The study of pastoral care in the middle ages has seen a resurgence in recent years. Scholars are now approaching this subject less from their respective ecclesiastical or parochial biases and more out of an effort to understand the significant role pastors (secular and religious) had in the shaping of medieval society at large. This book explores some of the new ways scholars are approaching this topic. Using a variety of sources and disciplinary angles: theology, preaching, catechesis, confessional literature, visitation records, monastic cartularies and the like, these studies show the many and varied ways in which pastoral care came to play such an important role in the day to day lives of medieval people. Contributors include: C. Colt Anderson, Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Beth Allison Barr, Sabrina Corbellini, Alexandra da Costa, Laura Michele Diener, William Dohar, James Ginther, Joe Goering, Ann M. Hutchison, Greg Peters, C. Matthew Phillips, Andrew Reeves, Ronald J. Stansbury, Susan M.B. Steuer, Mathilde van Dijk, and Anne T. Thayer.

Examines how thirteenth-century clergymen used pastoral care - preaching, sacraments and confession - to increase their parishioners' religious knowledge, devotion and expectations.

During the Middle Ages, many occult rituals and beliefs existed and were practiced alongside those officially sanctioned by the church. While educated clergy condemned some of these as magic, many of these practices involved religious language, rituals, or objects. For instance, charms recited to cure illnesses invoked God and the saints, and love spells used consecrated substances such as the Eucharist. Magic and Religion in Medieval England explores the entanglement of magical practices and the clergy during the Middle Ages, uncovering how churchmen decided which of these practices to deem acceptable and examining the ways they persuaded others to adopt their views. Covering the period from 1215 to the Reformation, Catherine Rider traces the change in the church’s attitude to vernacular forms of magic. She shows how this period brought the clergy more closely into contact with unofficial religious practices than ever before, and how this proximity prompted them to draw up precise guidelines on distinguishing magic from legitimate religion. Revealing the necessity of improving clerical education and the pastoral care of the laity, Magic and Religion in Medieval England provides a fascinating picture of religious life during this period.

New essays on the burgeoning of pastoral and devotional literature in medieval England.

Pastoral Care, or The Book of the Pastoral Rule, is a treatise on the responsibilities of the clergy written by Pope Gregory I in which he contrasted the role of bishops as pastors of their flock with their position as nobles of the church: the definitive statement of the nature of the episcopal office. Gregory enjoined parish priests to possess strict personal, intellectual and moral standards which were considered, in certain quarters, to be unrealistic and beyond ordinary capacities. The influence of the book, however, was vast and became one of the most influential works on the topic ever written. It was translated and distributed to every bishop within the Byzantine Empire.

In her ground-breaking new study, Katie Bugyis offers a new history of communities of Benedictine nuns in England from 900 to 1225. By applying innovative paleographical, codicological, and textual analyses to their surviving liturgical books, Bugyis recovers a treasure trove of unexamined evidence for understanding these women's lives and the liturgical and pastoral ministries they performed. She examines the duties and responsibilities of their chief monastic officers--abbesses, prioresses, cantors, and sacristans--highlighting three of the ministries vital to their practice-liturgically reading the gospel, hearing confessions, and offering intercessory prayers for others. Where previous scholarship has argued that the various reforms of the central Middle Ages effectively relegated nuns to complete dependency on the sacramental ministrations of priests, Bugyis shows that, in fact, these women continued to exercise primary control over their spiritual care. Essential to this argument is the discovery that the production of the liturgical books used in these communities was carried out by female scribes, copyists, correctors, and creators of texts, attesting to the agency and creativity that nuns exercised in the care they extended to themselves and those who sought their hospitality, counsel, instruction, healing, forgiveness, and intercession.

A close examination of religious texts illuminates the way in which parish priests dealt with their female parishioners in the middle ages.

Fresh perspectives on the English clergy, their books, and the wider Anglo-Saxon church.

Pastoral Care, the religious mission of the Church to minister to the laity and care for their spiritual welfare, has been a subject of growing interest in medieval studies. This volume breaks new ground with its broad chronological scope (from the early eleventh to the late fifteenth centuries), and its interdisciplinary breadth. New and established scholars from a range of disciplines, including history, literary studies, art history and musicology, bring their specialist perspectives to bear on textual and visual source materials. The varied contributions include discussions of politics, ecclesiology, book history, theology and patronage, forming a series of conversations that reveal both continuities and divergences across time and media, and exemplify the enriching effects of interdisciplinary work upon our understanding of this important topic.

The role of pastoral care reconsidered in the context of major changes within the Anglo-Saxon church. The tenth and eleventh centuries saw a number of very significant developments in the history of the English Church, perhaps the most important being the proliferation of local churches, which were to be the basis of the modern parochial system. Using evidence from homilies, canon law, saints' lives, and liturgical and penitential sources, the articles collected in this volume focus on the ways in which such developments were reflected in pastoral care, considering what it consisted of at this time, how it was provided and by whom. Starting with an investigation of the secular clergy, their recruitment and patronage, the papers move on to examine a variety of aspects of late Anglo-Saxon pastoral care, including church due payments, preaching, baptism, penance, confession, visitation of the sick and archaeological evidence of burial practice. Special attention is paid to the few surviving manuscripts which are likely to have been used in the field and the evidence they provide for the context, the actions and the verbal exchanges which characterised pastoral provisions.