Vitality and Vulnerability? Later Medieval English Religion, Church and Reform

The medieval English church and its religious beliefs and practices have always been sites of contest, from the internal debates over structure and papal relations following the conquest, through Lollardy and of course the Reformation, to the continued debate over their nature in the subsequent centuries.  Indeed, one of their features that needs constant emphasis is the sheer diversity both of institutions and of practices, contrary to the stereotype of a monolithic European church under papal hegemony.  The church and religion are therefore rich sites for the study of a wide spectrum of features of medieval society, from academic theology and ecclesiastical politics down to the material and cultural realities of rural life.   

Traditional ecclesiastical history was focused on institutions, authority and politics, no doubt in part because English Protestants regarded the medieval church’s religious beliefs and practices as superstitious nonsense.  But even in the era of Anglican dominance, the attachment to local churches, most of whose buildings survived, created a continued – or sometimes revived – interest in their furnishings and artwork, and even rituals as well as their architecture.  The historiography of the last few decades, with its more non-confessional and anthropological approach, has in particular shown the vibrancy of religious expressions, in writing as well as art and architecture and material culture.  Religious practice has been shown to be highly appropriate to the social life of most parts of medieval English society, and indeed to have been the cultural matrix through which most people in later-medieval England experienced their world.  There is a rich heritage of material through which to study these developments, and an ever-vibrant scholarship exploring it too. 

This is not to say that questions of authority and politics have been completely neglected.  The Wycliffite or Lollard heresy has remained a focus of academic study and thus kept a range of issues in focus, from the mechanics of salvation and the operation of grace in the mass through the nature of papal, episcopal and priestly authority to the extent of popular support for dissent and the reasons for this.  And while it is important to study this period on its own terms, the question of whether and how the Reformation grew out of or was a reaction to the developments of the two centuries before it remains central, and again maintains the focus on the full gamut of issues from the headship of the church through to the weekly practices of the parishioner.  

This is a subject which therefore enables students to encounter both live academic debates and the whole range of human life in late-medieval England, through a wide range of rich sources, visual and material as well as textual, the latter both documentary and literary, and in both English and Latin.  There is both considerable scope to pursue your own interests and very accessible materials with which to do so.