Saints and martyrs in late medieval religious culture

2018 ◽  
pp. 385-402
Author(s):  
Carl Watkins
Keyword(s):  
Religious Culture ◽  
Late Medieval

Singing of Death—and Life

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hayes
Keyword(s):  
New South ◽  
Folk Songs ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
Dance Of Death ◽  
Broad Community ◽  
Special Meaning

This chapter explores New South folk songs of personified Death, with special focus on the Lloyd Chandler composition “Conversation with Death”—its geographic scope, probable spread over time, and broad community of appropriators. The roots of “Conversation with Death” are traced to the late medieval Dance of Death, and the song is interpreted as articulating a medieval/modernist vision. Folk songs of Death are shown to be strikingly different from the songs of death in the dominant religious culture, where death is a release and the focus is on life after death as one’s true home. In contrast, folk songs of death evoke the terror of death to affirm the value of this life in this world—an affirmation that had special meaning for the poor, who faced denigration and devaluation from the dominant culture.

Emperor Charles IV (1346–1378) as the Architect of Local Religion in Prague

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 15-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Mengel
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Roman Emperor ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Local Religion ◽  
Guiding Principle

The idea of reform still supplies the guiding principle for most accounts of late medieval religion in Bohemia. Like a brightly colored thread, reform marks a trail leading forward from Jan Hus (d. 1415) to the leaders of the sixteenth-century Reformation, as well as backward to a series of precursors in the fourteenth century. This essay takes a different path through the religious culture of fourteenth-century Bohemia and of Prague, in particular. Rather than following the traditional historiography in identifying a handful of fourteenth-century Prague preachers as revolutionary forerunners of Jan Hus, this essay situates these and other figures within a more complicated and multivalent local religious culture, a culture that was carefully molded by Central Europe's most powerful authority. No one shaped Prague's local religion more dramatically than the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV (r. 1346–1378), as three examples offered here will illustrate. Like an architect, Charles IV designed much of Prague's vibrant local religion. Nevertheless, neither he nor anyone else completely controlled it.

Reforming Church Space: Altarpieces and Their Functions in Early Modern Transylvania

2007 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Maria Crăciun
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Religious Art ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Lutheran Church ◽  
Visual Evidence ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Confessional Identity ◽  
Ritual Context

AbstractFocused on an analysis of surviving late medieval religious art in Transylvanian Lutheran churches, this study wishes to explore the ways in which these images were presented to and viewed by the congregations after the Reformation of the Saxon community. The article considers the connection between these artifacts and the ritual context that framed them whilst assessing their ability to shape different patterns of piety and a new confessional identity. Drawing mostly on visual evidence, the study also relies on an exploration of the records of the synods of the Transylvanian Lutheran Church in order to understand this newly forged religious culture.

Biblical Languages and National-Religious Boundaries in Muscovy

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-22
Author(s):  
Isaiah Gruber
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Russian Orthodoxy ◽  
Biblical Language ◽  
Biblical Languages

Inspired in part by conversations with David Goldfrank, this essay considers aspects of how attitudes toward biblical language contributed to representations of national and religious identity in late medieval and early modern Muscovite Russia. At roughly the same time in history that revived Hebrew and Greek study in Western Europe helped to stimulate the Renaissance and Reformation, bookmen in East Slavia also reconsidered the original languages of sacred writings. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, such interest was neither unknown nor marginal within Muscovite religious culture. Hebrew-Russian glossaries circulated in leading monasteries from at least the thirteenth century; major infusions of Greek (and other) words and definitions in the sixteenth century transformed these texts into multilingual dictionaries. This mainstream tradition in Russian Orthodoxy can be linked to such important religious figures as Nil Sorskii and Maksim Grek. I argue that by “appropriating” biblical languages and terminology, often via inaccurate translations, Muscovite Russian literati created and defended their distinctive identity vis-à-vis Jews and Greeks, who were considered God’s former chosen peoples. These findings suggest reconsideration of the nature and boundaries of faith in Muscovy in the “age of confessionalism.”

scholarly journals The Pre-Reformation Landscape

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Religious Culture ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Nicholas Love ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
Walter Hilton ◽  
John Wyclif

This chapter surveys the rich and vibrant devotional culture of late medieval England, expressed in liturgy and collective religious practices, and in the development of a wide-ranging lay literature of spiritual and theological ambition, from writers such as Walter Hilton, Nicholas Love to energetic promoters of orthodox theology such as Margaret Beaufort. While acknowledging the emergence of Wycliffism, the heresy associated with Oxford theologian John Wyclif, the chapter argues that Wycliffism and its perceived off-shoot, ‘Lollardy’, should be read as part of a spectrum of reformist thinking that characterized the late medieval Church’s conception of its evangelical mission. The chapter problematizes notions of medieval religious culture as either atrophied or homogeneous, arguing instead that the variety and vitality of medieval English religious culture should complicate any quest for origins in accounts of the English Reformation.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sally Mayall Brasher
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Small Community ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Ecclesiastical Reform ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
City States ◽  
The City

The conclusions chapter summarizes the findings of the earlier chapters and reiterates the claim that throughout northern Italy, beginning as early as the twelfth century, as result of the pious impulse of an emerging class of cittadini, the focus of religious charitable activity was targeted on specific localized communities resulting in the founding of small, community-cantered hospitals. Over the following three centuries management of these hospitals evolved from grass-roots initiative of the community, through ecclesiastical reform and finally was appropriated by the civic government of the city-states. This evolution mirrored changes in urban society during the period and provides and excellent lens through which to view late medieval Italian society and religious culture.

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