Reason, conscience and equity: bishops as the king's judges in later Medieval England

It has long been recognized that many late medieval bishops were heavily involved in secular government. Scholars have tended to characterize these activities in fairly general terms, labelling those who chose to serve the crown as ‘administrators’, ‘bureaucrats’ or ‘civil servants’. In fact, they are better described as king’s judges, for a large part of what bishops did in government was dispensing justice in the king’s name. The first part of this article explores the contexts of this judicial activity, showing that bishops were especially active in institutions such as parliament, chancery and the council which offered justice to the king’s subjects on a discretionary basis. Discretionary justice was closely informed by the precepts of natural law, which in turn derived authority from the abstract notion of the divine will. The second half of the article suggests that the strong theological underpinning of discretionary justice meant that bishops’ involvement in secular government did not stand in opposition to their spiritual vocation or their role as leaders of the church. I argue that the sweeping and rather disparaging contemporary and modern characterizations of ‘civil-servant’ bishops as self-serving careerists ought to be replaced by a more nuanced understanding of the rationale and motivation of those senior clergymen who involved themselves in secular governance

Afterword: three letters

The essays consider issues of affect and emotion in terms of three early English letters - by Chaucer, the Paston family, and Henry VIII - in order to consider issues of the personal and the literary. It also comments on the volume of essays as a whole, and consider the field of the history of emotions and affect studies

A Treatise Proving Scripture to Be the Rule of Faith

The LEME Corpus Manual has an editorial introduction, indexes of subjects, proper names, and chronology, a primary bibliography of LEME corpus texts, as well as English language texts not included in the Corpus, a description of the XML encoding and of lemmatization and source analysis tools. The appendix includes lists of language abbreviations and of abbreviations for parts of speech.Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaCanada Foundation for InnovationUniversity of Toronto LibrariesUniversity of Toronto PressInformation & Instructional Technology, Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toront

The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy

This two-volume work is valuable for both religious and linguistic history. A vernacular text written in a period of division within the Church and widespread popular religious discontent, it provides a record of the arguments that fuelled this division. Reginald Pecock (c.1392–c.1459) recounts the attacks made by Lollard reformers and provides well-composed answers to them. A firm believer in papal supremacy, Pecock insisted on proving doctrine by reason, a position which laid him open to the charges of heresy that dogged his career and eventually led to his disgrace. Editor Charles Babington's introduction to this edition, published in the Rolls Series in 1860, gives biographical and contextual information, and a summary of the works contained within both volumes. In Volume 1, Pecock outlines eleven points of attack and his general answer to them, specifically dealing with vindications of images and pilgrimages, and the revenues of the clergy.</jats:p

The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy

This two-volume work, published in the Rolls Series in 1860, is valuable for both religious and linguistic history. A vernacular text written in a period of division within the Church and widespread popular religious discontent, it provides a record of the arguments that fuelled this division. Reginald Pecock (c.1392–c.1459) recounts the attacks made by Lollard reformers and provides well-composed answers to them. A firm believer in papal supremacy, Pecock insisted on proving doctrine by reason, a position which laid him open to the charges of heresy that dogged his career and eventually led to his disgrace. Volume 2 deals with ranks and degrees of clergy, papal statutes and authority, and religious orders. It also contains related contemporary texts in Latin both attacking and vindicating Pecock and his position. These include John Bury's answer to The Repressor, Gladius Salomonis, and a report of Pecock's eventual downfall and abjuration.</jats:p