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Fourteenth Warwick Symposium on Parish Research
University of Warwick, Humanities Building, Saturday 7 May 2016
‘Reflecting the Parish’ – ABSTRACTS
‘Out of a Christian dewtie’:
Child care and parish networks in seventeenth-century Scotland
Chris Langley (Newman University, Birmingham)
The position of the parish in providing for poor members of its congregations is a central component in our understandings of social and religious change across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Scotland, despite the lack of a statutory system of relief like England, the comprehensive system of church courts that crisscrossed the nation provided a locus of charitable payments to the young, disabled and ill. In tandem with a variety of local hospitals and charitable foundations, kirk sessions and presbyteries provided both ad hoc and more permanent forms of support.
Once individuals in receipt of these charitable payments disappear from the alms roll, however, we have difficulty assessing how these networks actually operated. Using material created by parish church courts (kirk sessions), this paper explores the manner in which child care networks in particular operated and how they interacted with ideals of pastoral care and local ecclesiastical discipline. The resulting system was far more flexible than we have hitherto appreciated: blurring the boundaries between informal and formal care. Indeed, rather than formal charity removing the need for voluntary aid, it is quite clear that the Kirk’s role was far less ‘top down’ and more about co-option and local knowledge.
“noþing ells but kepe riȝt mesure”:
Cultivating moderation in eating and drinking for the community in the Book of Vices and Virtues
Sunyoung Lee (Arizona State University)
The difficulty of differentiating appetite from gluttonous desire was emphasized in late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century vernacular didactic literature as the necessity of eating and drinking was taken more seriously into consideration in scholastic thinking on moderation. This chapter will investigate how vernacular penitential manuals acknowledge and cultivate the parishioner’s sense of discretion and ability to create his or her own theology of consumption for the parish community. In particular, this paper focuses on the discussion of gluttony in the Book of Vices and Virtues, a fourteenth-century Midland translation of the Somme le Roi. The Book expounds on Pope Gregory I’s five modes of gluttony, embracing Gregory’s idea of gluttony as corporeal temptation in general, which demands one undertake serious scrutiny in order not to be beguiled by desire disguised as necessity. However, the concerns about the individual’s discretion in eating and drinking are amplified in the Book of Vices and Virtues. The Book warns that the virtue of discretion can be threatened gravely if parishioners do not comply with ecclesiastical rules – some parishioners even scorn restrictions imposed by the church and attract other parishioners to their own ascetic practices! The Book casts doubt on the reliability of the unregulated practice of eating and fasting and reduces its public confidence. “Mesure” or moderation, nevertheless, cannot be easily achieved by simply observing existing regulations since gluttony is not only a problem of exceeding the measure of moderation, as Gregory instructs, but also a problem of adopting the wrong standards of measure. The individual would be well advised to figure out the right measures by contemplating various modes of eating and drinking in the community.
The concept of “mesure” becomes important to characterize gluttony in the Book of Vices and Virtues, underlining the malleable nature of the measure of moderation. The measurement metaphor is used to explain how parishioners maintain different standards of measure and allow them to control their life. The Book exhorts parishioners to reflect if they have a consistent measure to quantify their appetites and to avoid unsatisfactory or double standards of measure. Not all measurement techniques invite reason and grace and bring about “right” moderation. Moderation, therefore, does not simply amount to escaping excessive consumption or suppressing one’s appetite by abiding by rules, but seeking actively adequate ways of measuring desire in the community. In this sense, the Book actively engages parishioners in examining their eating and drinking habits and encourages the individual to develop self-awareness and communal knowledge to distinguish the right ways of moderation from the wrong ways of moderation beyond the ecclesiastical rules.
Parish registers and religious communities in south Germany
Eva Marie Lehner (Universität Duisburg-Essen)
The parish register is an early modern innovation: German administrations developed a new form and method of recording people in the 16th century during the reformation. Every person in a parish could be and should be registered in written form by the documentation of baptisms, marriages and burials in a book scribed by the clergy. The act of writing was also important for the pastoral care, especially for the spiritual and emotional guidance of the parishioners by the local ministers. Until now my research has focused on the administrative registration, now I want to find out more about the narrating of religious (confessional) communities and identities in the registers.
In my paper I aim to examine more closely the interplay between writing and constructing a religious (confessional) community in the registers. For example during plague or war the mortality rate increased dramatically and a parish could have lost half of its people. In these times, the narrating of burials also changed in the books, for example into column of numbers. What impact did the narrating of death on the religious (confessional) identity of a parish have? Another aspect is the pastoral care in time of death: A challenge for the clergies was the registration of stillborn and non-baptized infants, because their salvations were uncertain and debatable – at that time even for Protestants. What we can see here is that children and even very young children were recognized as members of the family, the neighbourhood, the religious community, the parish. But also the control of marriages was part of the pastoral care and part of managing the religious community. We find a lot of different forms of writing about illegitimate birth and premarital relationships, the writers had to include in the books. The same goes for writing down and including the lives of executed outlaws and “lost souls.”
An important function of the parish register was the fixation of these things during time. My argument is, that this form of making things official, permanent, memorable had an impact on shaping the religious communities and identities. The open question is, if there were confessional differences.
The Manor and the Parish:
Local organisation in the sixteenth century through the example of the Blount family
Elizabeth Norton (King’s College, London)
The sixteenth century is often considered a time of change in relation to local organisation in England, with the importance of the parish and village seen to increase and that of the manor to decline. The evidence of the Blount family, who held several manors in the West Midlands in the period, suggests that such a position was not universal, with the manor, village and parish all functioning as important units of local government and the setting for social relationships in the period as, indeed, they had done in the medieval period. The paper will suggest that this key relationship was capable of being sustained well into the post-Reformation period.
The paper will focus on the Blount family, who held land in Shropshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire and Oxfordshire in the period. By using manorial records, parish registers and documents, surviving wills and correspondence, it is possible to carry out a comprehensive review of life on the various Blount family manors. In particular, the manors of Earnwood, Kinlet and Highley, which lay within the geographical areas of the parishes (and also the villages) of Kinlet and Highley in Shropshire will be considered in detail, looking particularly at the way that the manors were administered and how the residents of the parish viewed the manorial and parish boundaries. Other Blount family manors, including Knightley in Staffordshire, which was part of the large parish of Gnossal, will also be considered, as well as Mapledurham and Deddington in Oxfordshire.
The paper will argue that the manor continued to flourish as a defining feature of local society in the Blount lands, and that the Blount family retained its deep roots within the social structure of the parish as well as maintaining its role in local government. It will challenge the idea that the parish grew to be the local unit of central importance in the sixteenth century at the expense of the manor while, at the same time, ideas about the way such units were structured will also be re-evaluated. It is intended to show that the complexities of local society – both economically and socially – were such that it is impossible to generalise and that, in many cases, the manor continued to function and prosper as a unit distinct from the parish in the period. In the case of the Blounts, the recusant culture of the manor was even able to overlay the loyalties of the post-Reformation parish.
In the Nave with Chaucer
Ellen K. Rentz, Claremont McKenna College
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is full of religious imagery and references to scripture, liturgy, and ritual practice. From the sins of the Pardoner to the perfection of St. Cecelia, Chaucer offers up a broad spectrum of devotional experience. Even so, until fairly recently, scholars working on late medieval religious culture have tended to look elsewhere. I’ve called this essay “In the Nave with Chaucer” because I want to think about what Chaucer does with the parish – not just how he reflects it, but how he uses it, and how he uses it as a way of experimenting with the literary. It’s not unusual to think of the Canterbury Tales as experimental, of course. A veritable encyclopedia of genres and poetic forms, it offers up the broadest swathe of speakers, voices, and styles that English readers had ever encountered. It was as much a social experiment as it was a literary one. And the parish (by which I mean its personnel, its material spaces, and its practices) was part of it. When Chaucer is “in the nave,” so to speak, he is actively teaching his audience how to interpret texts – in effect, how to read. I begin with the Squire’s Tale, where Chaucer forges an unusual link between the simile and the transi tomb in order to explore the complexity of both human behavior and poetic form. Turning to the General Prologue and the Miller’s Tale, I consider Chaucer’s methods of portraiture in relation to penitential discourse and the pastoral criteria outlined in Canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council. What does it mean to read people in the nave, and what does it mean to read people in poetry? And what happens to the parish when it comes into contact with different genres, particularly the fabliau? I end with the Parson’s Tale – in some ways the most nave-oriented moment in the Canterbury Tales, and yet also the point at which we find ourselves at the furthest remove from the parish. To what extent does the parish —or lack thereof—become a staging ground for the larger questions about reading, interpretation, and genre that inform and frame the collection as whole?
Perceptions and Expectations of the Elizabethan Clergy Wife:
Evidence from within the parish
Anne Thompson (University of Warwick)
There was no job description for the newly-created role of minister’s wife in the reign of Elizabeth. Reformers had been more concerned with advancing the doctrinal arguments in favour of clerical marriage than with defining the characteristics of the ideal clergy wife or the responsibilities that she should undertake. Although Elizabethan clergy wives have left only a faint a trace in the historical record, engagement with extensive archival material allows us to identify the emergence of a parochial understanding of how a minister’s wife should behave. We can also begin to appreciate the agency of the women themselves in the advent and evolution of a role which complemented their husbands’ calling. Women who have hitherto been defined by their supposed obscurity and unsuitability can be seen to have anticipated and exhibited the character, virtues and duties associated with the archetypal clergy wife of later centuries.
The Gotlandic Parish:
Concepts of identity and social differentiation
Jörg Widmaier (Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen)
The paper focuses on the form and function of the parish as a social entity and a differentiated identity concept on the isle of medieval Gotland. In doing so, the paper stresses the phenomena of the dynamic and stability of the parish system in time course. Points of departure are the written sources – like country laws and Sagas – that do transport a certain idea of social identity produced, expressed and transported via the membership to a parish community. The specific data of the written sources of gotlandic origin points out, that the formation of a parish community was strongly connected to the building and mentaining of a parish church as the spatial, cultural, juristical and symbolic center of the social realm. The GutaLag – the Law of the Gotlanders from the 13th century – therefore sets down, that the membership to a certain Parish is verified in court situation by a proof of the contribution to the building of the parish church. On the material level, inscriptions in churches hence record different layers of participation – from donating whole building parts to the supply with ox for the transport of building materials to the building side of the church. Both the written sources like law texts and the material sources like church buildings so do demonstrate the strong interdependence between the parish identity on one side and the building process and the upkeep of the parish church on the other. Based on these interdependencies a study of the church buildings, its material development and its religious features reveals the dynamics and rise of social identities and concepts. In diachronic perspective the 95 rural churches on Gotland thus represent a unique source material for studying rural communities from the 11th until the 18th century.