Fifteenth-century attitudes: perceptions of society in late medieval England

1995 ◽  
Vol 32 (09) ◽  
pp. 32-5223-32-5223
1991 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer I. Kermode

This article explores some of the methods used to raise credit in an important trading region of late medieval England during a decline in overseas trade and an international bullion famine. It argues that, because provincial credit arrangements depended on local as well as national factors, a combination of demographic and regional circumstances contributed to the commercial weakness of Yorkshire merchants as they faced growing competition from Londoners with access to more sophisticated financial networks.


Last Words ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Sebastian Sobecki

No medieval text was designed to be read hundreds of years later by an audience unfamiliar with its language, situation, and author. By ascribing to these texts intentional anonymity, we romanticize them and misjudge the social character of their authors. Instead, most medieval poems and manuscripts presuppose familiarity with their authorial or scribal maker. Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England attempts to recover this familiarity and understand the literary motivation behind some of the most important fifteenth-century texts and authors. Last Words captures the public selves of such social authors when they attempt to extract themselves from the context of a lived life.


Traditio ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 333-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN C. HIRSH

“The Twenty-five Joys of Our Lady” is a study, examination, and critical edition of an unpublished fifteenth-century Middle English prose devotion preserved in Bodleian Library MS Don. d. 85. It is here associated with twenty-five “Joys of Our Lady” and presented as a vernacular Marian rosary, the first such to be identified in the period. The introduction to the edition considers early liturgical influences upon what became the tradition of Our Lady's Joys, their late-medieval development both across Europe and across England, and the circumstances that usually indicated fewer in number than is present in the devotion printed here. The introduction also concerns itself with the presence and practice of the rosary itself in late-medieval England and elsewhere and the limited evidence that has come down to us for its presence and circulation in England, including woodcut evidence in Caxton and allusions in other Latin devotions. It further indicates an ambiguity in this devotion's treatment of Christ's passion and concludes by considering the role and importance of joy as a pervasive, if often ignored, Christian attitude present in late-medieval English devotion.


1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 647-678 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Heath

Forty years ago the story of the Church in late medieval England was a simple one and not very different from the version which had prevailed half a century before that. The interpretation presented by W. Capes in 1900 had been slightly modified but largely underlined by 1950, and the Church and its development which was commonly depicted in that year would not have been strikingly unfamiliar to him. The current version was that, after the reforming efforts of the thirteenth century, which failed to achieve their end, and the advent of the friars, who even by the middle of that century were departing from their earlier zeal and purity, the Church in the following hundred years was exploited by the pope when it was not saved or oppressed by the Crown. The resulting corruption of the clergy contributed to its negligence and provoked an eruption of heresy which in due course was savagely suppressed and virtually expunged; rid of this threat, the fifteenth-century clergy were so notorious for their laxity, greed and mediocrity that a few devout members of the laity, perhaps inspired by the mystical writings, took refuge in private devotions which anticipated the individualism of the Protestant. The Reformation was viewed as the inescapable result of these circumstances.


Author(s):  
Aapo Takala

Aapo Takala: A Curious Harpour in Helle. An Edition of the Commentary on the Orpheus Metre of De consolatione philosophiae in Manuscript Thott 304 2º   The article presents an edition of the commentary on the Orpheus Metre in Ms. Thott 304 2º. The manuscript is located at the Royal Library in Copenhagen and it contains an English verse translation of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae and an accompanying prose commentary. The manuscript, the translation, and the commentary are rare examples of literary culture in late medieval England. The manuscript can be dated to the early fifteenth century and it probably is the copy made specifically for the patron of the translation, the noblewoman Elizabeth Berkeley. In the sixteenth century it was used as exemplar for a printed edition of the translation: the printer’s markings can still be seen in the manuscript. The commentary is the most comprehensive medieval English commentary on De consolatione philosophiae, and only extant in this manuscript and in the sixteenth-century printed edition.   The manuscript has previously been studied in a handful of articles and one Master’s thesis. Thus far, there has been no extensive research on the commentary. In addition to the edition, the article includes a discussion of the manuscript’s background and an overview of previous research on it.  


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