Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England

Somerset, Fiona

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511583070

Cited by 110 publications

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“…46 Fiona Somerset speaks in this connection of 'an extra-clergial position'. 47 This is precisely the position occupied by Christine. 48 In the fourteenth century non-ecclesiastical authors begin laying claim to the moral and didactic authority of classical learning.…”

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The Metamorphosis of Woman: Transmission of Knowledge and the Problems of Gender

Mulder-Bakker

2000

Gender & History

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Guibert of Nogent (c. 1064Nogent (c. -c. 1125, in his autobiography De Vita Sua (On his own Life), has pertinent observations concerning the transmission of knowledge, in particular sacred knowledge, by himself, his mother and his uncle -a cleric, a lay woman, and a lay man respectively. Speaking of the formative influences on his mother's religious life, he notes that, widowed and alone after her children had left the nest, she opted for the solitary life. He then depicts her conversion in a way that is pivotal for his ideas concerning female schooling and the transmission of knowledge. 1 Evaluating this picture against his characterisation of both his own training as a cleric and an abbot, and his uncle's conversion to an eremitic life, we gain valuable insights into male and female (religious) education and thus into the transmission of knowledge and the problems of gender. 2 In the following I will investigate the perceived inequality of male and female education, focusing geographically on the lands of Loire and Rhine 3 and distinguishing between: (a) the way knowledge was acquired; (b) the media in which it was set down; (c) the content of the knowledge; and (d) the way it was transmitted to others. Subsequently I will test my findings on an example from the late middle ages, Christine de Pizan.

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confidence: 92%

The Metamorphosis of Woman: Transmission of Knowledge and the Problems of Gender

Mulder-Bakker

2000

Gender & History

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“…What is most helpful is instead to consider how elements of general agreement among the Latinate schoolmen are reworked and refracted by Lollards working in the vernacular, particularly in homiletic and polemical contexts. This reflects the "extraclergial" position of most vernacular Wycliffite writing (Somerset, 1998): academic discourses are nominally dismissed yet subtly deployed.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Thorpe thus imports the Pauline-Augustinian phrase homo interior into the vernacular (cf. Matthews, 1967), demonstrating his narrative's awkward "extraclergial" position as well (Somerset, 1998;cf. Somerset, 1996).…”

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“…Despite the relative consistency (if extreme technicality) of scholastic debate about the nature of "conscientia", therefore, its lack of conceptual and even linguistic clarity in Wyclif's Latin is clearly amplified when imported by his followers into vernacular, "extraclergial" contexts (Somerset, 1998). Across the English sermons, "conscience" is invoked repeatedly, but only ever in relation to (and in terms of) the individual sermons' particular-and often peculiar-exegetical and polemical aims.…”

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The Invisibility of the Soul and the Rhetoric of Dissent: Conscience and the Wycliffite Heresy

Plimmer

2022

Neophilologus

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This essay argues that the use of conscience as a justification for dissent has an even longer history than has often been assumed by intellectual historians of the Reformation. Through a close examination of the English Wycliffite Sermons (c.1380s–1390s) and the Testimony of William Thorpe (1407), it offers the first extended consideration of the use of the word “conscience” in Wycliffite texts, using this as the point of departure for an assessment of Lollard characterisations of human interiority more generally. Wycliffite writers repeatedly emphasise the opacity of the inner life and its consequent authority, a rhetorical tendency inherited and adapted from Wyclif’s own writings and other Latinate discourses. This not only provides Lollards with a helpful strategy in their attempts to avoid prosecution for heresy, but also provides the somewhat shaky ground upon which a number of their doctrinal convictions rest—especially those pertaining to oral confession and membership of the Church. Conscience also provides an obvious connection between religious dissent and political rebellion, which is why it must be central to any future account of Lollardy’s relationship to class struggle or sedition more generally conceived. When writers like Thorpe refer to the soul as invisible, or to God as their only judge, they invoke a fundamental, if unstable, aspect of Wycliffite belief: an incipient but dynamic account of the relationship between individual conscience, interiority, and authority that was to find even greater expression in figures such as Martin Luther, Jan Huss, and Henry VIII.

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Goldie¹

2003

Middle English Literature

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Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England

Cited by 110 publications

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The Metamorphosis of Woman: Transmission of Knowledge and the Problems of Gender

The Metamorphosis of Woman: Transmission of Knowledge and the Problems of Gender

The Invisibility of the Soul and the Rhetoric of Dissent: Conscience and the Wycliffite Heresy

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