Belief in prophetic inspiration and the possibility of discerning the future was a cornerstone of medieval conceptions of history and of God’s workings within that history. But prophecy’s significance for the Middle Ages is due as much to the multiplicity of its meanings as to its role as an engine of history. Prophetia was described in terms ranging from prediction and historiography to singing and teaching. This thesis examines the attempts of medieval thinkers to wrestle with these ambiguities. The nature and implications of prophetic inspiration were a crucial area of contention during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as scholastic theologians, with their particular techniques and standards of rationality, attempted to make systematic sense of inspired speech and knowledge. These attempts reveal a great deal about medieval structures of knowledge, and about theological reflections on the Church’s place in history. The stakes were high: ‘prophecy’ not only was the subject of Old Testament exegesis, but also, in its various forms, was often the basis of authority for exegetes and theologians themselves, as well as for preachers, visionaries, saints, and even writers of secular works. Those who claimed the mantle of the prophet came just as easily from inside the institutional structures as from outside. Theologians began legitimating a moderate form of inspiration that justified their own work through ordinary activities such as teaching and preaching, while trying to keep at bay perceived threats from powerful assertions of prophetic authority, such as Islam, female visionaries, and schismatic and apocalyptic Franciscans. This study argues that, as theologians sought to determine the limits of prophetic privilege, and to shape prophecy for their own purposes, they actually opened space for claims of divine insight to proliferate in those ordinary activities, and in a way that went beyond their control.

My doctoral thesis examines the intellectual and political relationship between England and the general councils of the Church from the Council of Pisa until the Council of Trent. It illuminates the hitherto unexplored features of the revolution that was the end of universal papal authority. With the transfer of spiritual authority to Henry VIII, the heads of England’s Protestant regimes inherited the papacy’s distrust of the general council, which had the potential to interfere with the course of the reformation in England. At the same time, the thesis examines the changing nature of public commitment to universal decision-making in the Church in the face of resistance by hierarchs (papal or royal). It finds a widespread support for the general council over the period, but also a plurality of views about how conciliar government could be reconciled with monarchical rule in the Church. In the fifteenth century, conciliarism had to contend with the suspicions of those who wished to shore up the Church hierarchy against Wycliffite attacks. In the sixteenth century, there was still competition between the establishment’s defence of an hierarchical Church, directed by the monarchy, and theories which stressed the importance of conciliar government. These arguments took different shapes when used by popular rebels in favour of traditional religion grounded on conciliar consent, or by Protestants in favour of synodal government by the godly. But they were both outcomes of enduring instabilities in the ideology of Church government, which had their roots in the fifteenth century.

In this thesis, a collective urban sector-consisting, in various different guises, of civic governments, urban merchants, and townspeople-is presented as a vital and distinctive component of later medieval English political society. The dynamics of this urban political sector are reconstructed through the use of a modified version of the 'urban systems' approach found in historical geography and economic history, positing that towns are defined by their evolving relationship with one another. Drawing from the municipal records of twenty-two towns, this thesis charts the composition of the later medieval English 'urban system' and the manner in which urban groups belonging to this 'system' participated in a broader national political sphere over four chronological periods-1413-35, 1435-50, 1450-61, and 1461-71. In 1413-35, the highly authoritative and institutionalised governments of Henry V and the child Henry VI fostered vertical relationships between the Crown and a variety of individual civic governments, leading both national and urban political actors to operate within a shared political culture, but not necessarily encouraging inter-urban political communication. This would change in the periods that followed, as the absence of strong royal authority after 1435 renewed the strength of lateral mercantile networks and facilitated the re-emergence of a semi-autonomous inter-urban political community, which saw little reason to participate in the civil wars of the early 1450s that now seemed divorced from its own interests. In the 1460s, however, the financially extractive policies of Edward IV once again gave civic governments and ordinary townspeople a greater stake in royal government, which was reflected in the high level of urban participation in the dynastic conflicts of 1469-71. The developments occurring in these four phases illustrate both the interdependence of urban and national politics in the later medieval period, and the mutability of their relationship with one another.

This thesis examines the relationship, in theory and in practice, between the concepts of justice (iustitia) and mercy (misericordia) in English courts between c. 1100 and c. 1250. During this period English judges (in courts of both common and canon law) were faced with a serious dilemma. The emergence of systematic law had fundamentally altered the pastoral foundations of the act of judgement. On the one hand, judges were incorporated into a system of law in which justice was expected to be routine and regular. They were bound by procedure, and ‘justice’ was considered to lie in the return of due punishment for injury. On the other, this notion of strict justice coexisted with an alternative way of conceiving of judicial responsibilities, which emphasised that justice was incomplete unless it incorporated within it the principle of mercy. This tradition argued that, both for the benefit of the offender and the judge’s own soul, it was safer and more virtuous to mitigate the punishments prescribed by law. English judges were caught in a dilemma, and were, in effect, obliged to choose between two fundamentally opposed ideas of justice, and two starkly contrasting approaches to sentencing. This thesis argues that such a choice was a problem which concerned the schools of theology as much as it did the courts of law. It examines the attempts of theologians and lawyers to resolve the dilemma and provide practical counsel to judges. Scripture, classical philosophy and patristic texts were the key sources in a discussion of how judicial discretion should be exercised in choosing between punitive and merciful courses of action. Rather than conceiving of justice as a purely procedural exercise, English law, and English judges, appreciated that the act of giving judgement was a complex pastoral challenge.

This thesis examines fragmentary Finnish in Late Old Swedish charters (c. 1350–1526) issued in the Finnish part of the Swedish realm, the diocese of Åbo. Consisting mostly of proper names, albeit occasionally displaying Finnish inflectional and derivational morphology, these fragments have previously not generally been regarded as representing actual written Finnish, but rather as onomastic loans or transcriptions of oral language by more or less monolingual Swedish scribes. This thesis attempts a description and analysis of the Swedish–Finnish language mixture, to see to what extent the embedding of Finnish segments in these Swedish-language charters can be said to reflect scribal proficiency in Finnish or a lack thereof. The thesis relies on theoretical and empirical findings in the fields of code-switching and historical sociolinguistics. To provide a socio-historical context for the linguistic analysis, sociolinguistic conditions in medieval Finland and the textual genre of medieval charters are outlined. The bilingual segments in the data are then described and compared with models of code-switching from modern studies, to see whether their form corresponds to patterns that could be expected of more or less balanced bilinguals. The choice between Swedish and Finnish linguistic variants is also considered in the light of textual and sociolinguistic factors, and a study is made of Finnish grammatical transfer in the scribal Swedish of medieval Finland. Although the scarcity of the medieval data does not allow definite conclusions, the tentative results reveal a language mixture that is mainly well formed, though limited in scope and with some instances of scribal errors that could be due to a lack of proficiency in Finnish. On the other hand, the insertion of Finnish segments shows a stylistic patterning that suggests a linguistic awareness on the part of the scribes, and the choice of Swedish prepositions in certain constructions differs quantitatively from the norm in non-Finnish parts of medieval Sweden, in a way that can partly be attributed to the influence of Finnish locative case semantics. While it is apparent that proficiency levels in Finnish must have varied somewhat among medieval scribes in Finland, the results point to a more or less bilingual proficiency, or at least extensive passive knowledge of Finnish.

This study examines landownership structures and settlement during the Middle Ages in the province of Östergötland in Sweden. It departs from a critical approach to the established view of social structure and property in the Scandinavian medieval society. The investigations are made at two levels. The first level is a cross section of the mid 16th century. This investigation shows that lay aristocrats and ecclesiastical institutions controlled most of the land, especially in the core areas of the parishes. The second level is a detailed investigation at the farm level in six parishes starting from the middle of the 16th century and working retrogresively to the early Middle Ages. This study shows that the landowning structure of the 16th century can be traced back to about AD 1300. For the early Middle Ages reconstructions are made through inheritance successions and genealogies of the aristocratic families. These reconstructions show that, in some parishes, most of the land was probably controlled by a few very rich families or dynasties during the early Middle Ages. The results lead to a question about the Viking Age and medieval society in general. This question is answered in a hypothesis stressing the development of the concept of land ownership in combination with the development of the land tenure system as one of the important factors for reproduction of local power during the Viking Age and early Middle Ages.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

My final thesis, based on study of primary and secondary sources, is focused on the idea of sovereign around 1300 AD. Old-Czech poem Alexandreida and German version Alexander of Ulrich von Etzenbach are used as primary repository of information. Thesis follows both of them and in their comparison shows, how the idea was formulated. Final thesis deals also with works of historians, literary historians and German studies related to its topic. The goal is not an linguistic analysis but to evaluate the poems as an historiographic source, on which we can study medieval notions of rulers and their role in society. Second main task for this final thesis is to reconstruct niveau of bohemian court surrounding King of Bohemia at the end of 13th century, where the poems were originally written. In the end, thesis describes so called "court culture" in the relation to both of Alexandrian poems and their influence in bohemia society.

ČASÁROVÁ V., Church administrative in the region of Turnov in the late Middle Ages, the thesis, The Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague, 2014, 93 s., 4 supp. The thesis is concerned with the development and the state of the church administration in the territory of the deanery of Turnov in the late Middle Ages, primarily after the year 1419 to the end of the fifteenth century. I extended my bachelor's thesis, results of which were used there and they function as a starting point for the further research. I have focused on the structure of the land possession at the particular parish offices and the comparison of the deanery of Turnov with another deaneries. Key words: Turnov, the church administration, the late Middle Ages

Bc. Jiří Vlasák, Deanery of Prácheň in the Late Middle Ages, Diploma Thesis, Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts, 2015 This thesis deals with the church administration of the Prácheň's deanery, chiefly within the Late Middle Ages. It focuses on individual parishes in terms of their patronates, assets background, territorial scope of authority and parish clergy. Moreover, it deals with other types of benefactions of the deanery, yet attention is dedicated to the deanery as a whole, too. Chief historical resources used were official records of the Archidiocese of Prague, primarily books of confirmation and books of erection, and the records of the Prague's consisory. Key words: church administration, Prácheň's deanery, 14th and 15th century, clergy, assets background, territorial scope