Despite the great literary achievements of Chaucer, Langland, and the Pearl Poet, Ricardian English books were still a niche market in 1400. As Kathryn Kerby-Fulton shows, however, their generation ...was transformational in nurturing the resurgence of English writing, in part as a result of the mass underemployment of clerks originally trained for the church but unable to find steady positions in it. Surviving instead as ecclesiastical or choral "piece workers, " or in secular jobs in government or private households, this "clerical proletariat" lived and worked in liminal spaces between the ecclesiastical and lay world. And there the most enterprising found new material—and new audiences—for poetry in English.Since English book production in London prior to 1380 was rare, Kerby-Fulton's study begins in the prior century with great regional poets, revealing their early experimentation with a new poetics of vocational crisis. Preoccupied with underemployment, patronage, careerist ambition, alienation, and changing literary fashion, these thirteenth-century writers were choosing the more avant garde option of writing in English while feeling backwards to earlier tradition in works such as La?amon's Brut and The Owl and the Nightingale. These early experimenters invoked semi-remembered literary forms in a still evolving written vernacular, breaking ground for Ricardian writers, who turned to these conventions during the massive clerical unemployment of the Great Schism era. Kerby-Fulton's is the first study of Langland's legacy of articulating an authorial employment crisis, and its echoes in Hoccleve and Audelay. It also uses new tools for uncovering proletarian writers in unattributed Middle English works, including the famous Harley 2253 lyrics, the "York Realist's" Second Trial from the York Cycle, St. Erkenwald, and Wynnere and Wastour. Taking in proletarian themes, including class, meritocracy, the abuse of children ("Choristers' Lament"), the gig economy, precarity, and the breaking of intellectual elites ( Book of Margery Kempe ), The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry speaks to both past and present employment urgencies.
On 13 June 1525, Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora, a former nun, in a private ceremony officiated by city preacher Johann Bugenhagen. Whilst Luther was not the first former monk or Reformer ...to marry, his marriage immediately became one of the iconic episodes of the Protestant Reformation. From that point on, the marital status of clergy would be a pivotal dividing line between the Catholic and Protestant churches. Tackling the early stages of this divide, this book provides a fresh assessment of clerical marriage in the first half of the sixteenth century, when the debates were undecided and the intellectual and institutional situation remained fluid and changeable. It investigates the way that clerical marriage was received, and viewed in the dioceses of Mainz and Magdeburg under Archbishop Albrecht of Brandenburg from 1513 to 1545. By concentrating on a cross-section of rural and urban settings from three key regions within this territory - Saxony, Franconia, and Swabia - the study is able to present a broad comparison of reactions to this contentious issue. Although the marital status of the clergy remains perhaps the most identifiable difference between Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, remarkably little research has been done on how the shift from a "celibate" to a married clergy took place during the Reformation in Germany or what reactions such a move elicited. As such, this book will be welcomed by all those wishing to gain greater insight, not only into the theological debates, but also into the interactions between social identity, governance, and religious practice.
The main aim of the paper is to address the question of whether Mikołaj of Błonie (before 1400 – ca. 1448), a Polish doctor of canon law, was a supporter of the conciliarist movement. In the first ...half of the 15th century, the most prominent representatives of Poland’s intellectual elite were conciliarists. Initially, the Polish elite were moderately sympathetic towards conciliarism, but with the development of the situation during the Council of Basel (1431–1449), radical solutions started to be favoured.
This article analyzes selected fragments from two works by Mikołaj of Błonie in the broader context of the conciliarist discussion in order to determine to what extent the contemporary situation and the preacher’s personal opinion could be reflected in the preaching and pastoral texts. These texts are Tractatus sacerdotalis de sacramentis (known as Sacramentale), a pastoral manual written around 1430, prepared for the lower clergy, and two collections of sermons – de tempore and de sanctis – also intended for use by lower clergy and uneducated audiences, written probably around 1438. Mikołaj of Błonie strongly postulated the need for reforms of the Church in membris while maintaining great caution in formulating conclusions regarding the reform in capite. His approach to power in the Church places him more on the side of the papists, although in his texts one can see a distant echo of the writings of Jean Gerson, Stanisław of Skarbimierz, and the discussions by Polish theologians and decreeists. Mikołaj’s conservativeness can be explained in many ways: the preacher’s personal views, the specific purpose of the texts, which did not provide space for ecclesiological discussion, and the context of polemics with the Hussites as well as the need to strengthen papal authority.
In late antiquity a consuetudo was consolidated consisting of the frequent meeting around the archbishop of Constantinople, in the form of a council, of the various bishops casually present in the ...capital, the so-called ¿vdiļ pound nuvoôoç, to which the ecclesiae of the East recognized great authority and a multiplicity of functions (especially jurisdictional ones). Taking into account the importance that this meeting of bishops still has today, the essay first ascertains the vagueness with which it is testified by late antique ecclesiastical sources, and then investigates the way in which the legislator of the fifth and sixth centuries identified, in line with the ecclesial vision, the very 'fluid' formal specificity of this singular institution.
In the fourth century, clerics began to distinguish themselves from members of the laity by virtue of their augmented claims to holiness. Because clerical celibacy was key to this distinction, ...religious authorities of all stripes—patristic authors, popes, theologians, canonists, monastic founders, and commentators—became progressively sensitive to sexual scandals that involved the clergy and developed sophisticated tactics for concealing or dispelling embarrassing lapses. According to Dyan Elliott, the fear of scandal dictated certain lines of action and inaction, the consequences of which are painfully apparent today. In The Corrupter of Boys, she demonstrates how, in conjunction with the requirement of clerical celibacy, scandal-averse policies at every conceivable level of the ecclesiastical hierarchy have enabled the widespread sexual abuse of boys and male adolescents within the Church.Elliott examines more than a millennium's worth of doctrine and practice to uncover the origins of a culture of secrecy and concealment of sin. She charts the continuities and changes, from late antiquity into the high Middle Ages, in the use of boys as sexual objects before focusing on four specific milieus in which boys and adolescents would have been especially at risk in the high and later Middle Ages: the monastery, the choir, the schools, and the episcopal court. The Corrupter of Boys is a work of stunning breadth and discomforting resonance, as Elliott concludes that the same clerical prerogatives and privileges that were formulated in late antiquity and the medieval era—and the same strategies to cover up the abuses they enable—remain very much in place.
This is the first biography to see William Robertson as both a man and a central Enlightenment figure. Drawing extensively on his unpublished correspondence, and foregrounding Robertson's religious ...outlook, Jeffrey R. Smitten gives us offers a more nuanced interpretation of his motives, intentions, and beliefs than ever before.
Rabbi Andre Ungar z’l Magonet, Jonathan
European Judaism,
03/2021, Volume:
54, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Rabbi Ungar was born in Budapest to Bela and Frederika Ungar. The family lived in hiding with false identity papers from 1944 under the German occupation. After the war, a scholarship brought him to ...the UK where he studied at Jews’ College, then part of University College, and subsequently studied philosophy. Feeling uncomfortable within Orthodoxy, he met with Rabbi Harold Reinhart and Rabbi Leo Baeck and eventually became an assistant rabbi at West London Synagogue. In 1954 he obtained his doctorate in philosophy and was ordained as a rabbi through a programme that preceded the formal creation of Leo Baeck College in 1956. In 1955 he was appointed as rabbi at the progressive congregation in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Very soon his fiery anti-Apartheid sermons were condemned in the Afrikaans newspapers and received mixed reactions from the Jewish community. In December 1956 he was served with a deportation order and was forced to leave the country.
Full text
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
During the High Middle Ages, members of the Anglo-Norman clergy not only routinely took wives but also often prepared their own sons for ecclesiastical careers. As the Anglo-Norman Church began to ...impose clerical celibacy on the priesthood, reform needed to be carefully negotiated, as it relied on the acceptance of a new definition of masculinity for religious men, one not dependent on conventional male roles in society.The Manly Priesttells the story of the imposition of clerical celibacy in a specific time and place and the resulting social tension and conflict.
No longer able to tie manliness to marriage and procreation, priests were instructed to embrace virile chastity, to become manly celibates who continually warred with the desires of the body. Reformers passed legislation to eradicate clerical marriages and prevent clerical sons from inheriting their fathers' benefices. In response, some married clerics authored tracts to uphold their customs of marriage and defend the right of a priest's son to assume clerical office. This resistance eventually waned, as clerical celibacy became the standard for the priesthood.
By the thirteenth century, ecclesiastical reformers had further tightened the standard of priestly masculinity by barring other typically masculine behaviors and comportment: gambling, tavern-frequenting, scurrilous speech, and brawling. Charting the progression of the new model of religious masculinity for the priesthood, Jennifer Thibodeaux illustrates this radical alteration and concludes not only that clerical celibacy was a hotly contested movement in high medieval England and Normandy, but that this movement created a new model of manliness for the medieval clergy.
In Verbum Domini , his 2010 apostolic exhortation, Pope
Benedict XVI challenged the church to keep theology firmly rooted
in the study of Scripture. The essays collected here respond
thoughtfully and ...concretely to that charge, together demonstrating
that exegesis is essential to the theological task and to faith for
scholars, students, and the broader Church.
The first full biography of W. H. H. Murray (1849-1904), a Boston preacher often described as the father of the American outdoor movement and the modern vacation.
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