Revised Thesis (doctoral)--Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [411]-442) and index.

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This dissertation studies adaptations of monastic literary culture between the first decades of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the English Reformation. My discussion focuses on the writings of John Whethamstede, John Lydgate, Richard Whitford and Thomas More. I argue that, while these authors aim to satisfy readers’ desires for elaborate and authoritative forms of piety, they actually provide models of reading and patterns of disciplined living that restrict lay piety within orthodox boundaries. I begin with an introductory chapter that situates this adaptation of monastic reading within broader literary and cultural developments, such as the growing popularity of humanist reading and Protestantism, in order to demonstrate that monastic ideals remained culturally relevant throughout this century. This chapter also aims to prompt a further reassessment of the division that is often created between the medieval and early modern periods. Chapters Two and Three focus on the use of monastic reading practices within a Benedictine context. Chapter Two examines the historiographic poetry and prose of John Whethamstede in which the abbot both positions himself at the forefront of contemporary Latin literature and, at the same time, signals the differences that set the cloistered reader apart from his secular counterpart. Chapter Three examines Lydgate’s incorporation of monastic devotional culture into the Life of Our Lady through the depiction of the Virgin as living out an exemplary religious vocation and through the arrangement of the text to facilitate calculated meditative responses from readers. Chapters Four and Five then shift to the first decades of the sixteenth century. Chapter Four examines Richard Whitford’s orthodox programme of monastic and social reform that aimed not only to meliorate the individual’s ethical life but also to revitalize Catholicism and engage directly with Protestantism. Finally, Chapter Five looks back two decades to investigate More’s borrowings from different elements of religious life in his Life of Pico and Utopia that seek to manage the spiritual aspirations of the laity and to depict a society in which, much as in a monastery, the desires of the individual are shaped by and subordinated to the ideals of the community. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2009-10-30 11:56:09.669

<p>Among the numerous commitments late ancient Christians throughout the Roman Empire shared with their non-Christian neighbors was a preoccupation with justice. Not only was the latter one of the celebrated characteristics of God, the New Testament had charged Christians, particularly those who served as bishops or elders, with ensuring and maintaining justice in their communities from the tradition's very origins. In the early fourth century, this aspect of episcopal responsibilities had received an unexpected boost when the Emperor Constantine not only recognized bishops' role in intra-Christian conflict resolution, but expanded their judicial capacity to include even outsiders in the so-called audientia episcopalis, the bishop's court. </p><p>Christians had, of course, never resolved the question of what constituted justice in a vacuum. Yet bishops' increasing integration into the sprawling and frequently amorphous apparatus of the Roman legal system introduced new pressures as well as new opportunities into Christian judicial discourse. Roman law could become an ally in a minister's exegetical or homiletical efforts. Yet it also came to intrude into spheres that had previously regarded themselves as set apart from Roman society, including especially monastic and clerical communities. The latter proved to be particularly permeable to different shades of legal discourse, inasmuch as they served as privileged feeders for episcopal sees. Their members were part of the Christian elites, whose judicial formation promised to bear disproportionate fruit among the laity under their actual or eventual care. This dissertation's task is the examination of the ways in which Christians in these environments throughout the Latin West at the turn of the fifth century thought and wrote about justice. I contend that no single influence proved dominant, but that three strands of judicial discourse emerge as significant throughout these sources: that of popular philosophical thought; that of biblical exegesis; and that of reasoning from Roman legal precept and practice. Late ancient Christian rhetoric consciously and selectively deployed these threads to craft visions of justice, both divine and human, that could be treated as distinctively Christian while remaining intelligible in the broader context of the Roman Empire.</p> / Dissertation

This study has engaged in a critical exploration of the relationship between the Church and Culture in Ga-Marishane village in Limpopo. A Case Study of the Anglican martyr Manche Masemola of Sekhukhune has been used to reveal the extent of tension between the Church and culture in the same village during the Colonial-Missionary era. The topic of this study reflects on the contestation of the Anglican rite of passage of initiation through the baptism sacrament of adults, and the traditional Pedi rite of initiation with special reference to the initiation of girls in Ga-Marishane. These initiation rites live in missional-tension in what they ought to do and to be in the village and therefore an interface has to be arrived at. Christianity as a western culture comes into contact with African culture through the process of evangelizing the African continent, through missionary engagement. The missionaries come into contact with African indigenous people, who have their own system of beliefs and cultural practices, and they want to impose their Christian tradition upon the residents who in turn oppose the teachings of the Church, and harmony is lost. This brings a lot of controversy amongst the Christian converts and the Pedi traditionalists. In the process of this turmoil, a family is deprived of their daughter through death, and the Church loses a catechumen. Manche Masemola’s parents were not happy that she wanted to join the Christian faith, more especially because they said that her behavior was very absurd, especially when she prayed, and they claimed that she acted like someone who had been bewitched. According to Pedi custom, a girl was supposed to eventually get married after she had been proclaimed marriageable. Manche’s parents were not happy when she joined the Church, as there were nuns in the village, who had made vows of remaining celibate and only be married to Jesus Christ. The presence of nuns suggested to them that Manche might want to be one of them, and then they would be deprived of magadi, as well as grandchildren, which would have been perceived by the community as their failure as parents to bring their daughter up. Manche’s determination to be a Christian impacted a lot on her parents, and they never considered their daughter’s desire to be a Christian, i.e. what it meant for her and what her ultimate goal was. This study reveals that both these institutions, the Church and the village are staunch in their practices to the extent that no one wants to compromise their beliefs. Inculturation is found to be one of the methods to be implemented in order to promote wholesome living in Ga-Marishane between the Christian converts (bakriste) and the Pedi traditionalists (baditshaba), in order to eliminate further ‘Blood baptisms.’ / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013.

One of the great paradoxes of the medieval period is the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1225), in which monks of the Cistercian Order took an active and violent role in campaigning against the heretics of the Languedoc. Why, and how, did this order officially devoted to prayer and contemplation become one of the prime orchestrators of one of medieval Europe’s most gruesome affairs? This thesis seeks to answer that question, not by looking at the crusading Cistercians themselves, but at their predecessor Bernard of Clairvaux, who—I will argue—made the Albigensian Crusade possible by making it permissible for monks to intervene in the world outside the cloister. The logic of this thesis is as follows. Bernard of Clairvaux lived in a world in which monastics had a certain spiritual authority that granted them special privileges over ecclesiastics (Chapter II). The Cistercian Order itself, even before Bernard became their prime mover and shaker, used these privileges to cultivate contacts beyond monastic borders (Chapter IV), and once Bernard became a prominent abbot himself, his desire to do good and criticisms of the outside world (Chapter VI) led him to intervene in various endeavors (Chapter V). These interventions drew backlash from other monastics and ecclesiastics, which then required justification in order to reconcile the vita passiva and Bernard’s active lifestyle (Chapter VII). These justifications, along with Bernard’s justifications of violence (Chapter VIII), came to more broadly characterize the Cistercian Order as a whole (Chapters I, IV), and thus the ideological material to justify monastic holy war was all present in eloquently defended and rapturously accepted form by the time Henry of Clairvaux took a castle during his 1281 preaching mission turned mini-crusade (Chapter IX). With all of this built into the Cistercian DNA, Arnaud Amaury found it very easy to lead a crusade in 1212. Could he have done this without Bernard’s example paving the way and ingraining such lessons in Cistercian thought? It is my contention that he could not have.

Diese Studie befasst sich mit der von der Forschung bisher wenig beachteten Zeit zwischen den großen Päpste Alexander III und Innozenz. Ihr Ziel ist es, Einblick zu gewinnen in die Wechselbeziehungen von Päpsten und Orden und zu analysieren, vor welchen Problemen beide Parteien am Ende des 12. Jahrhunderts standen und wie sie damit umgingen. Das Quellenkorpus für diese Arbeit bilden die knapp 200 päpstlichen Urkunden, die für die Ordensleitung oder die Mutterhäuser ausgewählter Orden, Verbände oder Klöster ausgestellt wurden. Als Ergänzung zu den Papsturkunden erweitern, soweit vorhanden, die jeweiligen institutiones der Orden und die Generalkapitelsbeschlüsse aus dem fraglichen Zeitraum das Quellenmaterial. Gemeinsam mit den Päpsten versuchten die Oberhäupter der religiösen Institutionen, den wirtschaftlichen und spirituellen Schwierigkeiten, die gegen Ende des 12. Jahrhunderts auftraten, Abhilfe zu verschaffen. Deshalb eignen sich die Papsturkunden dieser Zeit, um im Umkehrschluss Einblick in die wirtschaftliche und spirituelle Lage bei deren Empfängern zu gewinnen. Allerdings kann man davon ausgehen, dass die Ordensleitung nur dann die aufwändige Reise an die Kurie angetreten und um die Hilfe des Papstes gebeten hat, wenn sie ihre Probleme nicht mehr aus eigener Kraft lösen konnte, so dass man in den erhaltenen Papsturkunden nur die Extremfälle wirtschaftlichen und disziplinarischen Verfalls vor sich hat. Umso bemerkenswerter ist es, dass die Papsturkunden nahezu aller in dieser Studie untersuchten Verbände Rückschlüsse auf krisenhafte Zustände erlauben. Nur in seltenen Fällen – wenn ein scandalum entweder schon vorlag oder drohte - basierten päpstliche Maßnahmen nicht auf Initiativen aus den Orden. Die Ordensleitung benötigte wiederum die päpstliche Autorität, um ihren Reformmaßnahmen Durchsetzungskraft zu verleihen. Zu einem Eingreifen aus eigenem Antrieb sah sich die Kurie nur dann verpflichtet, wenn die Zustände in einem Verband derart zerrüttet waren, dass das daraus resultierende scandalum das Ansehen der gesamten Kirche zu beschädigen drohte. Dabei spielte es keine Rolle, welches propositum die Religiosen hatten, ob sie die Augustinus-, die Benediktsregel oder eine eigene befolgten, ja nicht einmal ob es sich um einen (wie auch immer organisierten) Verband oder ein Einzelkloster handelte – von der allgemeinen wirtschaftlichen und spirituellen Krise des späten 12. Jahrhunderts waren sie alle betroffen, wenn auch in unterschiedlichem Maße. Als Ergebnis dieser Untersuchung ist festzustellen: Die päpstlichen Privilegien des späten 12. Jahrhunderts gingen in der Regel auf die Initiative der Orden zurück, die deren Inhalte weitgehend selbst bestimmten, wenngleich für einige Stücke die Mitwirkung der Kurienmitglieder belegt werden kann. Ernsthafte Probleme im wirtschaftlichen, spirituellen und disziplinarischen Bereich hingen regelmäßig mit einem Autoritätsverlust der Verbandsleitung zusammen, sowohl Auslöser als auch Folge dieser krisenhaften Situation. Man kann davon ausgehen, dass der Einfluß der Päpste – oder allgemein der Kurie – auf die Inhalte der Urkunden zunahm, je schwächer die Position der Verbandsleitung war. Aus diesem Umstand resultiert die in den Privilegien dieser Zeit feststellbare Tendenz, die Autorität der Ordensleitung, meist in Gestalt des Abtes des Mutterklosters, zu stärken und seine Kompetenzen zu erweitern. Gleichzeitig mit der Zuspitzung der krisenhaften Situation der Orden und Verbände wuchs der Handlungsspielraum der Päpste. Die zunehmende Handlungsunfähigkeit der Leitung von Orden und Verbänden ermöglichte und erforderte eine neue Qualität der päpstlichen Einflußnahme. Während Lucius III. sich weitgehend darauf beschränkte, Privilegien seiner Vorgänger zu bestätigen, begann Urban III., im Einvernehmen mit den Orden neue Lösungen zu suchen. Mit der Rückkehr der Kurie nach Rom unter Clemens III. stieg die Zahl der zum Zweck der Krisenintervention ausgefertigten Urkunden merklich an, wobei das ausgleichende Temperament dieses Papstes als Faktor nicht außer Acht zu lassen ist. Bemerkenswert ist dabei, dass sich zum Ende des 12. Jahrhunderts hin nicht nur die Menge dieser Urkunden steigerte, sondern auch die Tiefe der päpstlichen Eingriffe zunahm, wenngleich sie in den meisten Fällen im Einklang mit dem Willen der Verbandsleitung standen.

The Order of Fontevraud, founded in 1100 by the hermit/preacher Robert of Arbrisssel was the only twelfth-century women's order incorporating into its structure a group of chaplains and lay brothers whose specific role was to serve the nuns. This thesis examines the origins of the order and demonstrates that the English foundations were a stage in its development, closely linked to its Angevin connections. Each of the two houses established in England c.l 150 was founded and patronised by supporters of Henry Plantagenet. Westwood, founded by the de Say family, lesser barons from Herefordshire, received a modest endowment. Nuneaton, founded by the magnate Robert, earl of Leicester, was richly endowed. Twenty years later Henry II expelled the Benedictine community from Amesbury replacing it with a group from Fontevraud, thus founding the third house. A fourth, Grovebury, is not treated; it was never a foundation for women. I have studied the process of endowment and shown that the wealth and status of the founder in no small measure determined the future prosperity of the foundation. The internal organisation of the Fontevraud houses has been explored, in particular the balance between local autonomy and dependence on the mother house. As well, I have examined recruitment and shown that this, too, reflected on the circumstances of foundation. My main focus has been on the economy of these three houses, their income and expenditure and the exploitation of their assets. The nuns are seen as a group of women who were dynamic and creative in managing their affairs. This has not precluded an investigation into the spiritual, and in particular, the liturgical dimension of life in the English foundations. Fundamentally the Order of Fontevraud is presented as an opportunity for noble women of England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to live religious life in a new order, one renowned for its strict interpretation of the Rule of St Benedict and for the prayerfumess of its members, and one in which women were manifestly in control of their own destinies.

The subject of this thesis is an American Zen monastery in New York, Zen Mountain Monastery (ZMM). The study is approached through a survey of methodologies: (1) through the scholarship on American culture and religion, (2) through the sociology of the study of religious institutions and communities and (3) through a comparison with East Asian Zen monasticism. The study reveals that ZMM's monasticism: (1) is part of a systematization of Zen in America that has made Zen into a mainstream option in American society, (2) has created group practices and commitment mechanisms that put ZMM in a better position than American lay Zen centers to challenge the individualist trends of American society and spirituality and (3) is based on a conception of the self more in line with the individualism of American society than the asceticism of East Asian Zen monasticism.

Thesis (J.C.L.)--Catholic University of America, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 61-65).