Religion in Common Life

This chapter sketches the development of Victoria’s liberal Protestant commitment to lived lay religion, which overlooked conventional distinctions between the sacred and the secular. Victoria and Albert regarded family and the home rather than the church as the locus of religious faith and practice, and sought to advance the identification of God with the laws of His creation. This chapter accordingly discusses Victoria’s relationship to the Christian sacraments, her creation and use of sacred space within royal homes, and her views of God and the natural world. It highlights the appeal of her and Albert’s godly domesticity to a broad Protestant public, while also indicating that Victoria’s hostility to Sabbatarianism and disdain for efforts to avert disease and war through prayer could set her at odds with religious, and particularly with evangelical, opinion.

From Charisma to Charity

This chapter focuses on a twelfth-century Italian urban lay saint: the merchant turned penitent Ranieri of Pisa (d. 1160). It is within the first written and visual sources created to celebrate Ranieri that one finds the most extensive evidence of a twelfth-century layman being celebrated more for his work as a living holy man than for his pious activities. In short, in the earliest cults of laymen in the Italian communes, it is spiritual gifts or charisma—specifically the performance of miracles—and not pious actions like a dedication to penance, a rigorous prayer schedule, or charity work that stand as the most compelling proof for sanctity. The first sources created for Ranieri's cult gives one an opportunity to see not only a detailed portrait of this kind of lay charisma but also how threatening such claims must have been to the institutional church in the late twelfth century. Although asceticism, pilgrimage, and charity would become defining characteristics of late medieval lay religion and would eventually come to dominate the cults of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century lay saints, Ranieri's early cult demonstrates how such a threefold identity was not emphasized in early lay saints' cults but rather emerged out of Pope Innocent III's efforts to redirect and reconceive of an ideal lay life.

Counsel and Conscience in Lancastrian England

The minority of Henry VI compelled the English governing cadre, faced with the heavy burden of his predecessor’s foreign conquests and unfinished wars, to clarify its notion of ministerial responsibility, a process which can be observed through the internal council memoranda which have occasionally survived. This new genre of documentation, terse and practical in tone and usually in the vernacular, is common to most European polities from the second decade of the fifteenth century, and seems to replicate closely the rhythm of the spoken word; it can therefore expose the underlying values of councillors which more artfully confected documents keep hidden. Councillors’ memoranda reveal a sense of obligation sharpened by recently articulated notions of equity and of private conscience, in the wake of Henry V’s vigorous stimulus to lay religion, and show that the notions of public duty learnt in his service survived through the reign of his successor.