David Luscombe

Religion and the Laity

Since the Carolingian age Catholic Christianity had spread from its heartland in the British Isles, France, the empire, Italy and northern Spain, to become the official religion of Bohemia, Poland and Hungary. A uniform though sparse church organisation existed throughout this huge area. The Christian west was divided into dioceses, though they varied considerably in size; but the provision of parishes was very uneven. All towns had at least one church while some had more than a hundred, but even in parts of the west which had been Christian for centuries many rural areas, were still served by the clergy of a central minster. The growth of parishes increased the possibility of conflict between clergy and laity. The cost of maintaining churches and priests was largely met from tithes, theoretically levied on all sources of income, but normally on the principal grain crops, but tithes were frequently impropriated by lay patrons, and this was a source of litigation.

The Rural Economy and Demographic Growth

For a deeper understanding of the interlocking phenomena of the years between 1050 and 1190, one would obviously need to turn ones attention to the towns, to long-distance exchanges, to the various social strata, and to both their spiritual and their economic interrelations. This chapter focuses on the dramatic increase in population and then unprecedented surge in agricultural production. South and north, Atlantic littoral and central Europe offer many contrasts in rhythm, in scale or even in the underlying causes determining the development of particular systems for the cultivation of the soil. Cereals may well be the main feature of the rural economy in regions characterised by a sedentary mode of existence and yet by no means all the soil in Europe was given over to the production of grain. Demographic increase, and the development of pack-animals, whether saddled or yoked, exerted considerable pressure upon natural resources.

Towns and the Growth of Trade

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, most of Europe was distinctly backward and peripheral by comparison with areas south of the Mediterranean and in the Middle East, which were highly commercialised and urbanised and under Muslim control. There were two distinctive core areas for urban growth: northern Italy and the territories bordering the southern part of the North Sea and the English Channel and extending up the Rhine. The most fundamental stimulus to urban and commercial growth was that of rural development and population increase. The interaction between local resources and lordship shaped patterns of urban growth, especially for small towns. Some of the largest and most populous cities owed their standing to their handling of a transit trade and to their role as centres for collecting and redistributing goods. The rapid growth of towns promoted commercial solutions to the basic problems of supply, and this in turn encouraged specialised agriculture.

Natural morality and natural law

Sources of the medieval concept of natural law The chief sources on which the scholastics drew for their knowledge of natural law were Cicero, the Digest , St Paul, the Fathers and, later, Aristotle. St Paul observed in his Epistle to the Romans, 2.12–16, that even without knowledge of the Old Testament Law pagans have its substance written on their hearts. Conscience and reason lead men to do by nature what the Law commands. Natural law thus accords with the Decalogue. Lactantius recorded Ciceros definition of law: true law is right reason in agreement with nature, being found among all men, summoning them to duty and prohibiting wrongdoing. True law may not be abolished by Senate or People; it is not different in Rome or in Athens, now or in the future. Its originator and promulgator is God; disobedience to it constitutes a denial of the nature of man. The Digest in its first chapter distinguished three types of law: ius civile or the law of the state, ius gentium or the law of nations, and ius naturale or the law of nature. The jurists cited defined the natural law variously. Ulpian described it as the common instinct of animals; the union of male and female, the procreation of offspring and their education have been taught to animals by nature. But Gaius defined the natural law as those human laws practised by all nations and dictated to all men by natural reason, and Paulus said that the natural law consists of what is equitable and good.

Zengids, Ayyubids and Seljuqs

For thirty years by 1063, Nizam al-Mulk devoted every effort to shaping the jerry-built Seljuqid political enterprise into a centralized absolutist monarchy. The decadence of Seljuqid power in western Iran after the death of Masud coincided with the collapse of Seljuqid rule in the East. In 1078 Malikshahs brother Tutush conquered Syria, but from the outset the latters ambitions were not easy to restrain. The occupation of Damascus reunified Syria for the first time since the death of Tutush, and the way in which unity was achieved ensured that Nur al-Din could exploit the citys military and fiscal resources with no fear of rebellion. In the eyes of Nur al-Din and Saladin, the Isma ʾilis interpretation of Islam espoused by the Fatimids was flagrantly heretical. The Ayyubids had had their eye on Mesopotamia and Mosul since Saladins time, and in any case it made sense to pre-empt any efforts at a Zengid revanche in Mesopotamia and north Syria.

Wyclif and Hierarchy

Nowadays it is widely realized that much discussion concerning the nature of the Church and of government in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was fuelled by the conceptions of hierarchy that are found in the writings of Denis the pseudo-Areopagite. Denis was invoked and quoted in varied and conflicting ways in consideration of questions concerning the structure and the unity of the Church, the relationships between bishops, mendicants and the papacy, the location of the state of perfection within the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the relationship between temporal and spiritual jurisdiction. From the treatises on the Celestial and on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy was derived knowledge of the arrangement of the angelic society in heaven into nine orders. They constituted an exemplar for the corresponding arrangement into nine orders of the Church Militant on earth. So an examination of the hierarchical structure of the contemporary Church seemed to require an understanding and an interpretation of the celestial hierarchy, and that entailed knowledge of the teachings of Denis. The basic propositions were familiar to many before the composition of the Bull Unam Sanctam in which they are enshrined: St. Paul has written that the powers that be are ordained of God, that is, they are arranged or constituted into an ordering, for they are not equal. To Paul’s disciple on the Areopagus in Athens were ascribed the treatises in which this ordering was elaborately explained in the light of the principle that every spirit belongs to an order or grade which forms part of a continuous hierarchy, so that the lower orders are connected to the highest ones, not directly but by the intermediate orders. Denis himself typically wrote of the differences between created beings in terms of the degree to which these unequal beings participate in the divine light which shines progressively less strongly the further it is transmitted down the orders in the hierarchy. Many medieval readers seized upon the implications of this for the exercise of jurisdiction, secular as well as spiritual. Denis’s angelology had been given a political and social extension by writers such as Alan of Lille who died in 1203 and William of Auvergne whose Magisterium divinale was written from about 1223 onwards. The role played by Denis’s writings and ideas in the debates and polemics concerning lay as well as ecclesiastical power continued to be a substantial one in the fourteenth century.

Peter Comestor and Biblical Chronology

The Historia scholastica of Peter Comestor (d. 1178) was for centuries the main work of reference for the study in the Latin West of Biblical history, just as Peter Lombard’s Four Books of Sentences were for the study of systematic theology and the Decretum of Gratian of Bologna for the study of canon law. Hundreds of manuscript copies of each of these manuals survive, and the Historia scholastica was conspicuous for the attention it gave to the details of the historical events narrated in the Bible, to such matters as places, names, and dates. The work does not offer moral or spiritual interpretation of the Bible. Some examples of Peter’s presentation of biblical chronology are presented in this essay.

Mind Matters: Studies of Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual History in Honour of Marcia Colish (review)

Regarding the translation, Dyson claims to improve on the translation of E. G. Doyle (Sedulius Scottus: On Christian Rulers and the Poems [Binghamton, NY, 1983]), which he considers “often unduly free” (p. 21). A literal translation of an obscure passage, however, is no help, as seen in the Preface, lines 4–5, when Sedulius writes, “Artibus egregiis sapientia Celsitonantis/Praeposuit hominem cunctis animalibus orbis.”The translation “By excellent arts the wisdom of the Heavenly Thunderer/Has set man over all the creatures of the world”(p.45) misses the point that God has given arts to humans:“The wisdom of the heavenly-thunderer set man by means of excellent arts before all the animals of the world.”

Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities – By Timothy Reuter

disciples” forms the backdrop for the study, with digressions into more directed religious and political rioting. Randall’s fundamental argument is that although the era was one of tremendous and multivariate change, there remained a fundamental continuity in how and why working-class Englishmen and women responded to those changes. The people’s response to community crisis, Randall argues, was rooted in a long tradition of popular disturbance, stretching back to the peasant rebellions and food riots of the later Middle Ages. Thus, Randall observes, even when the circumstances of the people changed, their sense of the justice and legitimacy of their protests, their belief in the protections offered by common law and precedent, and their conviction that magistrates could and should intervene to uphold community norms, remained constant through the century. Randall likewise examines the widespread use of ceremony, symbol, and ritual to dramatize and give the aura of legitimacy to the arguments of both rioters and, increasingly, their industrial and governmental opponents. Randall pays less attention to “the establishment,” which plays a secondary and largely unsympathetic role in his account of the changing climate of work and protest, and the reader should look elsewhere for the parallel development of government, finance, and the positive aspects of industrial innovation. Fortunately, these areas have their historians as well, and solid studies can be read as companions to provide a fuller picture of the transformative eighteenth century. Riotous Assemblies sets the standard for current scholarship on popular disturbances in early modern England. Its accessibility and attention to historiography makes it particularly well suited for advanced undergraduate and graduate libraries.

Peter Abelard after Marriage. The Spiritual Direction of Heloise and Her Nuns through Liturgical Song (review)

chronicle, as well as the characteristics of the period and milieu. (It was not possible to convey Cosmas’s rhymed prose in the translation.) Wolverton translates the proper names according to the ethnicity of persons. The place names should be given according to modern usage (see p. 23), which are inconsistent. For example, for Zbečno Wolverton created the nonexistent—and for Czechs unpronounceable—name Ztibečná, and the Saxon Dohna is translated by the Czech name Donín. Readers might be unable to locate the mentioned places and other geographical items. The adjoining map might provide some help, but it lacks a commentary (e.g., Mt. Osek in the central Vltava river region, which has not been pinpointed to date, needs some explication).