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John Wyclif (d. 1384) was among the leading schoolmen of fourteenth-century Europe. He was an outspoken controversialist and critic of the church, and, in his last days at Oxford, the author of the greatest heresy that England had known. This volume offers translations of a representative selection of his Latin writings on theology, the church and the Christian life. It offers a comprehensive view of the life of this charismatic but irascible medieval theologian, and of the development of the most prominent dissenting mind in pre-Reformation England. This collection will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students of medieval history, historical theology and religious heresy, as well as scholars in the field.
Using original source material, This book seeks to explore the nature of religious belief and practice in pre-Reformation England. For most people in England the main access to the Bible, and indeed to instruction in the faith, would be through hearing priests from their pulpits. The book demonstrates with immediacy and potency the diverse expressions of faith and observance. It discusses the varieties of spirituality in later medieval England and the ways in which they received expression, through participation in church services, actions like pilgrimages, charitable foundations, devotional readings and instruction. Opposition to prevailing spirituality, expressed through 'Lollardy', is also considered. There is a great deal of written evidence for both the theory and the practice of late medieval English religion and spirituality. The mass was the central ceremony of the Church: the consecration of the bread and wine to become the body and blood of Christ. Within Christianity, the principal focus of devotion was necessarily the divinity, in particular Christ, the second person of the Trinity. While there was considerable concern to accumulate spiritual benefits during life, the most important issue was to secure salvation after death. For those who sought advanced domestic spiritual satisfaction, an episcopal licence for the celebration of divine offices within a private chapel or oratory was necessary.
certainly an intriguing and enticing distinction, particularly for the pre-Reformation period. Then, while the Church may have proclaimed its Catholicity, it did so more in terms of its supposedly all-inclusive nature, which meant that it was impossible not to be a nonmember, than in terms of fixed dogmas of ‘Roman Catholicism’. The monolith apparently created by the Council of Trent, the Catholic
glass was considered necessary, we need to investigate several strands of Victorian medievalism. The Victorian Gothic Revival Arguably gothic had been consciously used as an archaic style since 1600 but it gained a new seriousness, popularity and momentum as Victoria came to the throne. 17 To some writers, such as Thomas Carlyle, the medieval world was not so much pre-Reformation as precapitalist, and it
locus of death provides a focal point where the poetic and the constructed self meet, uniting the rational and the sublime in contemplating the terrible and unknowable, and replacing the pre-Reformation prayers for the dead with a Protestant contemplation of the hereafter. Familiar memento mori , including grave markers, depict the passing of time as life’s enemy, but time is
tumultuous changes resulting from the religious reforms that began to take effect in the late 1530s. In pre-Reformation devotional practices, the relationship between worshipper and God was extensively mediated through visual representations depicting Christ and the saints. Medieval English churches were ‘filled’ with images of the saints, the embellishment and upkeep of which was paid for by worshippers. 21
discusses the politics and literature of Edward VI’s reign, concentrating on the events of 1549, Robert Crowley’s poetry and William Baldwin’s prose work Beware the Cat. Chapter 3 focuses on the literature of Mary Tudor’s reign, in particular the writing of John Heywood and Miles Hogarde, while the fourth chapter discusses a number of works produced during the first decade of Elizabeth I’s rule. This study concludes by briefly examining Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender. RELIGION, POLITICS AND PRINT The state of religion in pre-Reformation England has been the subject
was paraded in Herold’s preface (of 1549) which repeatedly alludes to contemporary circumstances, as well as drawing attention to the good humanist notion of history as a reservoir of edifying examples. Herold lamented current religious divisions, ‘dissensione animorum’.5 Soon the crusades were being examined through 39 THE DEBATE ON THE CRUSADES that filter of religious controversy. However, the historiographical battle-lines were neither clear nor impermeable. In certain pre-Reformation reformist Catholic circles, the idea that wars could be lawful if possessed
Classical Gaelic literary language, employed by the literate classes of both Ireland and Scotland. For 88 The pulpit and the pen John Carswell, this was not only a natural choice, it also ensured that the book would have the best possible opportunity to circulate among influential members of the learned class in Ireland and Scotland. Pre-Reformation clergymen who, like Carswell himself, had accepted benefices in the reformed Church would have inherited much of the Classical Gaelic literary tradition, including literacy in the classical lingua franca. Carswell himself was