Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

During the medieval period, a single institutionalized Church oversaw the spiritual welfare of most of the men and women in Western Europe: it was only at the Reformation that Christians in Western Europe came to be offered a choice of institutionalized faiths. Viewed from this perspective, the period appears one in which Christians were exposed to a single source of religious truth. In fact, inside the ‘ark’ of the Church, they were exposed to many such sources: the Bible, which told them the history of their faith and the moral tenets to which they should adhere; the interpretations, or ‘exegesis’, of the Bible that had been produced, in Latin, by the Fathers of the Church, and that continued to be produced by scholars in the medieval period itself; the doctrines formulated by the head of the Church, the Pope, and his prelates; perhaps God himself, who might communicate directly, if often obscurely, with a chosen individual. In the first ‘passus’ of his great late fourteenth-century dream vision poem Piers Plowman, William Langland famously has the personified figure of Holy Church tell the dreamer-narrator that the best way to save his soul is through Truth: “‘Whan alle tresors arn tried,‘” quod she, “Treuthe is the beste”’ (ed. Schmidt 1987: I.85). But what Holy Church means by ‘Treuthe’, equally famously, is many things: God, Scripture, the virtue of honesty (for example).Sometimes, ... log in or subscribe to read full text