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Loy is doomed to frustration. This is, paradoxically, because he believes that he can remove her clothes (those being the external paraphernalia that are part and parcel of the true institutional Church or Churches that she, as the community of the redeemed, inhabits) or – and this is simply tradition as such: ‘Primo, secundo, tertio is a good play; and the old saying is, the third pays for all.’ On fainting as a recurrent motif in The Faerie Queene, see Green, ‘Swooning in the Faerie Queene’. Green observes its typically restorative character (126). 53 Cf. Book of
The church as sacred space places the reader at the heart of medieval religious life, standing inside the church with the medieval laity in order to ask what the church meant to them and why. It examines the church as a building, idea, and community, and explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was crucial to its place at the centre of lay devotion and parish life. At a time when the parish church was facing competition for lay attention, and dissenting movements such as Lollardy were challenging the relevance of the material church, the book examines what was at stake in discussions of sanctity and its manifestations. Exploring a range of Middle English literature alongside liturgy, architecture, and material culture, the book explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was constructed and maintained for the edification of the laity. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary theoretical approaches, the book offers a reading of the church as continually produced and negotiated by the rituals, performances, and practices of its lay communities, who were constantly being asked to attend to its material form, visual decorations, and significance. The meaning of the church was a dominant question in late-medieval religious culture and this book provides an invaluable context for students and academics working on lay religious experience and canonical Middle English texts.
’s metaphor for ‘the Church’, the Church that is so described is not (thanks to the confusion of the heavenly and earthly citizenries in this life) necessarily identifiable with the institution known as such on earth. While the latter is, according to Augustine, a figure of the indiscernible community of the redeemed, and while it should harbour and foster true Christians, the degree of contiguity between it and the City of God is variable.10 Indeed, Augustine’s system implies that it would be possible for the membership of the earthly (i.e., institutional) Church to be
nineteenth century read Chaucer ‘straight’ as a medieval Catholic poet. Instead, there grew up a wide range of critical strategies to put Chaucer off-side with medieval Catholicism, creating interpretations in which he features in almost every conceivable non-orthodox role: zealous proto-Protestant; undoctrinal nature-worshipper; Chaucer as Catholic child 173 trifler in belief; ‘manly’ figure of English liberty, with a religion independent of the institutional church of the day; Laodicean; and a ‘child’ at heart. In what follows here, while risking over
(Chapter 7). In brief: the dwarf ’s eventual support of Una represents the broadly visible ‘services’ through which the visible institutional Church (or churches) may support, and even (allegorically) embody the functions of the invisible Church.48 These adiaphora include the forms and material ‘ornaments’ of worship, which 47 Lancelot Andrewes, Sermons of the Nativity and of Repentance and Fasting: Ninety-Six Sermons, 2 vols (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1861), I, 283 (italics mine). Andrewes’s text was Eph. 1:10, and in the peroration excerpted here he quotes
, Wimbledon assigns the task of pruning, whereby they cut away branches destroyed by sin through preaching ‘wiþ þe swerd of here tonge’. Railing, assigned to knights, involves a greater variety of tasks for protecting both the institutional church and the realm, including preventing theft, maintaining God’s law and those who teach it, and protecting the land from foreign enemies. Finally, labourers should work in a way that recalls the physical labour in the vineyard, as ‘wiþ here sore swet [labourers] geten out of þe erþe bodily liflode for hem and for oþer parties’.42
a violent event in the past, but by ‘the reality of the way in which its violence has not yet been fully known’.7 O’Connor’s voice registers such violence everywhere – in the relationship between mother and child, man and woman, the artist and the music industry, the individual and the institutional Church. In Caruth’s terms, O’Connor’s singing testifies to the inescapability of the belated impact of trauma, in its persistent witness to the voice that ‘cries out from the wound’. The modulations of her voice between the melodic smoothness of its purity and the
itself.32 If it came from the Pope, did that validate its authenticity or render it useless? The answer depended not on the material paper but on religious conviction. Was St Peter’s 30 Transporting Chaucer successor the rock of the institutional church, or the embodiment of Antichrist? Even if one were not a reformist, only God could provide ultimate proof that the document was not a fake. It is not only in the pilgrim context of The Canterbury Tales that Chaucer raises these questions. In The House of Fame, having demonstrated that there is no ontological
purpose is to contaminate and to confuse. As Hypocrisie (which is what he is called at I.i.Arg.3) he must inevitably insinuate himself into the company of his opposite number. Although Una is unable to see through Archimago, his malevolence towards her is always evident to the reader, thanks to the ‘God’s-eye view’ that Spenser’s allegory at this point projects. Spenser thus exposes the mixed nature of the institutional Church, even while he is establishing the sharpest possible distinction between its two components – the truly redeemed and the hypocrites
, who was represented by some Reformers as the devil’s whore. The contextualizing evidence is surveyed by Hamilton (Faerie Qveene, ed. Hamilton et al.) in his commentary on I.vii.16–17. 19 Institvtion, trans. Norton, 3.24.9 (405). 20 While the preaching of the Word is (together with the administration of the sacraments) a token of the true institutional Church, Arthur’s identification with its preaching function is not inconsistent with his status as one of the redeemed, since it is to the Church that is properly performing these essential functions that the