Church Building and Society in the Later Middle Ages

Church Building and Society in the Later Middle Ages
Author: Gabriel Byng
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2017-12-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108547648

The construction of a church was undoubtedly one of the most demanding events to take place in the life of a medieval parish. It required a huge outlay of time, money and labour, and often a new organisational structure to oversee design and management. Who took control and who provided the financing was deeply shaped by local patterns in wealth, authority and institutional development - from small villages with little formal government to settlements with highly unequal populations. This all took place during a period of great economic and social change as communities managed the impact of the Black Death, the end of serfdom and the slump of the mid-fifteenth century. This original and authoritative study provides an account of how economic change, local politics and architecture combined in late-medieval England. It will be of interest to researchers of medieval, socio-economic and art history.

The People of the Parish

The People of the Parish
Author: Katherine L. French
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2012-03-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812201957

The parish, the lowest level of hierarchy in the medieval church, was the shared responsibility of the laity and the clergy. Most Christians were baptized, went to confession, were married, and were buried in the parish church or churchyard; in addition, business, legal settlements, sociability, and entertainment brought people to the church, uniting secular and sacred concerns. In The People of the Parish, Katherine L. French contends that late medieval religion was participatory and flexible, promoting different kinds of spiritual and material involvement. The rich parish records of the small diocese of Bath and Wells include wills, court records, and detailed accounts by lay churchwardens of everyday parish activities. They reveal the differences between parishes within a single diocese that cannot be attributed to regional variation. By using these records show to the range and diversity of late medieval parish life, and a Christianity vibrant enough to accommodate differences in status, wealth, gender, and local priorities, French refines our understanding of lay attitudes toward Christianity in the two centuries before the Reformation.

Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms

Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms
Author: Natalie Mears
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2005-12-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780521819220

An important re-evaluation of Elizabethan politics and Elizabeth's queenship in sixteenth-century England, Wales and Ireland.

Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain

Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain
Author: Alec Ryrie
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2016-02-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134785844

The Parish Church was the primary site of religious practice throughout the early modern period. This was particularly so for the silent majority of the English population, who conformed outwardly to the successive religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What such public conformity might have meant has attracted less attention - and, ironically, is sometimes less well documented - than the non-conformity or semi-conformity of recusants, church-papists, Puritan conventiclers or separatists. In this volume, ten leading scholars of early modern religion explore the experience of parish worship in England during the Reformation and the century that followed it. As the contributors argue, parish worship in this period was of critical theological, cultural and even political importance. The volume's key themes are the interlocking importance of liturgy, music, the sermon and the parishioners' own bodies; the ways in which religious change was received, initiated, negotiated, embraced or subverted in local contexts; and the dialectic between practice and belief which helped to make both so contentious. The contributors - historians, historical theologians and literary scholars - through their commitment to an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, provide fruitful and revealing insights into this intersection of private and public worship. This collection is a sister volume to Martin and Ryrie (eds), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain. Together these two volumes focus and drive forward scholarship on the lived experience of early modern religion, as it was practised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII

The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII
Author: Steven Gunn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2018-01-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192523899

Henry VIII fought many wars, against the French and Scots, against rebels in England and the Gaelic lords of Ireland, even against his traditional allies in the Low Countries. But how much did these wars really affect his subjects? And what role did Henry's reign play in the long-term transformation of England's military capabilities? The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII searches for the answers to these questions in parish and borough account books, wills and memoirs, buildings and paintings, letters from Henry's captains, and the notes readers wrote in their printed history books. It looks back from Henry's reign to that of his grandfather, Edward IV, who in 1475 invaded France in the afterglow of the Hundred Years War, and forwards to that of Henry's daughter Elizabeth, who was trying by the 1570s to shape a trained militia and a powerful navy to defend England in a Europe increasingly polarised by religion. War, it shows, marked Henry's England at every turn: in the news and prophecies people discussed, in the money towns and villages spent on armour, guns, fortifications, and warning beacons, in the way noblemen used their power. War disturbed economic life, made men buy weapons and learn how to use them, and shaped people's attitudes to the king and to national history. War mobilised a high proportion of the English population and conditioned their relationships with the French and Scots, the Welsh and the Irish. War should be recognised as one of the defining features of life in the England of Henry VIII.

The Stripping of the Altars

The Stripping of the Altars
Author: Eamon Duffy
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 785
Release: 2022-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0300254415

This prize-winning account of the pre-Reformation church recreates lay people's experience of religion, showing that late-medieval Catholicism was neither decadent nor decayed, but a strong and vigorous tradition. For this edition, Duffy has written a new introduction reflecting on recent developments in our understanding of the period. "A mighty and momentous book: a book to be read and re-read, pondered and revered; a subtle, profound book written with passion and eloquence, and with masterly control."--J. J. Scarisbrick, The Tablet "Revisionist history at its most imaginative and exciting. . . . [An] astonishing and magnificent piece of work."--Edward T. Oakes, Commonweal "A magnificent scholarly achievement, a compelling read, and not a page too long to defend a thesis which will provoke passionate debate."--Patricia Morison, Financial Times "Deeply imaginative, movingly written, and splendidly illustrated."--Maurice Keen, New York Review of Books Winner of the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award

Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain

Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain
Author: Ian Lancashire
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 738
Release: 1984-08-02
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780521262958

In 1800 entries this valuable reference work covers texts and records of dramatic activity for about 400 sites in Britain from Roman times to 1558. Grouped in sections - texts listed chronologically; Records of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Other, classified by county, site, and date; and doubtful texts and records - the entries summarize the contents of each record and give bibliographic information. Professor Lancashire presents a comprehensive survey of almost every type of literary and historical record, document, and work: civic, church, guild, monastic, and royal court minutes and financial accounts; national records - Chancery, Parliament, Privy Council, Exchequer; royal proclamations; wills; local court rolls; jest-books, poems, prose treatises, sermons; archaeological remains, artifacts, illustrations. He brings together works in several normally unrelated fields: Roman theatre in Britain; medieval drama as such, including the Corpus Christi play and the moral play; court revels of the Tudors, and of their predecessors in England and Scotland; and finally Latin and Greek drama as played in Oxford and Cambridge colleges. An introduction outlines the history of early drama in Britain. Appendixes include indexes of about 335 towns or patrons with travelling players, complete with rough itineraries; about 180 playwrights; and about 320 playing places and buildings. There are illustrations, four maps, and a large general subject and name index.

The Good Women of the Parish

The Good Women of the Parish
Author: Katherine L. French
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2013-02-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812201965

There was immense social and economic upheaval between the Black Death and the English Reformation, and contemporary writers often blamed this upheaval on immorality, singling out women's behavior for particular censure. Late medieval moral treatises and sermons increasingly connected good behavior for women with Christianity, and their failure to conform to sin. Katherine L. French argues, however, that medieval laywomen both coped with the chaotic changes following the plague and justified their own changing behavior by participating in local religion. Through active engagement in the parish church, the basic unit of public worship, women promoted and validated their own interests and responsibilities. Scholarship on medieval women's religious experiences has focused primarily on elite women, nuns, and mystics who either were literate enough to leave written records of their religious ideas and behavior or had access to literate men who did this for them. Most women, however, were not literate, were not members of religious orders, and did not have private confessors. As The Good Women of the Parish shows, the great majority of women practiced their religion in a parish church. By looking at women's contributions to parish maintenance, the ways they shaped the liturgy and church seating arrangements, and their increasing opportunities for collective action in all-women's groups, the book argues that gendered behavior was central to parish life and that women's parish activities gave them increasing visibility and even, on occasion, authority. In the face of demands for silence, modesty, and passivity, women of every social status used religious practices as an important source of self-expression, creativity, and agency.

Poor Relief in England, 1350–1600

Poor Relief in England, 1350–1600
Author: Marjorie Keniston McIntosh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2011-12-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139503650

Between the mid-fourteenth century and the Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601, English poor relief moved toward a more coherent and comprehensive network of support. Marjorie McIntosh's study, the first to trace developments across that time span, focuses on three types of assistance: licensed begging and the solicitation of charitable alms; hospitals and almshouses for the bedridden and elderly; and the aid given by parishes. It explores changing conceptions of poverty and charity and altered roles for the church, state and private organizations in the provision of relief. The study highlights the creativity of local people in responding to poverty, cooperation between national levels of government, the problems of fraud and negligence, and mounting concern with proper supervision and accounting. This ground-breaking work challenges existing accounts of the Poor Laws, showing that they addressed problems with forms of aid already in use rather than creating a new system of relief.

The Voices of Morebath

The Voices of Morebath
Author: Eamon Duffy
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2003-08-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300175027

In the fifty years between 1530 and 1580, England moved from being one of the most lavishly Catholic countries in Europe to being a Protestant nation, a land of whitewashed churches and antipapal preaching. What was the impact of this religious change in the countryside? And how did country people feel about the revolutionary upheavals that transformed their mental and material worlds under Henry VIII and his three children? In this book a reformation historian takes us inside the mind and heart of Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep farming village on the southern edge of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebath’s conventional archives have long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all the drama of the English Reformation, Morebath’s only priest, Sir Christopher Trychay, kept the parish accounts on behalf of the churchwardens. Opinionated, eccentric, and talkative, Sir Christopher filled these vivid scripts for parish meetings with the names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes we catch a rare glimpse of the life and pre-Reformation piety of a sixteenth-century English village. The book also offers a unique window into a rural world in crisis as the Reformation progressed. Sir Christopher Trychay’s accounts provide direct evidence of the motives which drove the hitherto law-abiding West-Country communities to participate in the doomed Prayer-Book Rebellion of 1549 culminating in the siege of Exeter that ended in bloody defeat and a wave of executions. Its church bells confiscated and silenced, Morebath shared in the punishment imposed on all the towns and villages of Devon and Cornwall. Sir Christopher documents the changes in the community, reluctantly Protestant and increasingly preoccupied with the secular demands of the Elizabethan state, the equipping of armies, and the payment of taxes. Morebath’s priest, garrulous to the end of his days, describes a rural world irrevocably altered and enables us to hear the voices of his villagers after four hundred years of silence.