Intellectual Life in Fifteenth-Century England

Abstract

This essay analyses ways in which recent, and in particular literary, scholarship has explored sources of renewal in English intellectual life during the century that separated the beginning of the Council of Constance (1414–18) and the conclusion of the Fifth Lateran Council (1512–14). Concentrating largely on intellectual life in clerical, homosocial textual cultures, it also takes into account other ways of looking at the long fifteenth century. Beginning with a consideration of the way in which the Council of Constance is currently being written into the intellectual and literary history of this period, the essay broadens in scope to explore how interest in ecclesiastical reform acted as a channel for important currents in late medieval English intellectual life. Finally, it considers how recent critical narratives are investigating examples of clerical and secular humanism in the period, the dynamics of the latter having been notably illuminated by the comparative approach adopted in a recent study of Chaucer and Christine de Pizan. The findings of recent scholars are also compared with those of earlier generations, the latter exemplified by the contrasting approaches taken by Naomi Hurnard and Roberto Weiss, a fourth edition of whose study of humanism in England has recently appeared online.