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If this chapter had been written a mere quarter-century ago, it would have contained an almost entirely different account both of gentry religion and of the Church which ministered to the late medieval English laity. For in the mid-1970s the reaction against the longstanding ‘Protestant’ account of the Church and lay piety was only just beginning. The late medieval English
parish church went to the care of sick parishioners and would continue to do so for as long as the town wished. A prominent question arising from the study of religion in Scottish towns in the pre-Reformation period concerns whether there was a sense of religious community at the town level: was the Scottish burgh a single corpus christianium, or body of Christians, or was it a series of distinct
This collection and the romances it investigates are crucial to our understanding of the aesthetics of medieval narrative and to the ideologies of gender and sexuality, race, religion, political formations, social class, ethics, morality and national identity with which those narratives emerge.
: University of Chicago Press, 1982), sets the study of saints in a broad European framework. On pilgrims and pilgrimage see R. C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London: Dent, 1977); E. A. Petroff, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); on the role of gender and the body in defining in medieval religion see C. Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy 45 literary sources 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley CA
and London: University of California Press, 1987); eadem, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1991). 4 P. Stafford, ‘Women and the Norman Conquest’, TRHS, 6th ser, 4 (1994), 221–49; Stafford, ‘Emma’, pp. 12–13. 7 introduction 5 J. L. Nelson, ‘Women at the court of Charlemagne: a case of monstrous regiment?’ in J. Carmi Parsons (ed.), Medieval Queenship (Stroud: Sutton, 1994), pp. 43–61; eadem, ‘Gender and genre in women historians of the early Middle Ages’, L’Historiographie médiévale en Europe
The differentiation between the laity and those who have received ordination in a religion is not characteristic of all religions. In some it is demarcated, in some it is not to be found, and in yet others the differentiation is blurred. I would like to contrast the recognition and concern for the laity in Buddhism with the other major religion of early India, Hinduism, which tends either to leave it fluid or as in some sects, gives it no recognition. Votive inscriptions from Buddhist sites in the Deccan, the northern part of the Indian peninsula, during the
Jerusalem’s pilgrims or the cockleshells of Santiago’s to the more universal cross worn by all crusaders – but only a few centuries later both movements had effectively ceased to exist. The place to begin is with ‘A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake’, a colloquy that Erasmus first published in 1526. By that point, crusades – and especially successful ones – had become a thing of the past. Thirty-four years earlier, even the Reconquista, that most enduring monument to crusading fervour, had come to a successful end, and in this colloquy Erasmus now brought under satirical
, especially about religion and ethics, and then to explore where these questions and answers may have come from, and why they might have been copied here. That exploration is, of course, an exercise in what some call historical imagination and others call guesswork. As such, it stands as a tribute to the scholar who has given me the strongest support for guessing how Carolingians thought and acted
Working and living together Having understood the nature of the ‘Englishness’ that aliens encountered on their entry and settlement in the kingdom, and the various contributions that immigrants in turn made to the evolving culture of their adopted country, we now turn to consider some of the social interactions that resident aliens had, both with people of their own ethnicity and with their English neighbours. This includes the generally peaceful contacts revealed in the workplace and in the practice of religion
political power and expression of civic responsibility. It also provided an opportunity for the cities’ gradual emancipation from the authority of ecclesiastical powers. Lay and semi-religious groups who founded and administered hospitals became integral players in the political arena. Roisin Cossar gives us the most compelling study to date of the intersection of religion, community, social class, and political power within the Italian city-state of the Middle Ages. 45 She emphasizes the importance of understanding the increased participation