Conscience and Authority in the Medieval Church

Conscience and Authority in the Medieval Church PDF

Author: Alexander Murray

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 0198208839

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Alexander Murray has long had an intellectual interest in the history of religion - struggling between his inbuilt anti-clericism and his pronounced monastic leanings. The five essays in Conscience and Authority in the Medieval Church take on this dialectic, addressing the difficult relationship between private conscience and public authority in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In any organization, political, military, commercial, or religious, the relationship of conscience and authority is always potentially fraught, and can create dilemmas both for those in authority and those without. This volume records how our European predecessors approached and dealt with the same dilemmas as we face in the modern world.

Excommunication for Debt in Late Medieval France

Excommunication for Debt in Late Medieval France PDF

Author: Tyler Lange

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-03-24

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1316565378

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Late medieval church courts frequently excommunicated debtors at the request of their creditors. Tyler Lange analyzes over 11,000 excommunications between 1380 and 1530 in order to explore the forms, rhythms, and cultural significance of the practice. Three case studies demonstrate how excommunication for debt facilitated minor transactions in an age of scarce small-denomination coinage and how interest-free loans and sales credits could be viewed as encouraging the relations of charitable exchange that were supposed to exist between members of Christ's body. Lange also demonstrates how from 1500 or so believers gradually turned away from the practice and towards secular courts, at the same time as they retained the moralized, economically irrational conception of indebtedness we have yet to shake. The demand-driven rise and fall of excommunication for debt reveals how believers began to reshape the institutional Church well before Martin Luther posted his theses.

Paradoxes of Conscience in the High Middle Ages

Paradoxes of Conscience in the High Middle Ages PDF

Author: Peter Godman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-06-04

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1139477811

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The autobiographical and confessional writings of Abelard, Heloise and the Archpoet were concerned with religious authenticity, spiritual sincerity and their opposite - fictio, a composite of hypocrisy and dissimulation, lying and irony. How and why moral identity could be feigned or falsified were seen as issues of primary importance, and Peter Godman here restores them to the prominence they once occupied in twelfth-century thought. This book is an account of the relationship between ethics and literature in the work of the most famous authors of the Latin Middle Ages. Combining conceptual analysis with close attention to style and form, it offers a major contribution to the history of the medieval conscience.

Christianity and Freedom: Volume 1, Historical Perspectives

Christianity and Freedom: Volume 1, Historical Perspectives PDF

Author: Timothy Samuel Shah

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-04-26

Total Pages: 763

ISBN-13: 1316552853

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In Volume 1 of Christianity and Freedom, leading historians uncover the unappreciated role of Christianity in the development of basic human rights and freedoms from antiquity through today. These include radical notions of dignity and equality, religious freedom, liberty of conscience, limited government, consent of the governed, economic liberty, autonomous civil society, and church-state separation, as well as more recent advances in democracy, human rights, and human development. Acknowledging that the record is mixed, scholars document how the seeds of freedom in Christianity antedate and ultimately undermine later Christian justifications and practices of persecution. Drawing from history, political science, and sociology, this volume will become a standard reference work for historians, political scientists, theologians, students, journalists, business leaders, opinion shapers, and policymakers.

The Cambridge History of Medieval Canon Law

The Cambridge History of Medieval Canon Law PDF

Author: Anders Winroth

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-01-27

Total Pages: 738

ISBN-13: 1009063952

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Canon law touched nearly every aspect of medieval society, including many issues we now think of as purely secular. It regulated marriages, oaths, usury, sorcery, heresy, university life, penance, just war, court procedure, and Christian relations with religious minorities. Canon law also regulated the clergy and the Church, one of the most important institutions in the Middle Ages. This Cambridge History offers a comprehensive survey of canon law, both chronologically and thematically. Written by an international team of scholars, it explores, in non-technical language, how it operated in the daily life of people and in the great political events of the time. The volume demonstrates that medieval canon law holds a unique position in the legal history of Europe. Indeed, the influence of medieval canon law, which was at the forefront of introducing and defining concepts such as 'equity,' 'rationality,' 'office,' and 'positive law,' has been enormous, long-lasting, and remarkably diverse.

The Kidnapped Bishop

The Kidnapped Bishop PDF

Author: Thomas Fudge

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-05-15

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1666926647

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This book examines the abduction of a medieval Bohemian bishop by heretics and the forced consecration of over one hundred candidates to holy orders. The author clarifies the significance of the kidnapped bishop and his coerced acts of consecration.