Late Medieval Catholicism Research Articles

Dubius in fide fidelis est?Doubt and Assurance in Late Medieval Catholicism

The canon law dictum that ‘dubius in fide infidelis est’ offers a seemingly definitive statement on the place of doubt and uncertainty in medieval Catholicism. Yet where Catholic teaching was open to question, doubt was inseparable from faith, not merely as its obverse but as part of the process of achieving faithfulness – the trajectory outlined by Abelard in the twelfth century. The challenge for the Church was not that doubters lacked faith, but that having tested their doubts they might end up with the wrong faith: doubt preceded assurance, one way or the other. That problem is addressed in this essay by a broad examination of the ties between faith and doubt across the late Middle Ages (from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries), arguing that uncertainty and doubt were almost unavoidable in medieval Catholicism. As the starting points in a process which could lead to heresy and despair, they also had a positive role in developing and securing orthodox faith.

The Early Robin Hood and “The Myght of Mylde Marye”

A number of reformist commentators in late medieval England suggested that stories about Robin Hood were especially popular with people who were not especially devout. On the other hand, notwithstanding these reformist comments, we also have evidence that Robin Hood stories were sometimes used as sermon exempla, which suggests that they were seen (at least by some preachers) as promoting acceptable forms of Catholic devotion. At one level, the use of these stories as sermon exempla derived from the fact that in these early stories (quite unlike later stories) Robin was depicted as committed to the Mass and devoted to the Virgin Mary. The real value of these early stories about Robin Hood, however, is that they allow us to problematize two historiographical assumptions that continue to guide the thinking of English historians studying late medieval Catholicism. Thus, English historians (including the revisionist historians who have otherwise done so much to document the vitality of English Catholicism on the eve of the Reformation) continue to mimic official Catholic doctrine in suggesting that for English Catholics, Christ was the supernatural being who stood atop the Catholic pantheon, and that Mary and the saints were viewed only as intercessors with no independent power of their own. By contrast, the evidence from the Robin Hood stories (and from other stories used as sermon exempla) very explicitly depicts a rank ordering in which Mary not only had independent power, but independent power which eclipsed that of her Son.

ALEXANDRA WALSHAM. The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland.

Most reasonably informed readers would come to the topic of this book with a fair notion of the tale it was going to tell. Aware that the medieval Catholic Church had invested places with particular spiritual meanings (for example, the sites of miracles, martyrdoms, and relics that became the endpoint of pilgrimages), but also that Protestantism had stressed the transcendence of God beyond the material universe, they would expect the British and Irish reformations to have destroyed an older mental world. By most accounts, the Reformation desacralized the landscape in a way that mirrored its (better studied) stripping of the altars within churches. Protestants would have denied that particular places had special spiritual significance, and would have attacked the ceremonies and traditions associated with that set of beliefs. Alexandra Walsham's book certainly shows that this happened, and does so with the author's usual breathtaking ability to catalogue a huge range of fascinating examples, and with a truly impressive command of Welsh, Scots, and Irish material as well as English evidence. Yet this work does much more. It also demonstrates the ways in which the Reformation was not a simple exercise in destruction, and was not that destruction's sole agent. For example, as Walsham charts attitudes to the landscape before 1500, she shows that trends in late medieval Catholicism prefigured later Protestant doubt about the special spirituality of particular locations. Not only Lollard heretics but also perfectly orthodox humanists had worried about an overly sacralized landscape decades before Martin Luther or Henry VIII were born.

Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750

Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion, 1250–1750

Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education (review)

Reviewed by: Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education Richard Rex Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education. By Ian Green. [St. Andrew’s Studies in Reformation History.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2009. Pp. xviii, 373. $114.95. ISBN 978-0-754-66368-3.) This substantial study represents the author’s revision of his Waynflete Lectures, delivered at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 2006. Like Ian Green’s other books, The Christian’s ABC (Oxford, 1996) and Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000), it is an encyclopedic survey of almost an entire genre of English books—a staple of the publishing trade, textbooks printed to supply the rapidly growing numbers of grammar schools. The chief aim of the book is to explore the curious juxtaposition, perhaps tension, between the elements of Protestantism and humanism in English education. The labors on show here are prodigious and, as far as they go, definitive. Hundreds of books are examined, many in some depth, and Green provides a detailed account of the content of an English classical education—and of the varying levels at which that education was offered—in the two centuries from Henry VIII to George II (chapters 3 and 4). Among the most interesting of his findings is the increasing role of English translations of classical works in education from the middle of the seventeenth century. Only in chapter 5 is the relationship between Protestantism and humanism addressed directly, and Green does discern tension here, although not any kind of radical dysfunction. But the case he makes there and in the summative chapter 6,“Assessing the Impact,” perhaps could have been developed a little further. After detecting [End Page 367] a tension between an emphasis on practical virtue characteristic of the Erasmian and classical traditions and the “Protestant stress on divine grace”(p. 307), Green ultimately concludes that there was an “alliance of state religion and grammar school education” (p. 364) that prevailed until the nineteenth-century age of reform. Yet what this precisely calls into question is the Protestantism (that is, the theology) of English Protestantism. Even Philipp Melanchthon’s enormously influential reconciliation of Renaissance humanism with Reformation theology, to which the whole European Protestant tradition was massively indebted, was ultimately something of an intellectual sleight of hand. It was more shotgun marriage than love match. What Green’s analysis of English educational textbooks suggests is that authentically Protestant soteriology made little impact in the mainstream channels of English education and therefore probably equally little among relatively broad swathes of the English elite and middling sort. A goodly, or godly, section of the clergy was always deeply committed to this theology, along with a rather narrower section of the laity. But, as Puritan ministers in the early-seventeenth century were wont to lament, all the preaching of the “Gospel” had made little difference to the majority of the population. This is not to say, of course, that the English people as a whole were not Protestant. They most emphatically were, and God help anyone who seemed to threaten their Protestantism—witness Archbishop William Laud, King Charles I, and King James II. But that Protestantism was more a matter of identity than of theology, and that identity was all about being English and not being Catholic or “popish” (that is, from an English point of view, superstitious, idolatrous, antichristian, foreign, traitorous, Jesuitical, casuistical, or equivocal). The cohesion, such as it was, of English Protestantism was entirely negative: a proposition abundantly illustrated by the unholy alliances that brought about the Glorious Revolution, and annually enacted in the November rituals of “Gunpowder Treason.” But this Protestantism was hardly something that required formal schooling or even formal catechesis for its transmission, anymore than late-medieval Catholicism had done. It was by 1700 the DNA of English culture. Nor was this Protestantism even theoretically incompatible with a classical or humanist education. It may be that Green will have more to say about that in the promised final volume of his trilogy on early-modern English Protestantism. In the meantime, he has produced a work of solid scholarship that will have something for almost any student of early-modern English educational or...

The Imaginative World of the Reformation (review)

Reviewed by: The Imaginative World of the Reformation Susan C. Karant-Nunn The Imaginative World of the Reformation. By Peter Matheson. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 2001. Pp. xiii, 153. $15.00 paperback.) The unifying theme of this small book is sixteenth-century people's dreams of freedom here on earth. Made up of the Gunning Lectures that Matheson presented to the Divinity Faculty at the University of Edinburgh in 1998, the volume examines several ways in which this aspiration found expression. The author asserts that the so-called enchanted world, the liminality between telluric and divine, of late medieval Catholicism was no longer satisfying. He rejects the premise that "Protestants appear content with an impoverished imagination" (p. 2). Instead, the Reformation altered prevailing metaphors, away from the Mass with all its layers of meaning, toward liberty in this life. In order to achieve this shift, the Reformers had to be destructive. They desired to transform, Matheson says, the images in the heart (p. 14). Assisting them was widespread anticlericalism and the iconoclastic power of humanistic criticism. Pamphlets, sermons, woodcuts, and paintings disseminated the images of awakening to a new dawn (p. 47). They constituted an iconography of an inseparable spiritual and earthy freedom. With their competing utopias, both urban magistrates and peasant warriors were partisans in this quest for liberation. The "great shattering" that marked the birthing throes of the new vision gave way to tyranny and violence. Those in power, including Reformers themselves in some territories, found the peasants' egalitarian aspirations intolerable. The dream became a nightmare. The new symbolic world remained, but the limitations on its concepts stood revealed. And, Matheson admits, the old, the Catholic, ways of living and thinking died hard. He holds up Thomas Münzer and Argula von Grumbach as advocates of a fundamental empowerment of the laity as disciples of Christ. Christians must take up the gritty tasks of this life, including, for women, those of subordination. Matheson refers regularly to current historiographic discussion, such as the debate between Peter Blickle and Tom Scott. These essays may echo certain premises of Blickle, but they are not derivative of it. The author delicately expresses his skepticism toward "social history" and its "negative" conclusions about the Reformation. This is a learned, reflective, gentle, and very Protestant analysis of early Lutheran leitmotifs and their short-term fate. Susan C. Karant-Nunn University of Arizona Copyright © 2004 The Catholic University of America Press

The English Reformation Revisited

I was asked by the Society to provide an introduction to current historical thinking about the English Reformation in the first talk to the 1995 Conference. The ensuing lecture was deliberately intended to provide guidance through the minefield of controversy about the success of Reformation for those with only limited knowledge of sixteenth-century history. Debates about the Reformation have always been of obvious importance to both theologians and historians: they have usually in the past been profoundly influenced by confessional ideologies. In the last thirty years the nature of the questions asked about Reformation has undergone marked change: specifically the issue of popular religious belief and practice has assumed a centrality it never before possessed. But new questions have not brought closer agreement on the nature of religious change, and in recent years fierce debate has continued to rage on such issues as the vitality of late medieval Catholicism, the popularity of the early reformers and the motives of Henry VIII and his successors. Some, at least, of these controversies are still bound up with Protestant, Catholic and Anglican identities in the late twentieth century. Since the continuities between past and present were the theme of last year's Conference, I have touched on these identities, but have left it to others, especially Dr Rowell and Dr Rex to make these connections more explicit.

The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c. 1580 by Eamon Duffy

The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c. 1580. By Eamon Duffy. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 1993. Pp.xii, 654. $45.00 cloth; $18.00 paperback.) Historians have always questioned traditional beliefs and interpretations about the past. Some off new insights or emphasize neglected aspects of the human story, and others, iconoclastic in approach, radically reshape one's understanding of events. Very seldom, however, do the findings of revisionist historians touch a nerve outside the academic profession. Eamon Duffy's recent book on the English Reformation, however, proves to be an exception. has created a stir within English ecclesiastical circles and has forced some to re-examine the causes, motives, and events associated with the separation from Rome during the sixteenth century. The Tablet, a Roman Catholic publication, recently noted that the preface to the 1995 edition of the Church of England Yearbook drew attention to revisionist historians, especially Eamon Duffy, who have questioned some Anglican views about the Reformation. In his recent book, Duffy argues that the pre-Reformation Catholic Church was not as corrupt as some historians have believed, and he also casts doubt on the belief that the Reformers performed valuable services by reviving a moribund church. If this interpretation is correct and if Anglican history needs re-examination, then, the preface pointed out, Eamon Duffy's book has important ramifications in the area of ecumenism. The Stripping of the Altars, despite its length, will appeal to both the professional historian and to anyone interested in English ecclesiastical history. After an informative introduction, Duffy, a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, divides this important contribution to sixteenth-century England into two parts. In the first he skillfully sketches the structures of traditional religion, especially the beliefs and practices of the laity in the parishes of East Anglia, up to 1536. It is the contention of the first part of the book that late medieval Catholicism exerted an enormously strong, diverse, and vigorous hold over the imagination and the loyalty of the people up to the very moment of the Reformation (p. 4) The second part details the reforming and disruptive policies of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I. The break with Rome represented a violent rupture, and occasioned some opposition to the policy of the Reformers. Moreover, Mary's brief reign and the restoration of Catholicism met with success. This view of the English Reformation, consequently, contradicts those historians who portray the Roman Church as corrupt and believe that the dismantling of the traditional religion was supported by the laity. The liturgy of pre-Reformation England played an important part in the lives of the laity; it provided a meaning and purpose for their existence. Duffy describes the importance of the liturgical calendar, emphasizing certain feast days and Holy Week devotions, and he concludes that the liturgical cycle paralleled the rhythms of life. Moreover, literacy and the impact of the printing press, the importance of the Mass, the idea of corporate Christianity, the cult of the saints, prayers, the relation of religion and magic, and popular beliefs concerning death and purgatory all contributed to the connection between religion and the concerns of the laity. …

The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c. 1580.

prize-winning account of the pre-Reformation church recreates lay people's experience of religion in fifteenth-century England. Eamon Duffy shows that late medieval Catholicism was neither decadent nor decayed, but was a strong and vigorous tradition, and that the Reformation represented a violent rupture from a popular and theologically respectable religious system. For this edition, Duffy has written a new Preface reflecting on recent developments in our understanding of the period. From reviews of the first edition: A magnificent scholarly achievement [and] a compelling read.-Patricia Morrison, Financial Times Deeply imaginative, movingly written, and splendidly illustrated. . . . Duffy's analysis . . . carries conviction.-Maurice Keen, New York Review of Books This book will afford enjoyment and enlightenment to layman and specialist alike.-Peter Heath, Times Literary Supplement [An] astonishing and magnificent piece of work.-Edward T. Oakes, Commonweal

The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy

BOOK REVIEWS 357 paint the trends of an age in impressionistic strokes backed by a formidable , indeed overwhelming, amount of research (as indicated in the impressive footnotes, pp. 209-252). Yet, as in any masterpiece, one can find a few flaws: sometimes (particularly in Part II), the leitmotiv of " Church and Culture " gets obscured in the details; also, while some portraits, like those of Schell and Hertling, are captivating, others, like those of Schmid and Schanz, seem perfunctory. There are a few typographical errors and other errata; in particular, the Oxford Movement began in 1833, not 1883 (as in the "Synchronology," p. 2) ; also the data on the number and the percentage of German Catholics do not correspond (p. 249, n. 37). Yet, such minor criticisms aside, this work is a notable addition to the literature on nineteenth century theology. The Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. JOHN T. FORD, c.s.c. The Stripping of the Altars. By EAMON DUFFY. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Pp. 608. $45.00 (cloth). Eamon Duffy's most recent contribution to the debate about the Eng· lish Reformation is a two-edged sword. His goal is to correct two very different errors about the English Reformation, the classic one, the " Whig version," lately and brilliantly set forth by A. G. Dickens in his English Reformation (1964), and the other, the more recent "discontinuity " thesis of John Bossy (The English Catholic Community, 1580-1850) and Hugh Aveling (The Handle and the Axe). Something must be known about the two theses before Duffy's work can be fully appreciated. The Whig Version is the idea that the English Reformation was the necessary, popular, and wholesome reaction to centuries of superstition, corruption, and clerical manipulation by the Roman Church. The people conquered because the people were right. There was Good Queen Bess who was Protestant, and Bloody Mary who was Catholic. It is a theory which has held sway in the popular (and even the intellectual) mind of England for the last four hundred years. Bossy and Aveling make the combined (and seemingly different) point that the Roman Catholic Church which re-surfaced in England in the 1800s cannot lay claim to representing the Church catholic because it broke radically with its own traditions in the late 1500's. Trent had no effect on a dwindling English Catholic Church, which became no more than a separating community. Aveling curiously uses an in- 358 BOOK REVIEWS organic example to underline his contention that there was an organic discontinuity. His grandfather's axe had hung over the mantel and eventually had its blade and handle replaced. The Roman Catholic Church in England, said Aveling, was continuous with its medieval counterpart only in the same sense that the axe over the mantel is the same as his grandfather's. It is a theory which depends on Dickens because it makes popularity, or the majority, the determining factor of the Church catholic. Refuting all of this is a big order and is accomplished most effectively in Duffy's encyclopedic account of the pre-Reformation Church. This information has long been the missing piece of the Reformation puzzle, and Duffy has finally catalogued it-with results that are devastating to the causes of the above-mentioned historians. Duffy has found, through the same exacting local research that is being applied to the English Reformation itself, that the pre-Reformation Catholic Church was not corrupt and was popularly practiced by both peasants and gentry. Related to this, Duffy discovers that the distinction between the educated spirituality of the elite and the " superstitious " practices of the illiterate populace was not so decisive as has been proposed by Jean Delumeau . Invocations against the devil, for example, were not the exclusive domain of illiterate husbandmen, hut were part of the mainstream , both clerical and lay, educated and uneducated, and found expression in the liturgy itself. " They did not have a different religion. . . . Late medieval Catholicism was a broad Church" (p. 298). Furthermore , Duffy finds that this pre-Reformation Church was well-informed as to the meaning of sacraments, ceremonies, and creed, and was in good shape morally when the Reformation struck. Duffy accomplishes...