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30 - Public purity and discipline: states and religious renewal

from PART VII - REFORM AND RENEWAL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2010

By
Roberto Rusconi
Edited by
Miri Rubin  and
Walter Simons
Miri Rubin
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
Walter Simons
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
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Summary

The centrality of preaching in religious and social life in the late mediaeval period

From the last decades of the fourteenth century to the first part of the sixteenth, preaching acquired a central role within the religious, social and political life of Western Europe. By the end of the fourteenth century, preachers were already at the forefront in disseminating ideas of reform, whether in England, first with John Wyclif (1320–84), and later with the Lollards, or in Bohemia, with Jan Hus (c. 1370–1415) and his followers. In the first decades of the sixteenth century, both the supporters of religious renewal and the proponents of the Reformation used preaching from the pulpit as a way of promoting their respective ideas.

A wide range of contemporary documents all attest to the fact that preaching had been established as an event which drew crowds of listeners whose sizes varied according to the fame of the preachers and the size of the town. Sometimes all commercial and manufacturing activities were suspended so that a city’s population could assemble in the town square to hear a sermon; the inhabitants of the countryside were also drawn to the event.

Keywords

Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola da FerraraChristian renewalbonfires of the vanitiesreligious reformsocial structurePapal StatesPublic purityItalian Renaissancelate-medieval preachingObservant friars
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Christianity , pp. 458 - 471
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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