‘Lollard’ is the name given to followers of John Wyclif, the English dissident theologian who was dismissed from Oxford University in 1381 for his arguments regarding the eucharist. A forceful and influential critic of the ecclesiastical status quo in the late fourteenth century, Wyclif’s thought was condemned at the Council of Constance in 1415. While lollardy has attracted much attention in recent years, much of what we think we know about this English religious movement is based on records of heresy trials and anti-lollard chroniclers. In Feeling Like Saints, Fiona Somerset demonstrates that this approach has limitations. A better basis is the five hundred or so manuscript books from the period (1375–1530) containing materials translated, composed, or adapted by lollard writers themselves.
These writings provide rich evidence for how lollard writers collaborated with one another and with their readers to produce a distinctive religious identity based around structures of feeling. Lollards wanted to feel like saints. From Wyclif they drew an extraordinarily rigorous ethic of mutual responsibility that disregarded both social status and personal risk. They recalled their commitment to this ethic by reading narratives of physical suffering and vindication, metaphorically martyring themselves by inviting scorn for their zeal, and enclosing themselves in the virtues rather than the religious cloister. Yet in many ways they were not that different from their contemporaries, especially those with similar impulses to exceptional holiness.
Inhoudsopgave
Introduction
Part One
1. The Lollard Pastoral Program: Reform from Below
2. God’s Law: Loving, Learning, and Teaching
3. Lollard Prayer: Religious Practice and Everyday Life
Part Two
4. Lollard Tales
5. Lollard Parabiblia
Part Three
6. Moral Fantasie: Normative Allegory in Lollard Writings
7. Lollard Forms of Living
Conclusion
Appendix A: Brief Descriptions of Frequently Cited Manuscripts
Appendix B: The Pastoral Syllabus of SS74 and a Detailed Summary of the Sermons
Over de auteur
Fiona Somerset is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England and the coeditor of Lollards and Their Influence in Late Medieval England and The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity.Meer e-boeken van dezelfde auteur (s) / Editor
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