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The Medieval Church: A Brief History PDF

393 Pages·2013·5.512 MB·English
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The Medieval Church The Medieval Church: A Brief History argues for the pervasiveness of the Church in every aspect of life in medieval Europe. It shows how the institution of the Church attempted to control the lives and behaviour of medieval people, for example, through canon law, while at the same time being influenced by popular movements like the friars and heresy. This fully updated and illustrated second edition offers a new introductory chapter on ‘the basics of Christianity’, for students who might be unfamiliar with this territory. The book now has new material on some of the key individuals in Church history – Benedict of Nursia, Hildegard of Bingen, Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi – as well as a more comprehensive study throughout of the role of women in the medieval Church. Lynch and Adamo seek to explain the history of the Church as an institution, and to explore its all-pervasive role in medieval life. In the course of the thousand years covered in this book, we see the members and leaders of the western Church struggle with questions that are still relevant today: What is the nature of God? How does a Church keep beliefs from becoming diluted in a diverse society? What role should the state play in religion? The book is now accompanied by a website (www.routledge.com/cw/lynch) with textual, visual and musical primary sources making it a fantastic resource for students of medieval history. Joseph H. Lynch earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1971. He was the Joe & Elizabeth Engle Chair in the History of Christianity at The Ohio State University, where he taught from 1976 until 2008. Throughout his career, he earned many teaching awards, held numerous distinguished fellowships, and authored several books on Church history. Phillip C. Adamo studied medieval history under Joseph Lynch at The Ohio State University. He earned his Ph.D. in 2000. Adamo is currently Associate Professor of History and Director of Medieval Studies at Augsburg College in Minneapolis. In 2006, he was awarded Augsburg’s Teaching Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teaching and Learning. This page intentionally left blank The Medieval Church A Brief History 2nd Edition Joseph H. Lynch Phillip C. Adamo Second edition published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 Joseph H. Lynch and Phillip C. Adamo The rights of Joseph H. Lynch and Phillip C. Adamo to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Longman 1992 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-415-73685-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-582-77298-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-73522-1 (ebk) Typeset in 11/13pt Legacy Serif ITC Std by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Contents List of figures vi List of maps vii Preface to the first edition viii Preface to the second edition xii Publisher’s acknowledgements xiv Glossary xv Chapter 1: The basics of Christianity 1 Chapter 2: Ancient Christianity 12 Chapter 3: Beginnings of the medieval church 32 Chapter 4: The conversion of the west (350–700) 52 Chapter 5: The Papal-Frankish Alliance 72 Chapter 6: The church in the Carolingian Empire 85 Chapter 7: The Carolingian Renaissance 105 Chapter 8: The collapse of the Carolingian world 118 Chapter 9: The church in the year 1000 137 Chapter 10: The eleventh-century reforms 156 Chapter 11: The rise of Christendom 171 Chapter 12: The age of the papacy 189 Chapter 13: The New Testament revival 205 Chapter 14: Monastic life in the twelfth century 219 Chapter 15: The heretics 241 Chapter 16: The friars 255 Chapter 17: The schools 267 Chapter 18: The sacramental life 284 Chapter 19: Crisis and calamity 308 Chapter 20: The church in the fifteenth century 329 Chapter 21: Epilogue 347 Index 352 List of figures 1 Eve and Mary 8 2 Constantine at Nicaea 23 3 Pope Gregory I, the Great 38 4 Baptism of Clovis 60 5 Martyrdom of Boniface 76 6 Charlemagne with Popes Gelasius and Gregory 96 7 Charlemagne and Alcuin 109 8 Viking animal-head post 121 9 Coronation of Otto III 142 10 Encounter at Canossa 163 11 The Psalter Map 178 12 The pope promulgating the law 190 13 Suffering Christ 210 14 Bernard of Clairvaux preaching 226 15 Expulsion of the Albigensian heretics 251 16 Saint Francis of Assisi 257 17 A medieval classroom 281 18 The seven sacraments 285 19 The dance of death 312 20 Jan Hus 337 List of maps 1 Germanic kingdoms, c.534 39 2 Christianity and paganism in western Europe, c.350–750 75 3 The empire of Charlemagne, 768–814 89 4 The routes of the First Crusade 181 5 Important monasteries of medieval Europe 222 6 The mendicants 264 7 The universities of medieval Europe 276 8 The Papal Schism, 1378–1417 326 Preface to the first edition Christianity is a religion in which historical events (or what are believed to be historical events) are important. One source of that conviction was the Old Testament, which told of God’s dealings with humanity and with his chosen people, the Jews. A second source was the deeply held conviction, which Catholic Christians defended against Gnostic Christians, that Jesus had really been born of a woman, had really lived as a human being, had really died on a cross and had really risen from the dead. From the first generation, Christians understood themselves in a historical way. The presentation of Jesus’s life and teachings was not in philosophical treatises (as it might well have been) but in narratives – the gospels – that included place, time, circum- stances and other elements of history. The history of the movement that claimed Jesus as its founder – church history proper – was already being written in the late first century with Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. Luke had no immediate successors. No church writer in the second or third century com- posed a history in the strict sense of that term, but many of them recorded historical details, including the successions of bishops, the disputes within the group over belief, the spread of their religion and the persecutions by the Roman authorities. Church history received its first full expression in the Ecclesiastical History of Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea (c.260–339), who was aware that he was a pioneer in his effort to record the historical growth of the church.1 Eusebius had several successors in the fourth and fifth centuries, including Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret and Evagrius, all of whom wrote in Greek.2 Between the eighth and the fifteenth centuries church histories of many kinds – those of monasteries, bishoprics, the papacy, religious orders – proliferated. Those historians did not think of themselves as living in what we classify as ‘the Middle Ages’. Usually, they thought they lived in the sixth and final age of human history, which was connected by God’s plan to earlier ages and was moving more or less rapidly toward the end of time.3 It was in the fifteenth century, when Renaissance humanists divided European history into three parts – ancient, middle and modern – that a history of the church in its middle or medieval age (media aetas) could be con- ceptualised. The humanists’ notion of a middle age was generally a negative Preface to the first edition ix one. They saw the media aetas as a period of darkness and barbarism separat- ing them from their beloved Rome and Greece. The church of that barbaric age shared, in their view, in the crudeness and corruption of the times. The debate over the character of the church in the middle period grew hotter during the sixteenth century as Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans and others quarrelled about the nature of the church and used historical arguments to support their respective views. The study of the medieval church was born in the sixteenth century and has been an enterprise of huge proportions and long duration. It has always been and continues to be a multilingual pursuit: the main language of intellectual life and religion in the medieval west was Latin and that of the Christian east was Greek. Modern scholarship of high quality is produced in virtually every European language and some non-European languages as well. In an annual bibliography published by the Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, there has been an average of 7,524 entries for the last five years, about 40 per cent of which touch on the medieval church. In view of the mountains of sources and modern scholarship, it may be thought presumptuous to write a history of the medieval church in a single medium-sized volume. The chief justification I can offer is that I have experi- enced the need for such a work in my own teaching. Also, I am often asked by interested people for something both reliable and manageable to read on the medieval church. This book is intended to be an introduction for beginners and, to be frank, beginners with neither Latin nor extensive knowledge of modern foreign languages. With considerable regret, I have purposely restricted footnotes and suggested reading almost entirely to works in English, since I wanted to provide interested students with sources and secondary works that they could read with profit. In almost every instance, I chose to cite works that would be useful to a beginner who wished to pursue a particular topic. If students were to read what I included in the ‘Suggested Reading’ and in the notes, they would learn a great deal about the medieval church. Some readers will miss a more extensive treatment of eastern Christianity or of important historical figures. I understand their view, but I had to be selective in my choice of topics. I have concentrated on the western church and I have empha- sised ideas and trends over personalities. For readers who want different treatments of the history of the medieval church, there is no shortage of choices in all sorts of formats and approaches. I shall suggest only a few. Williston Walker, Richard Norris, David W. Lotz and Robert T. Handy, A History of the Christian Church, 4th edn (New York, 1985), cover the entire history of the church in about 750 densely printed pages, of which about 200 pages cover the Middle Ages. Generations of students have profited from Margaret Deanesly’s The Medieval Church, 590–1500, originally published in 1925 and reissued in a ninth edition, reprinted with corrections

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