Dr%20Benjamin%20Thompson: List of publications

This chapter addresses clerical abuse as a perennial topos for medieval polemicists. It was a theme visited and revisited across many sung poems of the High Middle Ages also, including those sung in motets. The chapter explores how a motet’s musical setting could inflect the experience of its polemical poetry for listeners and singers, through a close analysis of a polyphonic song known from a rich variety of thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century sources and in several different polyphonic adaptations. The motet is a genre which needs some introduction. It seems to have been born at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, when texts were added to the expansive melismatic phrases of rhythmically measured polyphony found in the cathedral’s liturgical compositions. The fund of aesthetic devices available in the genre could be used for other purposes, among them, polemical ones. The liturgical context of a chant serves as a thematic point of departure for the motet voices composed against it.

Forasmuch as manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living is daily used and committed among the little and small abbeys, priories and other religious houses. .. whereby the governors of such religious houses, and their convent, spoil, destroy consume and utterly waste [their churches, lands and ornaments] to the high displeasure of Almighty God, slander of good religion, and the great infamy of the King’s highness and his realm if redress should not be had thereof. .. Act suppressing the lesser monasteries, 1536 So opened the statute which inaugurated the wholesale dissolution of the monasteries in England between 1536 and 1540. e text allows no virtue to these houses, continuing that all eorts ‘for an honest and charitable reformation of such unthriy, carnal, and abominable living’ have failed. e only solution is to close them down and commit the religious to greater monasteries ‘where they may be compelled to live religiously, for reformation of their lives’.

Christine Carpenter's influential work on late-medieval English society aspires to encompass a wide spectrum of human experience. Her vision of "total" history embeds the study of politics in a multi-dimensional social framework which ranges from mentalities and ideology to economy and geography. This collection of essays celebrates Professor Carpenter's achievement by drawing attention to the social underpinning of political culture; the articles reflect the range of her interests, chronologically from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth, and thematically from ideology and culture, through government and its officials, the nobility, gentry and yeomanry, the law and the church, to local society. The connection between centre and locality pervades the volume, as does the interplay of the ideological and cultural with the practical and material. The essays highlight both how ideas were moulded in political debate and action, and how their roots sprang from social pressures and interests. It also emphasises the wider cultural aspects of topics too-easily conceived as local and material.

© Christopher Fletcher, Jean-Philippe Genet and John Watts 2015.It is difficult to imagine a medieval form of government, except perhaps the Italian city states or the free towns of the Empire, in which the church did not play an important role, and this was certainly true of the kingdoms of England and France. The purpose of this chapter will thus be to focus on the participation of the church in political power in these two kingdoms, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. We will first attempt to identify where clergy and graduates were to be found in the circles of political power, which in this case means primarily royal central and local government, although princely and even noble administrations will not be ignored, especially for France. Who these men were and how they had been trained will also be addressed, alongside the question of their clerical identity, and the changes wrought by the ‘laicisation’ of government in our period. Secondly, this chapter will assess the role of the church as a whole in the process of governance and in political culture. It will examine in particular how kings and princes deployed the church's material and ideological resources in pursuit of their objectives. This raises a third issue, that of the relationship of the Crown to the church more broadly, especially from the church's point of view: why did clergy serve the king, and why did the church need him? This will be placed in the context of late medieval developments to assess the tensions and paradoxes involved in the church's participation in governance, and in the development of these patterns into the sixteenth century. This theme is not as straightforward as it might seem, since the church was, according to high medieval reforming theory, a body separate from secular authority, subject to a higher calling and a different master. Yet in practice, its contribution to royal governance was essential and multifaceted, as well as evolving. This tension between the theory of ecclesiastical separateness and the practice of the church's involvement forms part of the background to our story of its participation in political power and, in its resolution, is itself part of that story.

High ecclesiastical office in the Middle Ages inevitably brought power, wealth and patronage. The essays in this volume examine how late medieval and Renaissance prelates deployed the income and influence of their offices, how they understood their role, and how they were viewed by others. Focusing primarily on but not exclusively confined to England, this collection explores the considerable common ground between cardinals, bishops and monastic superiors. Leading authorities on the late medieval and sixteenth-century Church analyse the political, cultural and pastoral activities of high-ranking churchmen, and consider how episcopal and abbatial expenditure was directed, justified and perceived. Overall, the collection enhances our understanding of ecclesiastical wealth and power in an era when the concept and role of the prelate were increasingly contested. Dr Martin Heale is Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval History, University of Liverpool. Contributors: Martin Heale, Michael Carter, James G. Clark, Gwilym Dodd, Felicity Heal, Anne Hudson, Emilia Jamroziak, Cédric Michon, Elizabeth A. New, Wendy Scase, Benjamin Thompson, C.M. Woolgar

The volume assesses performative structures within a variety of medieval forms of textuality, from vernacular literature to records of parliamentary proceedings, from prayer books to musical composition.

It continues to be assumed in some quarters that England's monasteries and mendicant convents fell into a headlong decline - pursuing high living and low morals - long before Henry VIII set out to destroy them at the Dissolution. The essays in this book add to the growing body of scholarly enquiry which challenges this view. Drawing on some of the most recent research by British and American scholars, they offer a wide-ranging reassessment of the religious orders on the eve of the Reformation. They consider not only the condition of their communities and the character of life within them, but also their wider contribution - spiritual, intellectual and economic - to English society at large. What emerges is the impression that the years leading up to the Dissolution were neither as dark nor as difficult for the regular religious as many earlier histories have led us to believe. It was a period of institutional and religious reform, and, for the Benedictines at least, a period of marked intellectual revival. Many religious houses also continued to enjoy close relations with the lay communities living beyond their precinct walls. While their role in the devotions of many ordinary lay folk may have diminished, they still had a significant part to play in the local economy, in education and in a wide range of social and cultural activities.

However, it seems clear enough that the last English monk-bishop to qualify as a demonstrably original writer and thinker was Philip Repyngdon, also the last medieval English monk to be made a cardinal.43 Ironically enough, Repyngdon's  ...

This volume offers an important new interpretation of a reign pivotal to English historiography, the recent interpretative debate around which is encapsulated in its elusive central figure. Was Henry the mean-minded and anti-noble bureaucrat who signed his accounts himself, or the lavish patron of the arts living in a splendid court? Was he a `new' or a traditional monarch? Many of the fourteen essays here amplify the recent trend towards seeing Henry in the latter context, amidst his churches and building projects, the stained glass he commissioned for them, his books, courtiers and even the music sung for him. Yet they also go beyond the public face: we are enabled to get closer to Henry the man, his family and the atmosphere of his court through piety, poetry and iconography, which reveal a sombre tone alongside the public splendour. Indeed both suggest a reign of constant paranoia and endemic insecurity, which negated the achievements of some of its medieval predecessors. Nevertheless, the reign may have inadvertently laid the foundations for a new monarchy after all.

Papers on a very wide range of subjects include, for the first time, one on music, on changes in English chant repertories in the eleventh century; book migrations are examined over the same period, and one of the two papers on the Bayeaux Tapestry looks at changing representations of the "burgheat". There are important papers on law and church administration and the relations of Normandy and England with other regions. The development of Rouen is compared with that of Paris; William the Conqueror's relations with Blois and Champagne are discussed; papers on the frontier with the Scots and on Rhys ap Teudur, king of Deheubarth are included. Domesday studies, chronicles and poetry are also represented with new research.

This book derives from a conference held in 1989. It reflects current research on ecclesiastical organisation and on aspects of religious belief from the Black Death to the English Reformation. On the wider front, there is an account of the diplomatic relations between the Pope and those who ruled for the infant Henry VI. Regional studies focus on Carthusians in Somerset, and the continued attraction of the eremitical life; on the canons of Exeter cathedral and on the foundation of chantries and the endowment of churches. Taken together, these essays show how late medieval religious belief was undermined by a variety of factors, and point up the contrast between the humanity and sensitivity of medieval religion and the nature of the faith which replaced it.