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A record of material and spiritual gifts to churches, compiled from 3000 wills made over 180 years. Reads like a medieval detective story. A splendid book... should be treated as a companion volume to The Stripping of the Altars. JULIAN LITTEN, CHURCH TIMES In the late medieval churches of the former deanery of Dunwich there are many features which were provided by testamentary gifts; this study of three thousand wills from fifty-two Suffolk parishes, written between 1370 and 1547, records such material and spiritual bequests. Many purchased prayer (the prayers of the poor being particularly sought), vital for the swift passage of the soul through Purgatory; other testators left instructions...
This interdisciplinary collection addresses the location of women and their bequests within the single most important public and social space in pre-Reformation Europe: the Roman Catholic Church. This innovative focus brings attention to gender and space as experienced in the medieval parish as well as in monastic and cathedral space. Through provocative handling of historical content and theory, the contributors explore strategies of exclusion and of inclusion and note patterns of later writers who neglect or rewrite records of female presence. Essays on the York religious cycle, the chronicle of the monastery at Ely, and The Book of Margery Kempe explore how medieval writers used texts as fictive spaces on which to graft responses to the gendered uses of real church buildings. These text-based essays are juxtaposed with tightly focused archival research in art history and history on Florentine patronage and English parish seating, as well as with more broadly synthetic studies on access of women to shrines and on gendered left-right placement in ritual art.
"While there has been work on the nobility as patrons of monasteries, this is the first real study of them as patrons of parish churches, and is thus the first study to tackle the subject as a whole. Illustrated with a wealth of detail, it will become an indispensable work of reference for those interested in lay patronage and the Church more generally in the middle ages." Professor David Carpenter, Department of History, King's College London This book provides the first full-length, integrated study of the ecclesiastical patronage rights of the nobility in medieval England. It examines the nature and extent of these rights, how they were used, why and for whom they were valuable, what chal...
This multidisciplinary collection of essays explores the functions, meanings and use of images and objects in various late Medieval and Early Modern social practices, which were linked by their ritual character. The book approaches ‘ritual’ as an action which is discussed under the general umbrella term “performative practice”, and is characterised by a synthesis between the repetitive and the extraordinary that carries an intense symbolic meaning and is emotionally charged. Images, spaces and rituals were closely interconnected in both the religious and the secular spheres, and played a relevant role in the symbolic communication of the time. The essays in this volume are devoted to a complex study of these phenomena in Northern and Central Europe, including regions which, due to linguistic or cultural barriers, have thus far received comparatively little attention in Anglo-American scholarship, including Scandinavia, Poland and the Baltic states.
East Anglia's political and economic importance in the middle ages is plain for all to see, stemming initially from its crucial position on the eastern shores of the North Sea and its participation in the successive patterns of invasion and settlement of England. Archaeological evidence abounds: burial mounds, castles, great churches deriving from the wealth created by sheep, yeoman farmhouses, and market towns of eighteenth-century elegance. Behind these visible manifestations of the march of centuries lie particular histories, and these seventeen studies from the region's best scholars reveal some of those jigsaw puzzles of time, ranging from the Domesday herring industry by way of monaste...
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The relationship between people and parish in the late medieval ages illuminated by this study of a remarkable survival from the period. In the two centuries preceding the Reformation in England, economic, political and spiritual conditions combined with constructive effect. Endemic plague prompted a demonstrative piety and, in a world enjoying rising disposable incomes, this linked with current teachings - especially the doctrine of Purgatory - to sustain a remarkable devotional generosity. Moreover, political conditions, and particularly war with France, persuaded the government to summonits subjects' assistance, including responses encouraged in England's many parishes. As a result, the w...
Medieval East Anglia - one of the most significant and prosperous parts of England in the middle ages - examined through essays on its landscape, history, religion, literature, and culture. East Anglia was the most prosperous region of medieval England; far from being an isolated backwater, it had strong economic, religious and cultural connections with continental Europe, with Norwich for a time England's second city. The essays in this volume bring out the importance of the region during the middle ages. Spanning the late eleventh to the fifteenth century, they offer a broad coverage of East Anglia's history and culture; particular topics examined include its landscape, urban history, buildings, government and society, religion and rich culture. Contributors: Christopher Harper-Bill, Tom Williamson, Robert E. Liddiard, P. Maddern, Brian Ayers, Elisabeth Rutledge, Penny Dunn, Kate Parker, Carole Rawcliffe, James Campbell, Lucy Marten, Colin Richmond, T. M. Colk, Carole Hill, T.A. Heslop, A.E. Oliver, Theresa Coletti, Penny Granger, Sarah Salih
This companion volume seeks to trace the development of ideas relating to death, burial, and the remembrance of the dead in Europe from ca.1300-1700.
The English Reformation was no bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky. Nor was it an event that was inevitable, smooth, or predictable. Rather, it was a process that had its turbulent beginnings in the late medieval period and extended through until the Restoration. This book places the emphasis not just on law makers or the major players, but also, and more importantly, on those individuals and parish communities that lived through the twists and turns of reform. It explores the unpredictable process of the English Reformation through the fabric, rituals and spaces of the parish church in the Diocese of Norwich c. 1450–1662, as recorded, through the churchwardens’ accounts and the material remains of the late medieval and early modern periods. It is through the uses and abuses of the objects, rituals, spaces of the parish church that the English Reformation became a reality in the lives of these faith communities that experienced it.