblical writers have not thought fit to utter in express terms, and this upon his mental equipment for his task, or, in other words, upon his knowledge of the constitution and operations of the human mind, within which the process of conversion goes on. The history of Melancthon's “synergism” brings this peculiarity of the subject before us in a very interesting way, for clearer ideas as to the nature of the soul went, in his case, hand in hand with the alterations of the theological system; and thus his efforts to arrive at a statement of the process of conversion which should be at once true to the Scriptures and to the consciousness and the moral necessities of man, are not only interesting as the mental history of a great mind, but throw light upon the interrelations of anthropology and psychology, give us many suggestions as to the interpretation to be put upon the Reformation theology at the present day, and may serve to reveal the lines upon which all progress in respect to these questions is to be sought.

Recent Sources of Information on the Anabaptists in the Netherlands

1917 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 47-71
Author(s):  
Henry Elias Dosker
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Spare Time ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Northeastern Germany

The subject is not of my own choosing. It was assigned to me by our Secretary, when he invited me last summer to write a paper for this meeting of the Society. The raeson for this request lies in the fact that, for the last dozen years, much of my spare time has been spent in special work on this engrossing subject, which is shrouded in much mystery. But we all know something about the great Anabaptist movement, which paralleled the history of the Reformation. We have all touched these Anabaptists in their life and labors, in the sixteenth century, in all Europe, but especially in Switzerland, upper Germany, and Holland. Crushed and practically wiped out everywhere else, they rooted themselves deeply in the soil of northeastern Germany and above all in the Low Countries. And thence, whenever persecution overwhelmed them, they crossed the channel and moved to England, where their history is closely interwoven with that of the Nonconformists in general and especially with the nascent history of the English Baptists.

Playing ‘follow my leader’ in Anglo-Norman studies

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Rothwell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Important Phenomenon ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
French And English ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

AbstractThroughout the present century the nature of Anglo-Norman and its role in the history of both French and English has been misunderstood and misrepresented by the endless repetition at second hand of views that have their origin in the nineteenth–century ‘reconstructionist’ movement in French philology. Evidence readily available from original sources of many kinds shows that the French used in England between the Conquest and the end of the fourteenth century is at once a more complex and far more important phenomenon than current writing on the subject would suggest, especially as regards the history of the English language.

A Neglected Eucharistic Controversy: The Afterlife of John Wyclif's Eucharistic Thought in Bohemia in the Early Fifteenth Century

2015 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcela K. Perett
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Real Presence ◽  
The Subject ◽  
John Wyclif ◽  
Full Century

The renewed interest in John Wyclif (d. 1384) has brought this late medieval figure back into the spotlight of historians, giving rise to numerous studies evaluating his thought and its implications in the context of late fourteenth century England. However, it is not possible fully to appreciate Wyclif's importance in late medieval European culture without understanding the legacy of his ideas on the continent. According to the accepted narrative, John Wyclif's thought was mediated to the continent through the scholarly contacts between the universities in Oxford and in Prague, and re-emerged in the Latin writings of Jan Hus. This article argues that John Wyclif's thought, especially his critique of the church's doctrine of transubstantiation, found a larger audience among the rural clerics and laity in Bohemia, whom it reached through Peter Payne, who simplified and disseminated the works of the Oxford master. Wyclif's critique of transubstantiation sparked a nationwide debate about the nature of the Eucharist, generating numerous treatises, both in Latin and in the vernacular, on the subject of Christ's presence in the sacrament of the mass. This debate anticipated, a full century earlier, the famous debate between Luther and Zwingli and the Eucharistic debates of the sixteenth century Reformation more generally. The proliferation of vernacular Eucharistic tractates in Bohemia shows that Wyclif's critique of transubstantiation could be answered in a number of different ways that included both real presence (however defined) and figurative theologies—a fact, which, in turn, explains the doctrinal diversity among the Lollards in England.

scholarly journals Escritos sobre o céu para homens ao mar - considerações e estudos sobre astrologia e astronomia dos séculos XV e XVI * Writings about the sky for men at the sea - considerations and studies about astrology and astronomy of the XV and XVI centuries

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Simone Ferreira Gomes de Almeida
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
History Of Astronomy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Key Points ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

A escrita da história da astronomia foi conduzida por alguns pontos chaves: a relação deste saber com as viagens de expansão e o aprimoramento da náutica, a diferenciação da astrologia e o questionamento do lugar da ciência e da superstição para o estudo do céu, bem como a construção das estruturas deste saber pelos escritos que desdobraram o assunto. Todas estas tópicas foram desenvolvidas em maior ou menor grau nos estudos historiográficos das décadas passadas que trataram da ciência do céu. Assim, este texto trata da astronomia dos séculos XV e XVI como objeto de estudos historiográficos que privilegiaram determinados aspectos deste saber, confluindo muitas vezes com a recusa – que já estava explícita nos escritos quatrocentistas – daquilo que veio se afirmar no futuro como algo totalmente desvinculado da astronomia – a astrologia.*The writing of the history of astronomy was conducted by a few key points: the relation of this knowledge to voyages of expansion and improvement of nautical, the differentiation of astrology and the questioning of the place of science and superstition for the study of the sky, as well as the construction of structures of this knowledge by the writings that unfolded the subject. All these topics were developed to a greater or lesser extent in the historiographical studies of the past decades about the science of the sky. Thus, this text deals with the astronomy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as an object of historiographical studies that privileged certain aspects of this lore, often converging with the refusal - which was already explicit in the writings of the fourteenth century - of what came to be affirmed in the future as something totally unrelated to astronomy - astrology. 

The Conditions of Mercy

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 403-429
Author(s):  
William Revere
Keyword(s):  
Piers Plowman ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Active Life ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Justification By Faith

This article examines John Bunyan’s relationship to traditions of representing labor reaching back before the Reformation, from Piers Plowman and its imitators through to a range of “plowman” satires, complaints, and reformist dialogues in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bunyan’s provocative rejection of the virtues of labor in part one of The Pilgrim’s Progress brings together theological convictions about justification by faith with a vision of mechanic mobility and schooling in the Spirit that disrupts a range of social forms and hierarchies. Yet in part two of The Pilgrim’s Progress, particularly in the figure of Mercie, Bunyan offers up a new valuation of the exemplarist potentials of labor. Part two expands rather than contracts Bunyan’s exploration of the active life of dissent, reimagining questions of embodiment, habituation, imitation, and community. Mercie’s labors are performed in continuity with a late medieval tradition linking work and virtue. Her example prompts reconsideration both of Bunyan’s own dissenting allegories and of the uses of literary forms and ethical traditions across conventional period boundaries and confessional identities.

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