Pragmatic Utopias: Ideals and Communities, 1200–1630

by Edited by Rosemary Horrox , Sarah Rees Jones

• ISBN13: 9780521187374
• ISBN10: 0521187370
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-02-17
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This 2001 collection of essays was presented to Barrie Dobson in celebration of his 70th birthday. It will be welcomed by all scholars of pre-modern religion and society. Spanning the artificial divide between medieval and early modern, the contributors - all acknowledged experts in their field - pursue the ways in which men and women tried to put their ideals into practice, sometimes alone, but more commonly in the shared environment of cloister, college or city. The range of topics is testimony to the breadth of Barrie Dobson's own interests, but even more striking are the continuities and shared assumptions across time, and between the dissident and the impeccably orthodox. Taking the reader from a rural anchor-hold to the London of Thomas More, and from the greenwood of Robin Hood to the central law courts, this collection builds into a richly satisfying exploration of the search for perfection in an imperfect world.

Table of Contents

Preface

Richard Barrie Dobson: an appreciation

'If heaven be on this earth, is it in cloister or in school': the monastic ideal in later medieval English literature

The 'chariot of Aminadab' and the Yorkshire priory of Swine

'Godliness and good learning': ideals and imagination in medieval university and college foundations

Hugh of Balsham, bishop of Ely 1256/7-1286

A cruel necessity? Christ's and St John's, two Cambridge re-foundations

Coventry's 'Lollard' programme of 1492 and the making of Utopia

Thomas More's Utopia and medieval London Sarah

Social exclusivity or justice for all? Access to justice in fourteenth-century England

Idealising criminality: Robin Hood in the fifteenth century

Fat Christian and Old Peter: ideals and compromises among the medieval Waldensians

Imageless devotion: what kind of an ideal?

An English anchorite: the making, unmaking and remaking of Christine Carpenter

Victorian values in fifteenth-century England: the Ewelme almshouse statutes

Puritanism and the poor

Realising a Utopian dream: the transformation of the clergy in the diocese of York, 1500-1630

Bibliography of Barrie Dobson's published works

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