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The Black Death and the Church - (1346 to 1353)

Having wondered why there was so much Church Building and extensions to exisiting Churches in the 14th Century, the fact that the Black Death (1346 to 1353) was also in this century, I have come to a conclusion.

If you make as search for the effects that the Black Death, bubonic plague pandemic or the the Great Mortality had on the Church, you will find many pages that claim the Church suffered from the concept that mankind was being punished for their lack of morality or sinful ways. Half the population of Europe was wiped out but still Church building was very active.

Like so many other things from history things are never that simple, the reasons for the expansion of Church Buildings started before the plague and in some cases the Black Death put a hold on some of the construction.

At the beginning of the fourteenth century there were many knights and nobles that had money to spend on buildings to illustrate their power. A case in point is the Church of St. Mary's Belchamp Walter. The Nave was extended and a chantry chapel built in the late 14th century. Either at that time extensive wall paintings were performed presumably to illustrate to the Church-going that they better be good and moral people.

The state of Medieval Ecclesiology at this time is seen by James R. Ginther as "a combination of historical fact and theological fiction" which sounds like it was thought that congregations could be influenced by visual representations painted on the walls of places of worship.

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"Build it and they will come" (a misquote from the Field of Dreams) - the building and expansion of churches in the 14th century

My athesitic view of this brings me the "Field of Dreams" analogy. The act of construction did not mean that congregations would increase. The fear of God's wrath may have been a reason but it is more likely just power.

Churches were obvious places of sanctuary, both from the perspective of shelter and in a spiritual sense. Taking the case of the church in Belchamp Walter the community at the time was located around the church, the Black Death probably meant that most of the dwellings were destroyed by fire in an attempt to stem the spread of the virus. The church could have provided much needed shelter.

In Belchamp Walter it is not known if there was a manor house close to the church and who was the resident of that dwelling?. Speculation says that it was Sir John Botetourt but this does not seem likely as he was busy elsewhere in the country and abroad (Gascony). Undoubtedly he had a stake in the village and manor due to his marriage to a Fitz Othes but that did not mean that he lived here. Subsequent marriages to other influencial families would suggest that the occupant was a Fitz Othes or a de Beachamp. After the Botetourt era marriages and inquistions saw the manor passing to Gernons, Swynbournes, Rolfe, Tyrell and then Wentworth.

The wall paintings

The wall paintings in St. Mary's were made by Monks from Colne Priory who were probably funded by the de Veres.

The paper quoted below (the text in green boxes) discusses why some of wall paintings may have been comissioned. The mixture of depictions of biblical events such as the Passion of Christ and those of morality plays seems to confirm what we see on the walls of many churches.

The Church In Medieval Theology - James R. Ginther

" Medieval Ecclesiology as a category of thought is a combination of historical fact and theological fiction. There is no doubting the existence of a social and institutional entity bearing the name ecclesia during the medieval period, and indeed it would be difficult to study any aspect of medieval Europe and not discover some role or influence of a church[1] Moreover, ecclesial functions and structures did not remain static over the period's thousand years and there is clear documentary evidence that on occasion Christians did take time to reflect upon what church means in order either to evoke or explain change. This in itself surely must be indelible evidence of an extant ecclesiology. "

" The historical fact has been enhanced, however, by theological fiction. Such a phrase is hardly pejorative and it does not imply that medieval ecclesiology was lacking any truth values. Rather, ecclesiology as a theological fiction points to two essential features. First, since the Church was a major medieval institution, its leaders and defenders exploited all available resources to protect and enhance it, including Roman civil law. Canon lawyers drew out the notion of discussing an institution as a person with its own standing before a court - the persona fictiva. The Church as a whole claimed the status of 'person' in law, a legal fiction that reinforced its corporate identity but never undermined the truth value of any legal or theological claim [2] Second - and in keeping with the Latin verbal root of 'fiction' (fingere, to create or shape) - the phrase reminds us that this part of medieval theology has often been constructed (fictus) according to modern and post-modern theological agendas. Ecclesiology is the 'wax nose' of medieval theology: it can be shaped and re-shaped because, despite being grounded in historical fact, ecclesiology of the Middle Ages remained undeveloped. The doctrine of God, salvation, Incarnation, the life of virtue and penance, the sacraments - all these were recognizable categories of theological discourse and theologians continually addressed them throughout the Middle Ages. The same cannot be said for ecclesiology and attempts to identify an ecclesiological textual tradition have often yielded more frustration than fruit. Perhaps the greatest student of medieval ecclesi- ology, Yves-Marie Congar, concluded after the first twenty years of his research into pre- modern ecclesiology that the Middle Ages did not enjoy a 'proper' ecclesiology until the last quarter of the thirteenth century.[3] Congar was not alone in this opinion, as Artur Landgraf had come to a similar conclusion in his careful study of twelfth-century theology. There are moments, indeed centuries, when the ecclesiological sources apparently fell silent. [4] "

" That silence easily allowed for modern theological assumptions to overpower the narrative. Congar's claim to a 'proper ecclesiology' emerging only in the late thirteenth century is based as much upon the documentary evidence as his own ecclesiological commitments that were riveted to the twentieth century. Even Landgraf's more moderate conclusion was based upon the assumption that treatments of the papacy were the definitive factor of any ecclesiology. In other words, the disparate data relevant to constructing a doctrine of ecclesia in the Middle Ages has been organized around themes that may have greater contemporary force than medieval fact. For example, can medieval ecclesiology be condensed into a jurisdictional tension between community (conciliarism) and leadership (papacy)? This is often presented as a fundamental issue, one sparked obviously by the Reform movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (but with some antecedents that stretch back into the core of the medieval period). This tension was clearly extant in both recent Vatican Councils and it remains a touchstone even as Catholic ecclesiology has begun to speak more about 'communion' than jurisdiction and leadership. The tension also enjoyed a serious revival in the middle of the twentieth century for medieval historians, thanks in large part to scholars such as Walter Ullmann, Brian Tierney and Francis Oakley." But was this tension really at the core of all theological reflection on the nature, function and structure of the Church? "

" The silence of ecclesiological discourse is more apparent than real. I argue that the present model used to explore the theology of Church in the Middle Ages does not fully capture all the data and sources available to the historical theologian and that a new methodology needs to be adopted. By including additional sets of texts in their analysis, historical theologians can better capture the multivalent vision that medieval thinkers had of Church. Study of medieval ecclesiology must include an account of both ecclesial events and texts. To make this case, I first discuss whether the issue hinges on only one point of departure – in this case whether a bottom-up approach is better than a top-down one. Then I will outline the standard account of medieval ecclesiology, which will be followed by a suggestion on how it may first be amended. Finally, I want to introduce a set of textual resources rarely employed in the scholarship of medieval ecclesiology, namely expositions of the Psalms and commentaries on the Dionysian corpus. "

Points of departure

" If we find the current account of medieval ecclesiology deficient, the first solution might be to address its point of departure. Until recently those who studied the medieval understanding of Church had adopted a 'top-down' approach, or what Nicholas Healy has called blueprint ecclesiology: scholars consider the nature and function of the Church in ideal and abstract terms, so much so that they find it difficult to relate to the events on the ground as it were, and so are reduced to describing how 'real' churches only fail to live up to the ideal standards. This informs historical study in the sense that ecclesiological principles function a-historically and so, many assume, they can easily be applied to any given period. The alternative is to adopt a 'bottom-up' approach which, according to Roger Haight, begins with the actual experience of being 'in church' and subsequently becomes the basis for understanding how general principles may be abstracted from the concrete. Haight in fact has adopted what Healy theorizes for contemporary ecclesiology, namely an approach to Church that focuses more on the drama of ecclesial experience than on the 'epic' narrative its exponents create.[Note 9]

For any study of medieval ecclesiology, however, historical theologians must seek both points of departure - and for two important reasons. First, medieval thought gravitated to an essentialist analysis of all reality because the phenomena of everyday experience were considered to be illusory and misleading. [Note 10] That approach was certainly echoed within the theological reflection on Church, and if so it would be difficult to avoid this aspect of medi- eval ecclesiology and still remain an honest exponent of the sources. Second, the contrast of these two points of departure can imply that they are almost incompatible, or at least leads to the conclusion that each provides a different etiology for medieval ecclesiology. To argue that somehow the abstract account of ecclesiology had no bearing on the events on the ground assumes an almost Durkheimian view of the development of ecclesial community. There were certainly moments of 'collective effervescence' that advanced the medieval view of Church, but the shaping of real-time ecclesial experience was itself shaped or ordered by the abstract and essentialist musing of Christian leaders. It would seem necessary, therefore, to consider the ecclesial experience and theological reflection about it in tandem when creating a narrative for medieval ecclesiology. Such a broader and more coherent account of medieval ecclesiology necessitates fresh consideration, if we are to come to a better understanding of how medieval Christians identified themselves as part of a believing and worshipping community. This is no easy matter. Despite his demand for a new reading of medieval ecclesiology, Haight relies heavily upon those scholars who worked in a manner completely opposite to his own bottom-up approach." How can he determine that he really has begun at the bottom, at the very locus where Christians engaged one another in community? Indeed, Haight's method requires a careful interplay between the practice of micro-history and the 'grand narrative' in order to establish what the 'in church' experience really was for the Middle Ages. [Note 12] How then do historical theologians keep their bearings as they wade deeply into the daily life of medieval Christians while simultaneously rising up to catch a view of the ideals that medieval theologians embraced in ecclesiological thought? The answer, I want to argue here, lies in providing a more coherent account of the resources they ought to utilize. If anything, historical theologians need to exploit in their research sets of texts that hitherto have not been (or at least rarely) attached to the study of medieval ecclesiology. I want to suggest that a richer set of texts comprises two general categories. Together they can be a helpful heuristic device for future study of the medieval theology of church. Events as ecclesiological texts In order to demonstrate why it is essential to expand the resources for medieval ecclesiology, let us focus now on its standard account.13 Many scholars have described medieval ecclesiology as juridical in nature and papal in orientation.1 It was juridical in nature because it was mainly concerned about institutional structures and how those structures operate within the context of Church-State relations. Granted, the Church-State dichotomy does not accurately represent the medieval experience, since most medieval thinkers would have found it bewildering to conceive of the 'State' as something outside of the Church. Nevertheless, most medieval ideas of the Church addressed the problem of where temporal authority fits into the Church, be it at the local, provincial or universal level.15 This complex relationship has often been reduced to the tension between 'kingdom' (regnum) and 'priesthood' (sacerdotium). On a theoretical level secular rulers and church leaders alike were quick to identify their own and the other's jurisdiction and provide sophisticated reasons why a certain activity or social relationship fell under the authority of one or the other. More pragmatically speaking, political programmes could not but impinge on ecclesial territory and almost every religious practice had political implications. The result was an intertwining of 'Church and State' if only because the political leaders were Christian and any community of Christians was practically part of social structures.16 Medieval ecclesiology was papal in orientation because the papacy was at the apex of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Nearly every medieval discussion of the idea of the Church addressed in some form or another the role and authority of the papacy, either in terms of the Church's relationship with temporal authority, or in terms of the pope's relationship with other members of the hierarchy. No matter what the point of departure was for any medieval text that historians have identified as ecclesiological, the papacy has always played a definitive role.17 The source for this general definition has been careful and scholarly historical observa- tion, based on a wide reading of the sources. Scholars have examined the general narratives of the medieval church so as to extrapolate the implicit ecclesiology that motivated changes in structure, undergirded development of ministerial programmes and methods, and shaped relations amongst the various powers in Europe and the Mediterranean. While there have been some textual markers along the way - such as explicit statements in conciliar pronouncements, epistolary exchanges and theological tractates - for the most part the general contours of medieval ecclesiology are found in analysing the historical reality of Christian communities of the Middle Ages. In other words, one can describe this kind of ecclesiology as being centred in the event. Event-centred ecclesiology is wholly sensible, as it begins with the assumption that the Church is first and foremost an historical entity. Even if one accepts ahistorical first principles in ecclesiology, one uncovers their meaning in how those principles were instantiated in a world of competing and complying social groups, all of which are made up of imperfect human beings. To accept the historicity of ecclesiology is also to recognize the incarnational nature of Christian communities. The communion of believers, the mystical body of Christ, extends the Christian axiom, the 'Word made flesh'. Equally importantly, event-centred ecclesiology puts greater hermeneutical pressure upon the historical theologian, who cannot simply conclude that any text containing ecclesiological content simply means what it says, but must rather interpret those textual resources within the broader context of the historical development or implementation of those principles, not to mention the presuppositions and historical experience of that text's author and initial readers. Indeed, texts do matter in event-centred ecclesiology. In the late thirteenth century a reflexive ecclesiology began to make an appearance in texts. By 'reflexive' I mean that ecclesiology becomes more explicit in its formulation, a formulation that resulted from reflection on both ecclesial events and texts such as the Politics of Aristotle. This is what Congar meant by a 'proper ecclesiology' (une ecclésiologie proprement dite) appearing for the first time in the late thirteenth century.18 This shift towards a more formal treatment of ecclesiology was still centred on an event, however, because it was the conflict between Pope Boniface VIII (r. 1294-1303) and Philip IV of France (r. 1285-1314) that engendered many of the treatises and polemical tractates. What had begun initially as a dispute over taxation exploded into a struggle over who had ultimate authority over the French church. Supporters of the royal side went so far as to question the legitimacy of Boniface's election, since his predecessor had resigned. This in turn launched a polemical debate about the process of papal resignation.19 The struggle also led to one of the clearest claims of papal supremacy over temporal authority: the famous bull, Unam Sanctam (1302). As absolute as Boniface VIII's claim was for being the source of both spiritual and temporal power, it was a hollow one because the French crown ran roughshod over all papal prerogatives and eventually gained immense influence over the papacy for the remainder of the fourteenth century.20 Nonetheless, the most obvious change was the appearance of works with the title trac- tatus de ecclesia.21 A complete census of such texts has yet to be achieved. A quick survey of the In principio database of medieval manuscripts (Brepols Publishers) reveals about thirty- nine works with the title de ecclesia (excluding hymns and works about a specific church), many of which have yet to be edited and studied. It is useful to note that at least three of these works were written prior to 1250: the De mysteriis ecclesie attributed to Hugh of St-Victor (PL 177.335-80), and two disputed questions, de ecclesia bonorum and de ecclesia malorum of Alexander of Hales. Another unexplored textual source for medieval ecclesi- ology is the liturgical guides to the dedication of a church.22 Regardless of these neglected sources, medieval ecclesiology has normally been divided into two phases: a 'pre-history' from circa 400 to circa 1260, and the history of medieval ecclesiology, fully developed, from about 1260 to the end of the Middle Ages.23 Critiquing event-centred ecclesiology The most obvious criticism of this account is the narrow understanding of 'event'. It assumes that the salient events that shaped or drove ecclesiological thought were found in the devel- opment of competing power structures in medieval Europe. In this context, historical theo- logians have accepted two significant watershed moments for medieval ecclesiology. The first was the transformation of the papacy during the Carolingian period from a religious centre of power constantly under threat in the Italian peninsula to an ultramontane authority that now enhanced (or shared, according to some proponents) the imperial power of Charlemagne's court and his successors.24 The second is the so-called Gregorian reform of the eleventh century, when the papacy was finally released from secular influence and began its slow but assured rise to primacy in Latin Christendom.25 These two watershed moments then become the focal points for tracing how Christians perceived the Church in terms of the political machinery of each period, demonstrating that ecclesiological thought must account for the origins of these momentous changes, and then how they subsequently played out in the following centuries.26 In some instances these rarefied events of power struggles did have a broad impact, such as the eleventh-century reforms of papal elections which eventually became the model for the elections of all bishops in the Latin West. It begs the question, however, as to whether the significance of any ecclesial reform is determined by its relation to the events of the great men of the period. In this respect, medieval ecclesiology has yet to exorcise the demons of a traditional historiography, as other parts of medieval studies have already done in a perfunctory manner. Nonetheless, it is unnecessary to cast the herd of swine over the cliff in order to envisage medieval ecclesiology afresh. Instead, to these events of the great men we ought to add two significant event-centred sources that can broaden our understanding of the 'in church' experience that is so necessary for an ecclesiology from below. The first is the physical locus of the Christian community itself: the buildings. If the assumption is that historical theolo- gians can infer an ecclesiological mindset from the recorded events of medieval communi- ties, then surely the same type of inferential reading is equally possible for ecclesial architecture and its adornment. Such a strategy, ironically, would take historical theolo- gians back to the original meaning of 'ecclesiology', namely a study of church architecture.27 Reading church architecture as a theological text would require careful attention to how medieval Christians themselves invested meaning into sacred space. 28 For example, perhaps the most common perception of the gothic church is the introduction of the altar screen as a replacement of the rood beam of earlier centuries. By enclosing the chancel or quire, it has appeared to the modern reader that this was one way to reinforce the division between the laity and a far more hierarchically minded clergy. True worship focused on the celebration of the eucharist, found only at the high altar, and the altar screen appears to have been a physical way of excluding the laity from that experience. For those who have studied reli- gious experience from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, such an observation seemed incongruous with the increasing emphasis on the pastoral responsibilities of the clergy during the same period. Pastoral care required the priest to have greater and more meaningful contact with his parish by means of regular confession, preaching and the beginnings of catechetical instruction.29 Moreover, in the midst of this supposed exclusion of the laity from the eucharist by means of architecture, there is the well-documented event of the laity demanding the elevation of the host during Mass.30 This demand only makes sense if architecturally they were still able to see the altar. More recent scholarship has therefore presented a very different view of the meaning of that architectural plan of the gothic church: the altar screen was not a means of excluding anyone, but rather it was a physical reminder that the tasks assigned to both clergy and laity were not the same. The former was to celebrate the eucharist vicariously while the latter fulfilled their responsibility of prayer and meditation.31 Reading accurately and correctly the ecclesiological inferences of a church building demands a second set of event-centred texts: the liturgy.32 No other textual loci reveal a more bottom-up 'in-church' experience than the missals, pontificals, graduals, lectionaries, psalters and ordinals. This assertion may appear to be completely incompatible with a bottom-up methodology, since liturgy is often presented as a principal example of imposing structures upon a community from above. However, the liturgy was hardly a monolithic or universal experience in the Middle Ages. There were certainly attempts to foster a universal liturgy, based in particular on the liturgy in Rome; but the repeated attempts only demon- strate how local cultic practices stubbornly resisted the universalizing tendencies of certain prelates and popes. Beginning in the eighth century, for example, the papacy attempted to reshape the worship experience of all Frankish kingdoms and had the full support of the new Carolingian court. The main obstacle was the Gallican rite in the Frankish territories: to impose a papal sanctioned liturgy required that rite to be eliminated altogether. The strategy only enjoyed partial success, for even with its adoption the Roman liturgy was soon 'contam- inated' with the remnants of its Gallican competitor.33 Such events indicate that formal imposition from above was often subverted by local concerns from below. What does liturgy tell us about medieval ecclesiology? The obvious and already welldigested factor is the sacramental nature of ecclesial experience. The often touted ecclesio- logical problematic of church-and-world dialectic is found in liturgical life in as much as the Church was to transform the world. Indeed, the Christian encounter with the immanent occurred in the transformation of worldly elements of worship: water, bread, wine, oil, etc. The eucharistic focus of medieval ecclesiology is also a well-trodden path, broken first by the innovative scholarship of Henri de Lubac.34 What remains, however, is to discover how specific communities – defined in terms of parish, diocese, province, or even by the notional term 'nation'-etched out their own specific vision of Church with the liturgical stylus. For example, was a community's self-perception unveiled in the celebration of specific feasts days (as opposed to the many they ignored)? The study of the use of saints' lives (and not just their composition) can be another point of access to the 'in church' experience during the Middle Ages. Such a strategy challenges the modern reader of medieval hagiography to consider the manner in which these texts were implemented within a specific liturgy, how that liturgy framed the reading of the saint's life, and then how that reading shaped – and was shaped by- the communal life of the local church.35 Other questions to pose are: Do specific customaries or local rites reflect a unique form of community of one part of medieval Christianity? How does the liturgy transform a sacred space, which then contributes to the ecclesial experience of the community as a whole? Is there a unique ecclesiological outlook that differentiates (or at least coincides with) the functionality of a monastic church from that of a parish church or a cathedral? And finally, how did the liturgical experience make an impact upon those whose task was to reflect upon the sacred page, formulate the abstract (and sometimes obtuse) theological problems and subsequently shape the future pastors and prelates? Texts as ecclesiological events Historical theologians gain access to events through the textual artifacts of medieval culture and in these we may discover each event's ecclesiological import. It has become a common- place in Medieval Studies that medieval culture was highly textual even though the number of literate persons accounted for a tiny minority. Medieval Christians considered texts to be the mirror in which they observed themselves as individuals and as members of a society, republic or body of believers. They advanced in learning by means of texts, for in the monastic cloister or the university classroom the main pedagogical tool was an authoritative text. Even for the illiterate texts mattered, for they gained access to their content through the voices of their literate leaders and in doing so formed communities that were woven together (textus) in the authority of a text.36 In this respect, texts are events in themselves.37 Text as an ecclesiological event is already evident in the onset of what I have called the reflexive ecclesiology of the later Middle Ages. My concern here is to expand this category to include a genre of texts that rarely emerges in any discussion of medieval ecclesiology. I want to suggest that, at the very least, historical theologians ought to consider two additional types of texts: commentaries on the Psalms and expositions of the Dionysian corpus. "

Conclusion

Fear and Superstition.

Dr. Ginther, UofT, has many words in the paper above. I am not sure if I understand it all!

Links

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If you require a copy please email tempusfugit.me.uk

References:

  • Black Death - https:// courses.lumenlearning.com/ atd-herkimer-westerncivilization/ chapter/the-black-death/ #:~:text=There was a significant impact,the old%20schedule of%20services - There was a significant impact on religion, as many believed the plague was God’s punishment for sinful ways. Church lands and buildings were unaffected, but there were too few priests left to maintain the old schedule of services.
  • James Ginther - https:// www.medieval.utoronto.ca/ people/ directories/all-faculty/ james-ginther
  • Ecclesiology - https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Ecclesiology - the study of the church from a theological perspective
  • Hildegard of Bingen - https:// www.worldhistory.org/ Hildegard_of_Bingen/
  • Hildegard of Bingen - https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Hildegard_of_Bingen - Scivias - Liber Vitae Meritorum - Liber Divinorum Operum
  • Julian of Norwich - https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Julian_of_Norwich
  • Danse Macabre. The Dance of Death (1493) - https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Danse_Macabre

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