Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

9 results

  • ‘Having drunk heresy with their (mother’s) milk’: English Protestant converts to Catholicism in Malta, 1600–1798

  • Frans Ciappara
  • Journal:
    British Catholic History / Volume 36 / Issue 2 / October 2022
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    07 November 2022, pp. 182-203
    Print publication:
    October 2022
    • Article
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • HTML
    • Export citation

  • This article analyses the conversion of 379 English Protestants to Catholicism in Malta between 1600 and 1798. It explores the motivations behind their recantation, the agents of their conversion and the role of dissimulation in discarding their Protestant faith. It ends with two remarks. First, people in the Mediterranean ‘knew no religious frontiers’.1 Malta, like other Mediterranean territories was a place with a mixed religious profile. Second, though English Protestants considered themselves to be the ‘elect’ and their country the new Israel, the two faiths were not mutually exclusive and could find common ground over the defence of Christendom.

  • Chapter 1 - ‘No News but the Abbeys Shall Be Down’

  • Harriet Lyon, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England
    Published online:
    08 October 2021
    Print publication:
    21 October 2021, pp 25-75

  • Summary

    Chapter 1 examines the process of suppression in the 1530s, using memory as a tool for rethinking our approach to this episode. With sensitivity to the language employed by the Henrician government, it characterises the dissolution as a long and uncertain process that can be separated into two main phases: the ‘reformation of the monasteries’ and the ‘surrender of the monasteries’. It pays particular attention to the emergence of narratives of monastic corruption and the expediency of suppression because, it argues, these are the themes that modern scholarship has inherited from its largely Henrician source base. It is the success and longevity of this triumphalist narrative that the remainder of the book sets out to test, complicate, and unravel. This chapter also notes the emergence of early critiques of the dissolution – Catholic, conservative, and evangelical – which are traced alongside the narratives propagated and perpetuated by Tudor governments with a view to highlighting the complexity and diversity of the early modern memory of the dissolution. Crucially, the chapter highlights the prevalence and persistence of the idea that the monasteries were irredeemably corrupt across different confessional perspectives, as well as across time and space.

From the Material to the Mystical in Late Medieval Piety
  • The Vernacular Transmission of Gertrude of Helfta's Visions
  • Racha Kirakosian
  • Published online:
    01 September 2021
    Print publication:
    30 September 2021
  • The German mystic Gertrude the Great of Helfta (c.1256–1301) is a globally venerated saint who is still central to the Sacred Heart Devotion. Her visions were first recorded in Latin, and they inspired generations of readers in processes of creative rewriting. The vernacular copies of these redactions challenge the long-standing idea that translations do not bear the same literary or historical weight as the originals upon which they are based. In this study, Racha Kirakosian argues that manuscript transmission reveals how redactors serve as cultural agents. Examining the late medieval vernacular copies of Gertrude's visions, she demonstrates how redactors recast textual materials, reflected changes in piety, and generated new forms of devotional practices. She also shows how these texts served as a bridge between material culture, in the form of textiles and book illumination, and mysticism. Kirakosian's multi-faceted study is an important contribution to current debates on medieval manuscript culture, authorship, and translation as objects of study in their own right.

  • 8 - Material support II: religious orders

  • from PART II - FORGING A CHRISTIAN WORLD, 1200–1300
  • Edited by Miri Rubin, Queen Mary University of London, Walter Simons, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Christianity
    Published online:
    28 March 2010
    Print publication:
    02 July 2009, pp 107-113

  • Summary

    The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw great changes in the nature of the material support for institutions within the monastic and religious orders. Early medieval material support for monastic houses came from a number of sources. For some religious houses a further source of material support came from pilgrims and visitors to their saints, shrines and relics. The friars came to attract the material support that had hitherto been lavished on the monastic order. Monastic endowments continued to be made, patrons continued to seek burial in monasteries, men continued to become monks and canons, and women nuns. Charters also indicate that those providing material support for the monastic order were now likely to be more demanding in return for their generosity. Monks were not the only ones who could pray for salvation. This could be done by a priest or chaplain employed by a family, in a parish church, or for a guild or lay confraternity.

  • 1 - Clerical purity and the re-ordered world

  • from PART I - INSTITUTIONS AND CHANGE: 1100–1200
  • Edited by Miri Rubin, Queen Mary University of London, Walter Simons, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Christianity
    Published online:
    28 March 2010
    Print publication:
    02 July 2009, pp 9-21

  • Summary

    Caesarius of Heisterbach combines his relish in telling stories that discomfit priests with a knowledge, even an acceptance of human frailty. For Caesarius celibacy is indeed of paramount importance for both clerks and monks; nonetheless, even those who fail to observe it can count on forgiveness provided they truly repent. The Lateran Council of 1215, and the subsequent dissemination of its canons, set the seal on the new order in the Christian world. The decrees of Lateran IV in effect secured the monasticisation of the clergy. A sinful clergy, insisted Innocent III, is the root of all evil, 'faith decays, religion grows deformed, liberty is thwarted. In Summa confessorum, Thomas of Chobham argues that it was a lesser sin for a cleric to marry secretly than it was for him to have extra-marital sex and to express in more general terms doubts about the legitimacy of enforcing clerical celibacy.

  • 29 - Observant reform in religious orders

  • from PART VII - REFORM AND RENEWAL
  • Edited by Miri Rubin, Queen Mary University of London, Walter Simons, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Christianity
    Published online:
    28 March 2010
    Print publication:
    02 July 2009, pp 446-457

  • Summary

    The period of the so-called Observant reforms was far more dynamic than longstanding convictions concerning the decline of religious life in the closing centuries of the Middle Ages. Most impressive was the wave of Observant initiatives in the mendicant orders, and the Franciscan order in particular. Observant reforms among the Augustinian hermits first made headway at the Lecceto hermitage near Siena in 1385, soon leading to the first Augustinian Observant Congregation. Until the 1460s the spread of moderate Dominican Observant reforms was very much a steered and moderately successful phenomenon, without granting much specific autonomy to the Observant houses. The Lateran reform congregation at first had an impact in Italy, but soon influenced many houses of regular canons in middle and eastern Europe, notably in Poland. Significant for late medieval society as a whole was the Observant interference with the religious life of the laity.

  • 4 - Monastic and religious orders, c. 1100–c. 1350

  • from PART I - INSTITUTIONS AND CHANGE: 1100–1200
  • Edited by Miri Rubin, Queen Mary University of London, Walter Simons, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Christianity
    Published online:
    28 March 2010
    Print publication:
    02 July 2009, pp 54-72

  • Summary

    This chapter shows that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries manifest an embarrassment of riches: the number, variety and development of monastic and religious orders in this period is overwhelming. It also discusses traditional Benedictine monasticism, and considers the changes that came in the twelfth century. The Cistercians were one of the great historical enterprises of Western monasticism. The Premonstratensians belongs to the family of Augustinian canons. In the Augustinian mould the Premonstratensians combined community life with a pastoral mission. The Cistercians were more positive in their dealings with the Templars. In 1119 Hugh de Payns, a knight from Champagne, organised his companions into soldier-monks. Their founder Bruno, a teacher at Cologne, was fascinated by the stories of the hermits of the desert in Late Antiquity. The foundation of the Franciscans and the Dominicans shortly after 1200 resulted from a new surge of religious feeling and desire for vita apostolica, in imitation of the lives of the apostles.

  • 13 - Church and society

  • from PART IV - THE HIGH MEDIEVAL KINGDOMS
  • Edited by Knut Helle, Universitetet i Bergen, Norway
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Scandinavia
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    04 September 2003, pp 421-462

  • Summary

    During the eleventh century, Christianity was accepted as the public religion in most of Scandinavia. The conversion of the Finns, a process that was not completed until the high Middle Ages, was closely related to their incorporation in the Swedish kingdom. The missionaries working in Scandinavia from the ninth century were in large part Benedictine monks. The first Nordic religious houses were a couple of Benedictine monasteries established in Denmark towards the end of the eleventh century. The ecclesiastical demands for immunities and rights of various kinds culminated in the second half of the thirteenth century. To a large extent these demands were met, but there were soon counter-reactions because the secular aristocracy and the monarchy felt threatened by the economic resources and autonomy of the Church. The doctrines and moral code of the Church influenced people's lives throughout the Middle Ages. The chapter also discusses the extent to which the teaching of the Church managed to change Scandinavian mentality.

  • 9 - The religious Orders

  • from Part II - The Church in the Thirteenth Century
  • David Abulafia, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge Medieval History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    21 October 1999, pp 220-255

  • Summary

    Around 1230, one of the greatest figures of the Reformation, the bishop of Acre, Jacques de Vitry, taking stock of the changes that had occurred to Christianity throughout the preceding decades, made the following observation: 'Three types of religious life already existed: the hermits, the monks and the canons. Towards the end of this period was added a fourth institution, the beauty of a new religious Order and the sanctity of a new Rule. The difficulties of the great monastic and canonical institutions should not overshadow the appearance of new, often successful, forms of religious life, with ambitions that were both more precise and more concrete. In 1252, the University of Paris therefore declared that no member of a religious Order could subsequently hold a Chair. During the thirteenth century, the religious influence of the Mendicant Orders was felt above all in the cities.