Author : Marie-Madeleine de Cevins
Publisher : Brepols Publishers
ISBN 13 : 9782503578712
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (787 download)
Book Synopsis Confraternity, Mendicant Orders, and Salvation in the Middle Ages by : Marie-Madeleine de Cevins
Download or read book Confraternity, Mendicant Orders, and Salvation in the Middle Ages written by Marie-Madeleine de Cevins and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the late Middle Ages, mendicant spiritual confraternities had developed a bad reputation. Their spiritual status was ill-identified: somewhere between requests for intercession, necrological commemoration, and pious associations. In the hands of the mendicants, they seemed to resemble what indulgences had become in the hands of the bishops and the papacy: a bait handed out to extort funds from the faithful while offering an apparently immediate access to Paradise. Thus, like indulgences, they seem to have been gradually emptied of their substance and denounced (even before Luther) as glaring evidence of the corruption of the Roman Church. Much recent scholarship has followed this negative portrait of spiritual confraternities--unless it has conflated them with other non-spiritual confraternities, or indeed ignored them altogether. This volume draws on the abundant number of letters of confraternity available from Hungarian sources in order to provide a more nuanced picture of mendicant spiritual confraternities. It sheds new light on the links between the mendicants and their supports among the laity, and emphasises the broader significance of the confraternity movement in late medieval piety in Central Europe and beyond.