scholarly journals Printed Pages, Perfect Souls? Ideals and Instructions for the Devout Home in the First Books Printed in Dutch

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Anna Dlabačová
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Religious Instruction ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Printed Books

This article studies the role of the earliest books printed in the Dutch vernacular in the religious practice of lay individuals and the devout home. Many of the texts disseminated in these early printed books have received little attention and scholars have tended to view them within the sphere of the Modern Devotion, even though often there is no direct link to this religious reform movement. This article attempts to show that the first books printed in Dutch offer an interesting lens through which to study domestic devotion in the Low Countries in the last decades of the fifteenth century. It argues that these books bridged the gap between catechetical instruction and the private home, literally bringing home many of the ideals and instructions that the clergy would have offered in church and thus increasingly ‘textualizing’ the lives of the late medieval laity. Printers such as Gerard Leeu and his contemporaries acquainted Christians to the use of printed books for personal and practical religious instruction and knowledge and thus paved the way for developments in the sixteenth century.

scholarly journals Incunabula in Communities of Canonesses Regular and Tertiaries Related to the Devotio Moderna

Quaerendo ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-248
Author(s):  
Anna Dlabačová ◽  
Patricia Stoop
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Religious Women ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Inclusive Approach ◽  
Devotio Moderna ◽  
Religious Book

Abstract This contribution discusses the hitherto overlooked ownership of the earliest printed books (incunabula) by Netherlandish female religious communities of tertiaries and canonesses regular connected to the religious reform movement of the Devotio moderna. Studies of book ownership and book collections in these communities have tended to focus on manuscripts. From the last decades of the fifteenth century onwards, however, these religious women increasingly came in contact with printed books, even though the involvement of the Devotio moderna with the printing press was limited. The discussion focuses on the channels via which tertiaries and canonesses acquired books produced by commercially operating printers, the ways in which incunabula affected what these (semi-)religious women read, as well as the ratio between printed books in Latin and the vernacular, and their function(s) within these communities. Thus the essay intends to sketch a preliminary image of the role of incunabula in female convents, and advocates a more inclusive approach of female religious book ownership.

Krijg je nog rente voor een lied? : Stadsdichterschap als eer en verdienste sinds de middeleeuwen1

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-131
Author(s):  
Laurens Ham ◽  
Nina Geerdink ◽  
Johan Oosterman ◽  
Remco Sleiderink ◽  
Sander Bax
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
First Century ◽  
City Marketing ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
City Councils ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Public Money

Abstract This article presents the first diachronic overview of the economic, social and symbolic profits of ‘city poets’ (‘stadsdichters’) in the Low Countries. From the early fifteenth century onwards, there have been many (more or less) official relationships between city councils and poets. The prominence and the form of these relationships, however, diverged greatly in different periods: whereas official appointments were the standard in the fifteenth, sixteenth and the twenty-first centuries, the period in between saw a much more diverse landscape of informal appointments and relationships. After presenting a historical overview of the role of city poets throughout the centuries, this article focuses on two well-documented periods in which formal agreements were made between town governments and poets: the late Middle Ages and the start of the 21st century. We analyze political and financial agreements explicitly in relationship to the complexities surrounding the production of city poetry. City poetry, paid by public money, is bound to be controversial: in general because its status is subject to changes and political discussions, but also because this form of commissioned poetry is sometimes seen as a form of propaganda. Official city poetry seems to flourish most in societies with a stable political-religious climate (as in the Southern Low Countries in the fifteenth and sixteenth century) and/or with a keen interest in city marketing (as in Flanders and the Netherlands in the twenty-first century).

Public and Private: The Late Medieval Wall Paintings of Haddon Hall Chapel, Derbyshire

2006 ◽  
Vol 86 ◽  
pp. 179-205
Author(s):  
Mellie Naydenova
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Wall Paintings ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Public Statement ◽  
The Public ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Public Persona ◽  
Private Devotion

This paper focuses on the mural scheme executed in Haddon Hall Chapel shortly after 1427 for Sir Richard Vernon. It argues that at that time the chapel was also being used as a parish church, and that the paintings were therefore both an expression of private devotion and a public statement. This is reflected in their subject matter, which combines themes associated with popular beliefs, the public persona of the Hall's owner and the Vernon family's personal devotions. The remarkable inventiveness and complexity of the iconography is matched by the exceptionally sophisticated style of the paintings. Attention is also given to part of the decoration previously thought to be contemporary with this fifteenth-century scheme but for which an early sixteenth-century date is now proposed on the basis of stylistic and other evidence.

At Home in Renaissance Bruges

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie De Groot
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Rich Material ◽  
At Home

How did citizens in Bruges create a home? What did an ordinary domestic interior look like in the sixteenth century? And more importantly: how does one study the domestic culture of bygone times by analysing documents such as probate inventories? These questions seem straightforward, yet few endeavours are more challenging than reconstructing a sixteenth-century domestic reality from written sources. This book takes full advantage of the inventory and convincingly frames household objects in their original context of use. Meticulously connecting objects, people and domestic spaces, the book introduces the reader to the rich material world of Bruges citizens in the Renaissance, their sensory engagement, their religious practice, the role of women, and other social factors. By weaving insights from material culture studies with urban history, At Home in Renaissance Bruges offers an appealing and holistic mixture of in-depth socio-economic, cultural and material analysis. In its approach the book goes beyond heavy-handed theories and stereotypes about the exquisite taste of aristocratic elites, focusing instead on the domestic materiality of Bruges’ middling groups. Evocatively illustrated with contemporary paintings from Bruges and beyond, this monograph shows a nuanced picture of domestic materiality in a remarkable European city.

Rivals for Ministry? Ordinations of Secular and Regular Clergy in Southern England c. 1300–1500

1989 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 99-109
Author(s):  
Virginia Davis
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Religious Orders ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Southern England ◽  
Secular Clergy ◽  
Pastoral Role ◽  
Late Medieval Literature ◽  
Changing Patterns

At the beginning of the fourteenth century ecclesiastical recruitment AA was flourishing in England. Hundreds of men turned up to be ordained at the four Ember seasons each year at which major ordinations were permitted to be held. The majority of these men were secular clergy; only a small proportion were members of religious orders. Of the scores of people in the diocese of Winchester who came at the stipulated time to be ordained to the major orders at this date only about one fifth were members of religious orders and of those, only a handful were mendicants. However, by the end of the century, after the ravages of the Black Death, although the total numbers of men being ordained had declined dramatically a greater percentage of these were regular rather than secular clergy. A similar pattern can be seen all over Southern England. It was a trend which persisted throughout much of the fifteenth century. This paper will investigate the changing patterns of secular and regular ordinations to the priesthood in southern England in the period between 1300 and 1500. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries extensive anti-mendicant feeling was expressed both in late medieval literature and in rivalry between the secular clergy and the friars over the pastoral role of the latter. Was this, in fact, a reflection of a reality which meant that, compared to the position in the early fourteenth century, far more ordained friars were on the streets and in the parishes?

Ex vita patrum formatur vita fratrum: The Appropriation of the Desert Fathers in the Augustinian Monasticism of the Later Middle Ages

2006 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-228
Author(s):  
Eric Saak
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Saint Augustine ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Desert Fathers ◽  
The Creation ◽  
John Cassian

AbstractThis article traces the role of the desert fathers in the creation of the late medieval Augustinian Myth. It argues that the major problem facing members of the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine (OESA) was how to appropriate the tradition of the desert fathers and that of Augustine's monasticism for the tradition of the Order. In this light, special attention is given to the Pseudo-Augustinian Sermones ad fratres in eremo and the central importance of John Cassian and Paul of Thebes. Of particular importance are the works of Jordan of Quedlinburg, which shaped the identity of the OESA from the mid-fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. The desert fathers provided the model of the eremitical life, and thus Jordan "mythified" the desert fathers as he had Augustine himself. This was not an issue of historical identification, but of mythic creation in an attempt to provide the foundation of the late medieval OESA.

The transformation of rural elites in late medieval Flanders: oligarchy, state formation and social change in the Liberty of Bruges (c. 1350–c. 1525)

2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
FREDERIK BUYLAERT ◽  
ANDY RAMANDT
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Rural Society ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Political Factor ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Elite Formation

AbstractProceeding from an in-depth analysis of the Liberty of Bruges, an important rural district in the late medieval Low Countries, this contribution frames rural elite formation by means of two debates which are seldom used in combination, namely, the debates on state building and on the commercialisation of rural society. We challenge the thesis, inspired by modernisation theory, that socio-economic transformation engendered political change in pre-modern Europe as newly emerging rural bourgeoisies are alleged to have become an important political factor, shifting their allegiances between lords and peasants as they saw fit. The evidence discussed shows instead a trend towards oligarchy from the fifteenth century onwards, in which an increasingly exclusive social network came to combine hitherto separated forms of political power, largely at the expense of the growing number of wealthy rural bourgeois. It is argued that this transformation of the rural political elites is closely tied to changes in the established relations between the central government and the regional elites of the Low Countries.

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 Theology, Martyrdom and Female Agency in Reformation Prague

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 748
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Fudge
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Limited Attention ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
The World

The Hussite tradition historically has been excluded by the mainstream of Reformation historiography. Czech-language scholarship treating Hussite history have made few significant advances in the study of women and there has been limited attention given to the role women played in the Hussite tradition. The gap in Anglophone historiography is even more apparent. This essay considers Klára, a sixteenth-century Prague housekeeper, Marta, a learned figure contemporary with Klára who withstood civil and ecclesiastical officials, and Anna Marie Trejtlarová, an early seventeen-century educated laywoman. Their names are almost completely unknown outside Czech historiography. An examination of their lives and faith by means of the surviving primary sources and relevant historiography provides a window through which to observe the nature of religious reform in the Prague context in the world of Reformations. What is striking is the role of theology and the nature of female agency in the examination of these women. The essay endeavours to use these case studies to present a preliminary answer to the question: What do women tell us about Reformation? This study reveals the world of religious reform more fully by situating women and female agency in an active capacity.

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