This significant and innovative collection explores the changing piety of townspeople and villagers before, during, and after the Reformation. It brings together leading and new scholars from England and the Netherlands to present new research on a subject of importance to historians of society and religion in late medieval and early modern Europe. Contributors examine the diverse evidence for transitions in piety and the processes of these changes. The volume incorporates a range of approaches including social, cultural and religious history, literary and manuscript studies, social anthropology and archaeology. This is, therefore, an interdisciplinary volume that constitutes a cultural history of changing pieties in the period c. 1400-1640. Contributors focus on a number of specific themes using a range of types of evidence and theoretical approach.

Winner of the Medieval Academy of America's 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize!

For centuries, the relation between lay piety and academic theology has determined the faith of lay people as well as developments in theology, and influenced daily life as well as scholarly discussions. In this book an international and multidisciplinary panel of specialists, covering the fields of church history, history of literature, music history, book history, and art history reflects on a broad range of research topics, providing a fascinating and refreshing view on what this relation has been throughout the centuries. Christoph Burger has given a major impulse to the research into the history of theology, notably the issue of adapting academic theology for lay people. The contributions to this Festschrift reflect this broad spectrum of correlations between learned theology and lay piety from the Early Church period until modern times. The book contains contributions to the research on lay piety as well as academic theology in the Middle Ages, Reformation, and the modern period, as well as their representations in such media as printed books and woodcuts. The result is a truly epoch-transcending and interdisciplinary volume.

The true importance of cathedrals during the Anglo-Norman period is here brought out, through an examination of the most important aspects of their history. Cathedrals dominated the ecclesiastical (and physical) landscape of the British Isles and Normandy in the middle ages; yet, in comparison with the history of monasteries, theirs has received significantly less attention. This volume helps to redress the balance by examining major themes in their development between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. These include the composition, life, corporate identity and memory of cathedral communities; the relationships, sometimes supportive, sometimes conflicting, that they had with kings (e.g. King John), aristocracies, and neighbouring urban and religious communities; the importance of cathedrals as centres of lordship and patronage; their role in promoting and utilizing saints' cults (e.g. that of St Thomas Becket); episcopal relations; and the involvement of cathedrals in religious and political conflicts, and in the settlement of disputes. A critical introduction locates medieval cathedrals in space and time, and against a backdrop of wider ecclesiastical change in the period. Contributors: Paul Dalton, Charles Insley, Louise J. Wilkinson, Ann Williams, C.P. Lewis, RichardAllen, John Reuben Davies, Thomas Roche, Stephen Marritt, Michael Staunton, Sheila Sweetinburgh, Paul Webster, Nicholas Vincent

Challenging the view that England's monasteries and mendicant convents fell into a headlong decline long before Henry VIII set about destroying them at the Dissolution, these essays offer a reassessment of the religious orders on the eve of the Reformation.