Visions in Late Medieval England: Lay Spirituality and by Gwenfair Walters Adams
By Gwenfair Walters Adams
Visions have been hugely well known within the past due heart a long time, even if preached as brilliant tales from the pulpit, illuminated in saint-filled manuscripts, or skilled in the course of the breathless anticipation of a Mass or eerie darkness of a Yorkshire graveyard. This quantity is the 1st to map out the big variety of imaginative and prescient forms in overdue medieval English lay piety. interpreting one thousand visionary money owed accrued from sermon and exempla collections, non secular devotional works, saints' legends, and lay tales, it explores 5 significant dynamics of spirituality that visions formed and sustained: Transactions of pride (visits to and from purgatory and hell), Reciprocated Devotion (visitations of the saints), non secular struggle (attacks by means of demons), Supra-Sacramental Sight (Mass and keenness sightings), and Mediated Revelation (prophetic visions).
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Extra resources for Visions in Late Medieval England: Lay Spirituality and Sacred Glimpses of the Hidden Worlds of Faith (Studies in the History of Christian Thought)
Sample text
Apart from the vision, there was no way of confirming that warnings about eternal sanctions were indeed legitimate. Like testimonials and photographs in travel brochures, the visions associated with the underworld offered a form of evidence, which although not incontrovertible, was the most forceful form of proof available that prayers for the dead, the sacrament of penance, and the medieval standards of morality were accurate. ‘Ghost’ The first category of Satisfaction–Transaction visions we will examine is that of ghosts.
371. , p. 365. , pp. 365–366. 32 33 28 chapter one Warnings against ecclesial violations A third way in which visions of ghosts supported the Theory of Satisfaction was through providing warnings against the very sins which were, of course, what made satisfaction necessary in the first place. This was true of the minority of the didactic visions of purgatorial revenants in which the ghosts were not returning to ask for aid. Instead of being told in order to foster help for the dead, these accounts served as warnings to listeners.
199; JW, p. 64. As Finucane indicates, by the Late Middle Ages, the “once-dreaded sentence of excommunication could be reversed after death” (Appearances, p. 63). 42 BA, p. 371. , p. 372. 40 41 30 chapter one The fact that the stories were handed down by monks and recorded by one was not sufficient reason for their pro-clerical slant. Nor did the fact that one of the ghosts was a canon obviate the message of the visions that crime against the Church did not pay. Both visions appear to have happened to laypeople and thus initially to have been reported by them.