Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
Lollardy Trials
Religious and secular authorities applied the name “Lollard” to people from a cross-section of medieval society who believed in one or more heretical ideas, many of them deriving from the writings of John Wyclif (ca. 1330–84), the Oxford theologian. His writings, beginning in the 1370s, articulated a set of ideas that questioned traditional discourse about Church authority, state prerogatives, the nature of the sacraments, and authority to translate, … Read the rest
The English and England
Medieval writers from Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Layamon to the authors of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century romances, historical writings, and religious works described England in sociological terms. This kingdom, country, or nation, as Benedict Anderson observes of a later age, is here already imagined as a community of humans that is “limited” and “sovereign” even if its inhabitants are imprecise in answering where and when the … Read the rest
Force and Order Battle of Agincourt
The Hundred Years’ War is a misnomer not only because the hostilities between England and France lasted from 1337 to 1453, but also because, as with much medieval warfare, engaged fighting was comparatively infrequent during this period. Major battles usually lasted less than two weeks, commonly with less than 3,000 people on each side, siege being a far more common form of achieving victory. … Read the rest
Prioresses
In the year 1000 only six or seven religious houses for women existed in England. When religious houses were dissolved in the sixteenth century, approximately seventy-five Benedictine nunneries were active. Nuns’ primary duties were prayer, contemplation of religious texts, and duties that sustained their house. Nunneries’ wealth varied widely, from those that received royal patronage or that benefited from the bequests of affluent families, to houses that were in … Read the rest
Pilgrimage
The spiritual, moral, physical, and pecuniary aspects of pilgrimages were the subject of debate throughout the Middle Ages, but contention intensified in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England as it did on the Continent. Archbishops, bishops, and others encouraged the view that pilgrimages were effective in remitting sins, while popular belief in the efficacy of visiting shrines of saints for curative reasons remained strong. On the other hand, … Read the rest
Marriage
Three principal bodies of texts discussed marriage in late medieval Europe: theology, law, and literature. Theologians focused on marriage not only as a socially sanctioned state of mutual love between a man and a woman, but also as many possible relationships among the individual, the Church, and Christ. Hence, earthly marriage, and particularly the wife, ranked lower on a scale below other possible marriages, the married woman less favored … Read the rest
Humors
Humoral theory in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries belonged both to the world of the practitioner and the academic. It originated in Aristotle’s idea of balance within the body and achieved its fullest articulation in the works of Galen (129–ca. 216), which became central to the curriculum of medical study in Europe. The enormous quantity of medical manuscripts in England (over 7,000 in English alone from the … Read the rest
Friars
The mendicant orders first arrived in England in the thirteenth century and the number of adherents rapidly grew. Two of the four principal orders – the Friars Preachers (Dominicans or Black Friars) and the Friars Minor (Franciscans or Grey Friars) – quickly became integral in the life of universities and commercial centers in the country, the Franciscans producing the remarkable theologians Roger Bacon, John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, … Read the rest
Benedictine
Rule Monastic orders existed in Ireland and Wales in the fifth century, first arrived in England in the sixth and seventh centuries, and in the eighth century the Rule of St. Benedict (480–ca. 550), Benedict’s set of codes for behavior, also came to be known in the British Isles. Receiving additional impetus after 1066 and then again with the arrival of orders of canons and friars in the twelfth … Read the rest
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Character” (1866)
If there is anything in art that can take the place of religion, we should
like to see it.
Josiah Gilbert Holland, Every-Day Topics, 2nd series (1882)
That American thought before 1865 was markedly religiocentric is a
scholarly commonplace. Such was especially true of New England, owing
to the Puritan imprint, which Enlightenment … Read the rest