Late Medieval Church Research Articles

Ministry to the Sick and Dying in the Late Medieval Church by Thomas M. Izbicki (review)

Ministry to the Sick and Dying in the Late Medieval Church by Thomas M. Izbicki (review)

Advantages and limitations of micro-computed tomography and computed tomography imaging of archaeological textiles and coffins

AbstractWe have recently studied northern Finnish archaeological textiles extensively using computed tomography (CT) imaging. These textiles have been found in inhumation burials from the Late Medieval church of Valmarinniemi in Keminmaa and the Postmedieval church of Haukipudas. In this article we discuss the advantages and limitations of CT imaging based on three case studies. Based on the research objectives and the size of studied items, we utilised three different CT scanners: clinical systems and micro- and nano-scale X-ray microscopes. We were able to visualise a child’s coffin and a doll inside, which is a larger scale sample. We were also able to study and reconstruct the complicated structure of a tablet-woven band, as well as identifying individual fibres when examining smaller textile samples with submicron resolution. Even though we observed some limitations in the image quality, we conclude that computed tomography has great potential in the research of archaeological textiles in both 3D and cross-sections and is often easier and more informative than conventional microscopic or other archaeological methodologies.

Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics: Disputed Sanctity and Communal Identity in Late Medieval Italy by Janine Larmon Peterson

Reviewed by: Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics: Disputed Sanctity and Communal Identity in Late Medieval Italy by Janine Larmon Peterson Austin Powell Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics: Disputed Sanctity and Communal Identity in Late Medieval Italy. By Janine Larmon Peterson. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Pp. xii, 270. $58.95. ISBN: 9781501742347) Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics uses thirteenth- and fourteenth-century disputes over local saints’ cults as a means of examining the conflicts that arose between an imperial papacy and the independently minded communes of northern and central Italy. Janine Larmon Peterson thus engages with several historiographies, including the late medieval cult of the saints, heresy and inquisition, the centralization and bureaucratization of papal administration, and the Guelf-Ghibelline conflicts that wracked the region throughout this period. By taking a comparative approach which examines several saints’ cults and by remaining focused on points of conflict, Peterson expands our appreciation for the extent to which the question of who had the right to define the sacred was often contested in the Later Middle Ages, and closely tied to the vicissitudes of papal and local politics. The book is divided into two parts. The first, in four chapters, delves into the evidence provided by more than twenty cases of disputed sanctity. These chapters outline a typology of four different kinds of disputed sainthood. The first, tolerated saints, were those individuals who were venerated by the local community but never received papal canonization; suspect saints were those whom inquisitors suspected of heresy but never successfully condemned them for it, thus enabling local veneration to continue; heretical saints included figures who received local veneration, but whom inquisitors eventually condemned as heretics and whose cults they sought to suppress; finally, holy heretics were individuals whom members of the local community venerated even though they had already been condemned for heresy. The second part, also divided into four chapters, explores the broader rationales, trends, and strategies that lay behind the conflicts surrounding the cults, [End Page 194] whether those be economic interests, anti-mendicant and anti-inquisitorial sentiments, or communal resistance to papal ambitions. The eighth chapter, examining “methods of contesting authority,” is especially interesting in that it demonstrates how local agents understood and had recourse to legal methods and judicial venues when challenging the actions of inquisitors. Throughout the work, Peterson is persuasive in her framing of the disputes as between local communities and the imperial papacy, rather than between lay and clerical social orders. She shows how the local clergy, both regular and secular, often allied with the local laity in combatting the efforts of the papacy’s typically mendicant and inquisitorial agents. Peterson also clearly demonstrates how orthodox members of local communities continued to venerate certain figures after inquisitors had expressed their suspicions or even condemned those figures of heresy. One of Peterson’s goals is to contribute to recent scholarship that seeks to correct a historiography that has over emphasized the “hegemonic” position of the late medieval church (p. 4). In particular, by exploring cults which were never canonized, she hopes to contrast her work with that of Vauchez, which centered the papacy by examining documents produced within the machinery of the papal bureaucracy. Yet the papacy looms large throughout her book. Indeed, the very categories Peterson uses to classify a saint (tolerated, suspect, heretic) depend on the cult’s relationship to papal authority. Some of the strategies communities used to contest inquisitorial authority participated within what Peterson calls an “oppositional inquisitorial culture” (p. 197) by accepting the logic of the inquisitorial office and its methods. This, to me, seems to be the very definition of hegemonic. Nonetheless, this is a careful study of a wide range of texts, including a great deal in manuscript sources. Peterson provides nuanced readings of the evidence and intervenes in numerous scholarly discussions. What she has produced is a text that is essential reading for all scholars interested in the religion and politics of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy. Austin Powell University of California, Davis Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press ...

Untangling the Taphonomy of Charred Plant Remains in Ritual Contexts: Late Antique and Medieval Churches and Graves from Croatia

ABSTRACT Food has played a central role in death rituals throughout human history, yet finding evidence of these practices in the archaeological record can be problematic. In particular, linking charred plant remains to inhumation burials requires careful consideration of the taphonomic processes involved. Here we focus on the recovery of charred plant macro-remains from four Late Antique and medieval cemeteries and one late medieval church in Croatia. The results showed low densities of both charcoal and other charred plant macro-remains, suggesting that the remains are general settlement debris that was accidentally deposited within the cemeteries and church context. At Bribirska Glavica, the sampling of stratigraphic layers at the multi-level cemetery allowed a greater understanding of taphonomic processes and corroborated the identification of a rubbish dump linked to an adjacent Roman villa. The results provide important insights for future sampling strategies, including the importance of taking control samples outside the graves and radiocarbon dating to determine whether botanical remains are related to the burials.

Lives of the Brothers of Syon Abbey: Patterns of Vocation from the Syon Martiloge and Other Records ca. 1415-1622

This paper is part of a major prosopography project which is nearing completion. The project traced around 600 sisters, brothers and benefactors of Syon Abbey ca. 1400-1600. Their names were recorded by the community in three obit lists: the Cambridge obit list ca. 1451 was copied into the second, the Syon Martiloge (BL Add MS 22285), in the 1470s. The third was copied from the Martiloge in Lisbon ca. 1608. The Lisbon obit list contains new information unused by earlier historians. Five lists of names provide snapshots of the community in 1428, 1539, 1557, 1587 and 1622. Short biographies based on other sources reveal family background, social status, education and book ownership. Collectively they tell the story of Syon Abbey's first two centuries. This paper is about the Syon brothers: 164 have been traced and their names are all published here. St. Birgitta of Sweden (1303-1373) founded her Order of St Saviour for nuns as part of a wider movement for reform and renewal in the late medieval church. The Birgittines spread rapidly in northern Europe ca. 1400. Each Birgittine monastery had a house for up to 60 sisters living enclosed contemplative lives and a smaller house for 25 brothers. Their role was to provide the sacraments for the sisters and the community’s patrons and pilgrims. Syon Abbey was the only Birgittine house in England, founded near London by the Lancastrian king Henry V in 1415. It went on to commemorate the Yorkist and Tudor dynasties and had links with the Stuarts. It was important for its proximity to royal power during the Hundred Years’ War, the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation. The Birgittines of Syon Abbey were renowned for their holiness and learning and their resistance to Henry VIII’s Reformation. Syon priest St. Richard Reynolds was martyred at Tyburn in 1535 and Lay Brother Thomas Brownell in Newgate Gaol in 1537. Syon was dissolved in 1539, but the Birgittines divided into groups and continued to follow the Rule, some in exile. In 1559 the whole community went into exile, enduring poverty and warfare in the Low Countries and France. Two sisters died in prison and three brothers were captured by pirates before settling in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1594. Syon Abbey was significant in forging English Roman Catholic identity and inspiring the revival of religious orders in Europe. Scholars have made two main assumptions about the brothers which are countered by prosopographical analysis: firstly medieval Syon attracted steady numbers from foundation by Henry V to dissolution by Henry VIII; secondly numbers declined rapidly from 1539 until they died out in the 1600s. The early death of the founder, and Henry VI’s transfer of patronage elsewhere reduced funding and prestige. Recruitment dwindled until Edward IV refounded Syon in 1461. Medieval Syon’s fame is based on the achievements of the Yorkist era. There were fewer brothers after 1539 and fewer sisters, but the brothers were vital to Syon’s survival as a house of enclosed nuns. In St. Birgitta’s Rule the brothers were 30% of the community. At Syon they reached ca. 20-25%, 1420-1594. After 1600 the brothers continued their work as ca. 10% of the community until 1695.

Bidding Prayers: The Economic Vocabulary of Late Medieval European Christianity and the Experience of the Liturgy on the Eve of the Reformations

Bidding Prayers:The Economic Vocabulary of Late Medieval European Christianity and the Experience of the Liturgy on the Eve of the Reformations1 Tyler Lange Mutuum date, nihil inde sperantes. Luc. 6:35 O sacramentum pietatis! o signum unitatis! o vinculum caritatis! Qui vult vivere, habet ubi vivat, habet unde vivat. Accedat, credat, incorporetur, ut vivificetur. Augustine, Tractatus in Johannem, 26.13 (ad Jo. 6:50-52) Culpae quantitas non mensuratur ex nocumento quod quis facit, sed ex voluntate qua quis facit, contra caritatem agens. Et ideo, quamvis poena excommunicationis excedat nocumentum, non tamen excedit quantitatem culpae. Thomas Aquinas and Rainaldo da Piperno, Supplementum ad Summam theologiae, Q.21, a.3 Je deffens pareillement que nulle personne de quelque estat quil soit ne viengne a la table nostre seigneur Jesu crist ayant aulcune rancune ou haygne contre son prochain: ou se sentent estre en quelque aultre peche mortel secret ou notoyre Car en telle sorte prendre le corps de Jesu crist est recepvoir sa dampnation. Priest's Manual, Saint-Eustache, Paris BNF Latin 1216, 1530s) [End Page 19] Introduction 'Economy of salvation', 'treasury of merit', 'marketplace for merit', 'price of salvation', 'business of salvation', 'office of souls', 'management of poverty', 'accounting for the afterlife', 'moral economy or economies', 'passports to paradise', 'quantifiable religiosity'…2: theologians and historians since at [End Page 20] least Tertullianhave used 'economic' language to speak of God, salvation, and religious life. Recent contributions are no exception, whether the specific subjects are: Franciscan theologians as experts in valuation and shapers of the late medieval economic vocabulary, managing the finances of Franciscan convents; the operation of the Apostolic Penitentiary, confession and scandal, testamentary bequests funding masses, devotional indulgences, and popular piety; or governmental regulation of bread prices. Yet what do recent historians mean by using such language? For the most part, these accounts abandon former narratives of economic history in which lending, which existed in a separate, economic realm divorced from religious life, was Christianized at some point in the Middle Ages, hobbling it with the prohibition of usury from which the economy had to be liberated, most successfully in the Protestant territories of northern Europe. They do not, for the most part, revive old, anti-Catholic narratives of a commercialized, corrupt medieval Church. Instead, they, and in particular the studies of Giacomo Todeschini, Jacques Chiffoleau, and Chiffoleau's students on the 'economic vocabulary' and management practices of the Franciscan friars, offer a vision of economic life fully embedded in religious life. In fact, they show that there was no separate economic life to be disembedded from religious life because a religious language of economic ethics shaped economic life through the sermons and management practices of the friars. Franciscans became experts at valuation and valorized the circulation of economic goods, rather than hoarding or thesaurization, because the Franciscans had to manage daily life without legal property rights in accordance with St. Francis's [End Page 21] ideal of poverty, and because their subsistence—and salvation—depended on proper estimation of the necessities of life. The intellectual and practical consequences of Franciscan poverty clarify the context of the excommunications for debt that I examined in Excommunication for Debt in Late Medieval France, and affirm the possible implications of the practice's apparent decline from the late fifteenth century. In short, it appears that excommunication for debt manifests popular adoption of the Mendicants' encouragement of economic circulation through caritative lending: excommunication for debt treated debt not as a crime per se, but as a crime when payment was delayed or deferred against the creditor's will. Our mistake is to imagine the creditor as an oppressor: because he or she had likely extended an interest-free sales credit, the defaulting debtor was potentially behaving in an immoral manner by breaking a promise and by impeding the circulation of goods, within this economic ethics. (The situation was different for usurious loans from Christian or Jewish moneylenders.) While Franciscans were most obviously arbiters of proper economic behavior as preachers and confessors, users of late medieval church courts were also arbiters of proper economic behavior each time they sought ecclesiastical sanction against a usurer or, more commonly, a defaulting debtor. Because the practice...

Pilegrimsspor fra Tynset: En detektorfunnet blymedaljong med kristne motiver

In 2016, a metal detectorist found a circular lead medallion with iconography on both sides in Tynset in the Østerdalen valley. This article studies the medallion’s shape, function and symbolical content. The object is interpreted as a pendant comparable with pilgrim badges from the late medieval period. The motifs are identified as Christian, representing the apocalyptical Mary with Christ on one side, and a passion and resurrection scene on the other. In this article, the medallion is compared to Norwegian and other European pilgrim badges and amulets with the same motifs, suggesting its origin most likely to be Aachen in Germany. Aachen was one of the most visited holy places for pilgrimage in Europe. The motifs can be connected to the Marian cathedral in Aachen, at the same time as expressing religious content regularly transmitted in the late medieval church. By comparing the motifs with Old Norse texts and images, the article demonstrates how the amulet’s religious messages potentially could influence the bearer – possibly a Norwegian pilgrim.

Of Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets: The Conversation about Poetry in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

Individual works of poetry and drama often contribute to a conversation that spans centuries, but A Midsummer Night's Dream contains a very specific dialogue in which Shakespeare takes the Jesuit priest-poet Robert Southwell for an interlocutor. Shakespeare creates this conversation by echoing Southwell's published work. By the first staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream, around 1595 or 1596, Southwell had endured a martyr's death; but that didn't stop Shakespeare from responding to the prescriptions laid down by Southwell about the proper way for Christian poets to write. His prefatory letter and introductory poem to the posthumous volume St. Peters Complaint make clear that Christian poets whose poems are not overtly devotional are squandering their talent. He remonstrates with such poets – one in particular, whom Southwell addresses as his “belov'd cousen” – to chasten themselves and to write poetry more in the vein of the reverent and improving verses included in Southwell's own volume. Through the character of Theseus, especially, and in the structure of the play, more generally, Shakespeare replies to Southwell. Shakespeare doesn't simply reject Southwell, but rather evokes an understanding of piety and poetry consistent with the pre-Reformation, late medieval Church. This understanding is one that allows room for juxtaposing the sacred and the profane as opposed to championing one at the expense of the other.

Perspectives (Old and New) on Late Medieval Church Art in Norway: Questioning the Hegemony of Lübeck Workshops

Perspectives (Old and New) on Late Medieval Church Art in Norway: Questioning the Hegemony of Lübeck Workshops

New Perspectives on Paul: A Reflection on Luther's Contribution to the Doctrine of Christian Grace on the Occasion of the Fifth Centenary of the Reformation

New Perspectives on Paul:A Reflection on Luther's Contribution to the Doctrine of Christian Grace on the Occasion of the Fifth Centenary of the Reformation Paul O'Callaghan This study will deal with different ways (or "perspectives") in which Paul's central teaching on justification, faith, grace, and works have been interpreted in the context of the Reformation, and especially in the teaching of Martin Luther. It is made up of three parts. The first briefly considers Luther's own interpretation of Paul and its applicability or otherwise to the situation of the Church in society five centuries ago. The second part presents an interpretation of Paul commonly called the "new perspective," which has consolidated over the last fifty years or so, a perspective that recontextualizes Luther's view, situating it within challenges of an ethical and ecclesiological kind typical of the late-twentieth-century Christian world. The principal authors involved include E. P. Sanders (especially his work Paul and Palestinian Judaism), N. T. Wright, and James D. G. Dunn.1 In the third place, we shall consider how the "new perspective" has been contested in different ways of late, and not only by classical Lutheran authors who insist on the perennial value of Luther's intuition. We shall pay special attention to the recent work of the Anglican exegete John Barclay, Paul and the Gift.2 [End Page 797] Luther's Perspective on Paul's Doctrine of Justification by Faith Luther consistently envisaged his understanding of the Gospel as centered on the doctrine of justification by faith alone,3 without works, as a rediscovery of St. Paul's fundamental and determinative intuition as regards the justice of God. For Luther, iustitia Dei, the "righteousness of God," is not the justice by which God judges our actions and rewards (or punishes) them accordingly, but rather the justice by which God accepts the believer as being truly just. That is to say, justification is by faith, not by works: humans cannot win justification by their good deeds; they can only accept it gratefully in faith. Although the Christian is meant to carry out an abundance of good works, the latter are of no use in winning or maintaining divine favor. This, of course, decisively influences Luther's understanding of salvation, of the Church, and of ethical life. The context in which Luther's revolution took place, as he saw it, constituted an almost exact replica of the situation Paul found himself in when faced with the Judaizing movement within nascent Christianity. He applied the Pauline tension between "faith" and "works" (especially present in Galatians and Romans)4 to the tension that existed between his personal situation as a conscience-smitten monk seeking a merciful God and the late medieval Church enslaved (as he saw it) to a religion of works far-removed from the original Gospel message of simplicity and freedom. The comparison Luther made between the two historical situations, in spite of obvious religious and cultural differences that not even he denied, is highly significant. If Luther's contention was right, his would be an epoch-making rediscovery of authentic Christianity, and by insisting on "justification by faith alone," he would be paying signal service to the Church's evangelizing mission. His doctrine, as expressing anew Paul's authentic teaching, would necessarily constitute a living statement of the permanent and perennial core of Christian life and doctrine, in his own time as well as five hundred years after the Reformation began. [End Page 798] And on the same account, the medieval Church Luther encountered could well be accused of having severely prejudiced, at least in practical terms, the core belief of Christians that God, in his mercy, had sent his only Son to save his people from their sins. However, in attempting to re-present authentic Christian teaching in terms of the doctrine of justification by faith, Luther made two assumptions, both of which need to be carefully appraised.5 Paul's Conversion and Luther's Firstly, Luther took it for granted that Paul underwent the same experience he (Luther) had undergone before discovering the true meaning of iustitia Dei, the "righteousness of God," the justice by which...

Preface

Preface Exactly what significance should be attached to the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 1517 protest? Luther could not foresee that his actions and those of his opponents would trigger a series of regional reform movements, culminating in the Catholic Reformation, that had multiple consequences both for western Europe and for the shaping of global Christianity. The short answer must be that historians will debate the question till kingdom come: the file, so to speak, will never be closed. What follows in this special issue of Studies comprises the contributions of distinguished Irish and British historians at the recent ‘Reformation 500’ conference held in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, and St Patrick’s campus of Dublin City University, on 20–21 October 2017. This conference was jointly organised by the Church of Ireland Historical Society and the Catholic Historical Society of Ireland to mark the anniversary of the onset of the European reformations. Both societies, it need scarcely be said, aspire to achieve high academic standards as the means of engaging with the complex religious history of Ireland in a European context. The measure of these essays will be the extent to which they reflect such standards. In disentangling the many issues raised by the European reformations, certain things need to be borne in mind. To begin with, the vertiginous political and dynastic complexity of early modern Europe provided the immediate context of these reforming movements. Valois-Habsburg rivalries, particularly in Italy, impacted on papal politics, complicating and frustrating repeated attempts to convene a General Council of the Church to address reform. In this situation the Medici Pope, Clement VII, became a prisoner of a Hapsburg army in 1527 in the Castel Sant’Angelo. The king of France could make and unmake alliances alternately with the Turks and the Protestant Schmalkaldic League. To such an unstable mix could be added the growing Turkish threat in the western Mediterranean and in central Europe, the complexities of the Habsburg state itself, the rivalries of the Italian cities, not to mention the rivalries within the Roman nobility. Such a political environment, as well as frustrating Catholic reform, enabled the Protestant reformations to establish themselves in some German states and cities, while simultaneously imposing territorial limits on their extension. It needs to be borne in mind that Protestant reformers did not set out with Studies • volume 106 • number 424 Preface: Winter 2017/18 401 the intention of dividing the Church. They expected that reform would eventually embrace the entire Church. What is our past was once their future, the outcome of which was no clearer to them then than ours is to us now. Indeed, the concept of ‘the Reformation’ was only first applied to the history of the Church by Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff at the end of the seventeenth century, and even then he limited its application to the Lutheran movement. The fact that our perceptions of what transpired in the past are often filtered through our unconscious modern biases raises a host of hermeneutical issues. All sorts of notions linking the Protestant Reformation(s) to the rise of capitalism, science, freedom of conscience, the emergence of nation states, have little basis in fact. Such ideas tell us more about historians and their times than about history. One way of gauging such influences is the study of reception history of the sort that Dr Scott Dixon deals with in the first essay in these pages, which was the opening address of the conference. Among the misperceptions of the Reformation period is the idea that the late medieval Church was incorrigibly corrupt. Historians today have a more nuanced understanding of a Church that, for all its faults – and this is a common theme across the entire spectrum of medieval governance – was not lacking in vitality, intellectual and spiritual vigour, and popular engagement. The need for reform of some of its structures was widely acknowledged. Reforming our political institutions after the financial collapse in 2008 has not been achieved, in spite of the fact that we know that failure to do so risks condemning ourselves to repeated disasters. We are not so different from those who went before us. We are happily past the...

Malowidła artysty gdańskiego Johanna Kriega w Pelplinie

The paper deals with an artist active in the Baltic city (c. 1590-1643/47) about whom relatively little is known both with regard to his biography and oeuvre. While correcting some data related to the first topic, namely place of birth (Spickendorf close to Magdeburg), identity of wife (Dorothea Scheder) and original religious affiliation (Calvinist), the author concentrates on the issue of paintings executed by the master, which, although much praised in an 18th century manuscript, remain practically unidentified. There exist thirty one signed and attributed drawings, some of which are now lost, but the only painterly works confirmed by sources are five small emblematic depictions from 1640. These decorate the altar of St. Jacob the Elder in ex-Cistercian church in Pelplin, now cathedral, around thirty miles south of Gdansk; the artist executed them after he converted to Roman Catholicism and joined the monastery following the death of his wife in 1632. The apparent lack of paintings by Krieg in comparison with a considerable number of extant drawings brought on several attempts at attributions, persisting in part, none of which seems plausible, however. The present text proposes the authorship of Krieg with regard to an ensemble of paintings in the Pelplin cathedral church, hitherto hardly noticed in literature, which can be dated to c. 1640. Executed on the backs of late medieval church stalls, they are only partially visible today, and were in part removed recently to the former summer refectory of the convent. The set consists of an upper row of religious pictures illustrating the Creed and a lower row of emblematic paintings commenting on them. Especially the latter works, containing partly allegorical and mythological elements, are well comparable both in figure and landscape details to drawings by Krieg, but also to the few emblematic pictures in nearby altar. Most similarities occur in the southern row of paintings on the stalls, probably executed by Krieg personally. The northern row, where the affinities are fewer, was apparently finished by another hand, while pictures representing Evangelists on the backs of two further, independent stalls originally used by officers of the Cistercian convent, were probably made by Krieg jointly with an apprentice. Four modest emblematic depictions – also dated approximately 1640 – on the altar of St. Ursula in Pelplin cathedral church, complete the number of paintings, which can for now be given to the Gdansk artist turned lay brother in the monastery.

Holy Scripture and the Quest for Authority at the End of the Middle Ages

Holy Scripture and the Quest for Authority at the End of the Middle Ages

Reforming Household Piety: John Foxe and the Lollard Conventicle Tradition

That the ecclesia in antiquity met in private homes was well known to first- and second-generation English reformers who sought to reshape the late medieval established Church. In the wake of Catholic accusations of novelty – and thus illegitimacy – evangelicals developed a history of their movement that stretched back through the generations to the early Church itself, and none more successfully than John Foxe (d. 1587), author of Acts and Monuments and England’s major martyrologist. A crucial link in this historical chain would prove to be the Lollards, medieval English heretics whose ‘privy assemblies’ saw the reading of vernacular Scripture and its exposition, recitation of the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, and even hints of liturgical activity, all in the private space of the home.

Early English Orthodoxies: Reading the English Reformations

The past two decades have seen a series of studies of late medieval and Early Modern heresy, reform, and orthodoxy, many of which challenge long-held narratives of cultural and religious change and supersession. At the vanguard of these reassessments, Eamon Duffy’s 1992 revisionist history of reformation England, The Stripping of the Altars, argued that because the late medieval English church “had about it no particular marks of exhaustion or decay,” the Reformation came as a “violent disruption” of the period’s robust religion.1 But many scholars found Duffy to insist rather too strongly on a narrative of cultural rupture and change, noting his scant consideration of late medieval religious controversy and dissent. In a lengthy review of Duffy’s book, David Aers argued that Duffy’s emphasis on the vitality of “traditional religion” in late medieval England obscured the reality of heterodox sects in the century before the Reformation.2 Subsequent considerations of early English religious cultures have continued to echo many of the same themes. More recently James Simpson and others have sought to recover a sense of the vibrantly “reformist” sensibilities and aesthetics of late medieval England, lamenting the destruction resulting from “revolutionary” tendencies, while also decrying scholarly tendencies to find a heretic under every late medieval bush.3 Still others

The late medieval English Church. Vitality and vulnerability before the break with Rome. By G. W. Bernard. Pp. x+304+12 ills. New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 2012. £25. 978 0 300 17997 2

The late medieval English Church. Vitality and vulnerability before the break with Rome. By G. W. Bernard. Pp. x+304+12 ills. New Haven–London: Yale University Press, 2012. £25. 978 0 300 17997 2

Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum. By Amy Knight Powell. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Zone Books, 2012. 370 pp. $34.95 cloth.

Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum. By Amy Knight Powell. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Zone Books, 2012. 370 pp. $34.95 cloth.

Records of the Churchwardens of Mildenhall: Collections (1446–1454) and Accounts (1503–1553), ed. Judith Middleton-Stewart

A posthumously-published labour of love by a meticulous scholar (whose first book was Inward Piety and Outward Splendour: Death and Remembrance in the Suffolk Deanery of Dunwich), this edition of ‘collections’—records of extra funding for specific projects—and of fifty years’ worth of churchwardens’ accounts for the parish of Mildenhall, Suffolk, is a fine production that should be taken as a model by anyone attempting similar tasks elsewhere. The annotation is copious; the appendices include selected wills, notes on people mentioned, an admirable glossary and a thorough index. And there is a substantial fifty-page introduction revealing close acquaintance with recent secondary literature. For anyone who wants to know more about late medieval Mildenhall, whether for its own sake or as an example of a late medieval market town, this study will be very useful. Dr Middleton-Stewart gives a clear architectural history of the church, usefully supported by black-and-white photographs, together with information about priests and chaplains. She draws on the churchwardens’ accounts to show the purchase of liturgical equipment. Accounts are supplemented by wills to show the profusion of gilds and chantries. For students coming to the religious history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for the first time, the introduction offers a sure-footed guide, and the edited texts provide an instructive indication of the sources from which historians try to understand the late medieval church. Such historians will find illustrative examples in plenty here. What they will not find, not least because the sources edited here were not created to answer such questions, is much on the state of the church. Unavoidably, financial accounts give an impression of activity—spending on the fabric and on liturgical equipment—and to that extent suggest a church in good heart, effectively maintained by parishioners. But how deeply pious such parishioners were is not a question the financial accounts attempt to answer—and nor does the editor. Reviewing her earlier monograph (ante, cxvii [2003], 462–3), Colin Richmond noted that ‘little, probably nothing, that we did not already know about late medieval religion is revealed by this painstaking investigation’, and that is just as true in general terms here. What instead we receive is more information more accessibly presented than we have had before, and for that we are richly in her debt.

Mitchell Merback. Review of "Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum" by Amy Knight Powell.

Mitchell Merback. Review of "Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum" by Amy Knight Powell.

The Late Medieval Church: Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with Rome by G. W. Bernard (review)

Reviewed by: The Late Medieval Church: Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with Rome by G. W. Bernard Richard Rex The Late Medieval Church: Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with Rome. By G. W. Bernard. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2012. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-300-17997-2.) G. W. Bernard’s account of the late-medieval English Church is a perplexing endeavor. On the one hand he emphasizes his own long-standing dissatisfaction with the “protestant grand narrative” (p. ix) that saw the Reformation as the inevitable outcome of the corruption, decadence, and superstition that were all the late-medieval Church had to offer, and he affirms his broad agreement with the very different view of that Church offered by Eamon Duffy in The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, 1992). Yet on the other hand he informs us that it was Duffy’s book itself that provoked his own “rethinking” of the subject, because he found its analysis left it impossible to explain why the Reformation happened at all. Bernard’s alternative interpretation, which he originally set out in a short article about fifteen years ago, offers us “vitality and vulnerability” as a general theory that he hopes will generate vigorous new debate in the field. What is perplexing is that there is nothing for this new theory to do. The suggestion that Duffy’s analysis of the late-medieval church makes the Reformation seem impossible or inexplicable has often been made, yet it has never been entirely clear what it means. Duffy’s analysis was the culmination of a generation of scholarship that exploded the “protestant grand narrative,” and his explanation of the English Reformation was simple—the late-medieval Church did not totter and fall under its own unstable weight; it was [End Page 349] in a stable equilibrium until it was pushed over thanks to a stupendous effort on the part of one of the most powerful kings ever to rule this land—Henry VIII. This is, when one comes down to it, much the same as the explanation Bernard himself offers in The King’s Reformation (New Haven, 2005), however much one might demur at his tendency to reduce an extremely complex set of political maneuvers to a mere act of will on the part of the monarch. “Vitality and vulnerability” are offered as the solution to a supposed problem. But it is not clear what the problem is, nor how the solution works. Bernard repeatedly affirms the “vitality” of the late-medieval church, but is uncomfortably aware that the focus of his own analysis is “vulnerability.” While anxiously disavowing any intention of reviving the old narrative of corruption and decadence, the theory he advances is that the vulnerabilities explain why the Church did not resist Henry VIII more effectively when the assault of the 1530s was launched. Thus, because pilgrimage could be made to inauthentic relics or to fraudulent images, and could be undertaken for superstitious or self-serving reasons, it was “vulnerable” to the kind of critique that Desiderius Erasmus, Henry VIII’s propagandists, and Protestants leveled against it. But this explains either nothing or too much. Either the late-medieval Church was indeed, as A. G. Dickens maintained, a sort of house of cards, that only needed the lion’s roar to bring it tumbling down; or, as Duffy has persuasively argued, it was not. Of course, the late-medieval Church had its weaknesses. People knew that at the time, and not even Duffy has ever sought to argue otherwise. But either these vulnerabilities are a sufficient cause for the collapse of that Church, or they are not. That is what The Stripping of the Altars was about. Although, then, this book fails at the theoretical level, it remains both interesting and valuable. The brilliant forensic analysis of the Richard Hunne case with which it opens is the fairest and most thorough ever achieved. Bernard is in his element here, attacking a conceptually straightforward question—was Hunne murdered, or did he hang himself?—through a thicket of contradictory and problematic evidence, to reach a conclusion (suicide) that runs counter to the verdicts or prejudices of the majority of other...