Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Richard Barrie Dobson: an appreciation
- 1 ‘If heaven be on this earth, it is in cloister or in school’: the monastic ideal in later medieval English literature
- 2 The ‘Chariot of Aminadab’ and the Yorkshire priory of Swine
- 3 Godliness and good learning: ideals and imagination in medieval university and college foundations
- 4 Hugh of Balsham, bishop of Ely 1256/7–1286
- 5 A cruel necessity? Christ's and St John's, two Cambridge refoundations
- 6 Coventry's ‘Lollard’ programme of 1492 and the making of Utopia
- 7 Thomas More's Utopia and medieval London
- 8 Social exclusivity or justice for all? Access to justice in fourteenth-century England
- 9 Idealising criminality: Robin Hood in the fifteenth century
- 10 Fat Christian and Old Peter: ideals and compromises among the medieval Waldensians
- 11 Imageless devotion: what kind of an ideal?
- 12 An English anchorite: the making, unmaking and remaking of Christine Carpenter
- 13 Victorian values in fifteenth-century England: the Ewelme almshouse statutes
- 14 Puritanism and the poor
- 15 Realising a utopian dream: the transformation of the clergy in the diocese of York, 1500–1630
- Bibliography of Barrie Dobson's published works
- Index
11 - Imageless devotion: what kind of an ideal?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Richard Barrie Dobson: an appreciation
- 1 ‘If heaven be on this earth, it is in cloister or in school’: the monastic ideal in later medieval English literature
- 2 The ‘Chariot of Aminadab’ and the Yorkshire priory of Swine
- 3 Godliness and good learning: ideals and imagination in medieval university and college foundations
- 4 Hugh of Balsham, bishop of Ely 1256/7–1286
- 5 A cruel necessity? Christ's and St John's, two Cambridge refoundations
- 6 Coventry's ‘Lollard’ programme of 1492 and the making of Utopia
- 7 Thomas More's Utopia and medieval London
- 8 Social exclusivity or justice for all? Access to justice in fourteenth-century England
- 9 Idealising criminality: Robin Hood in the fifteenth century
- 10 Fat Christian and Old Peter: ideals and compromises among the medieval Waldensians
- 11 Imageless devotion: what kind of an ideal?
- 12 An English anchorite: the making, unmaking and remaking of Christine Carpenter
- 13 Victorian values in fifteenth-century England: the Ewelme almshouse statutes
- 14 Puritanism and the poor
- 15 Realising a utopian dream: the transformation of the clergy in the diocese of York, 1500–1630
- Bibliography of Barrie Dobson's published works
- Index
Summary
In 1955, having unexpectedly arrived at a strange and happy transformation of his life, Isaiah Berlin wrote to his future wife with a musing question. ‘Is there some calm deep feeling which is not tied to “images” and goes on in some even, mystical fashion?’ Behind those words, whether or not the writer's thoughts were bent that way, lie centuries of theory and practice. Mystical striving towards some ‘calm deep’ understanding of God was closely connected to the aim of lifting contemplation above and beyond attachment to the visual. Imageless devotion was part of a spiritual ideal of the medieval Church. But was it not also an ideal of the Protestant reformers who denied the very concept of monastic contemplation, and who worked so hard to eliminate dependence on images in religious learning?
Given the amount that we have learnt in recent years, and are still learning, about the role of imagery, actual and mental, in medieval thought and religion, there is a self-evident absurdity in posing this question in the compass of a short essay. But even if the matter can only be barely broached, it must be worth considering whether there are any continuities, or only discontinuities, in the visual methodology and aspirations which, after so many centuries, were fundamentally called in question in the sixteenth century. Perhaps a health warning is in place at the outset.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Pragmatic UtopiasIdeals and Communities, 1200–1630, pp. 188 - 203Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001