John Wyclif's Discourse on Dominion in Community


Book Description

This book reconstructs John Wyclif's whole discourse on dominion in community by rereading his notorious works, and restores his fame and integrity as a serious and original thinker, 'Christ's lawyer, ' and the law giver of the English nation at the dawn of Reformation.




The Making of Medieval Antifraternalism


Book Description

A case study in opposition to religious authority in the pre-modern period, Geltner treats a phenomenon known as antifraternalism from a fresh methodological and documentary perspective. He challenges many assumptions made about the early history of the mendicant orders, and the origins, scale, and scope of resistance to them.




Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe


Book Description

This collection builds on the foundational work of Penelope D. Johnson, John Boswell's most influential student outside queer studies, on integration and segregation in medieval Christianity. It documents the multiple strategies by which medieval people constructed identities and, in the process, wove the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion among various individuals and groups. The collection adopts an interdisciplinary approach, encompassing historical, art historical, and literary perpsectives to explore the definition of personal and communal spaces within medieval texts, the complex negotiation of the relationship between devotee and saint in both the early and the later Middle Ages, the forming of partnerships (symbolic, economic, devotional, etc.) between men and women across medieval Europe's considerable gender divide, and the ostracism of individuals and groups through various means including imprisonment, violence, and their identification with pollution. Contributors include: Diane Peters Auslander, Constance Hoffman Berman, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Alexandra Cuffel, Anne M. Schuchman, Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Katherine Allen Smith, Kathryn A. Smith, Christina Roukis-Stern, Susan Valentine, Susan Wade, and Scott Wells.




The Gawain-Poet and the Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition


Book Description

Ethan Campbell argues that a central feature of the Gawain-poet's Middle English works' moral rhetoric is anticlerical critique. Written in an era when clerical corruption was a key concern for polemicists such as Richard FitzRalph and John Wyclif, as well as satirical poets such as John Gower, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer, the Gawain poems feature an explicit attack on hypocritical priests in the opening lines of Cleanness as well as more subtle critiques embedded within depictions of flawed priest-like characters.




Against the Friars


Book Description

The friars represented a remarkable innovation in medieval religious life. Founded in the early 13th century, the Franciscans and Dominicans seemed a perfect solution to the Church's troubles in confronting rapid changes in society. They attracted enthusiastic support, especially from the papacy, to which they answered directly. In their first 200 years, membership grew at an astonishing rate, and they became counsellors to princes and kings, receiving an endless stream of donations and gifts. Yet there were those who believed the adulation was misguided or even dangerous, and who saw in the friars' actions only hypocrisy, deceit, greed and even signs of the end of the world. From the mid-13th century, writings appeared denouncing and mocking the friars and calling for their abolition. Their French and English opponents were among the most vocal. From harsh theological criticism and outrage at the Inquisition to vulgar tales and bathroom humor, this thoroughly documented work is suitable for the newcomer, as well as for readers who are familiar with the subject but might like to investigate specific topics in more detail.




Milton and the Reformation Aesthetics of the Passion


Book Description

Scholarship on Milton's view of God the Father and the Son has focused on the author's theological beliefs. For Milton, these are equally artistic questions, and to address them this study considers the precedents in Christian art that provide models for portraying the divine within a reformed context. Milton's revision of the passion tradition in his short poems of 1645 and his later epic poems substitutes a living, obedient and subservient Son in place of late medieval representations of the crucifixion. His alternative passion unfolds through a poetic vocabulary of fragmentation, omission, and restoration, drawing on iconoclasm as an artistic strategy. This study addresses the long-standing question about Milton's avoidance of the crucifixion and contributes to the broader study of his reformed poetics.




Poverty’s Proprietors: Ownership and Mortal Sin at the Origins of the Observant Movement


Book Description

Focusing on the theme of property and community, this study offers a new account of the origins of fifteenth-century Observant reform in the monasteries and canonries of the southern Empire. Through close readings of unpublished texts, it traces how ideas about reformed community emerged, both beyond and within the religious orders, in the era of the Council of Constance. Focusing on reform among monks and canons in Bavaria and Austria to 1450, it then shows how those ideas were applied in practice, through reforming visitation and through a devotional culture steeped in the “new piety” of the day. These considerations allow the Observant Movement to offer fresh perspectives on the history religious community, reform, and the church in the fifteenth century.




“To Recover What Has Been Lost”: Essays on Eschatology, Intertextuality, and Reception History in Honor of Dale C. Allison Jr.


Book Description

This volume participates in and furthers the legacy of Dale Allison by collecting essays from leading scholars on the eschatology, intertextuality, and reception history of New Testament texts and related literature.




Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis


Book Description

After establishing a feminist-historicist perspective on the tradition of biblical commentary, Tinkle develops in-depth case studies that situate scholars reading the bible in three distinct historical moments, and in so doing she exposes the cultural pressures that medieval scholars felt as they interpreted the bible.




The Kabbalistic Scholars of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible


Book Description

This work places the Syriac New Testament in the Antwerp Polyglot within a new appreciation of sixteenth century Catholic Syriac and Oriental scholarship. The Spanish antecedents of the Polyglot and the role of Montano in its production are evaluated before the focus is turned upon the Northern Scholars who prepared the Syriac edition. Their motivation is shown, particularly in the case of Guillaume Postel, to derive from both Christian kabbalah and an insistent eschatological timetable. The principles of Christian kabbalah found in the Polyglot are then shown to be characteristic also of Guy Lefevre de la Boderie's 1584 Paris edition of the Syriac New Testament dedicated to Henri III. This work completes the account of sixteenth century Syriac bibles begun in the companion volume Orientalism, Aramaic and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation which also appears with Brill.