Pragmatic Utopias: Ideals and Communities, 1200–1630

by Edited by Rosemary Horrox , Sarah Rees Jones

• ISBN13: 9780521650601
• ISBN10: 0521650607
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-01-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This collection of essays is presented to Barrie Dobson in celebration of his 70th birthday, and 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	vii
Rosemary Horrox
List of abbreviations	ix
Richard Barrie Dobson: an appreciation	1	(10)
John Taylor
`If heaven be on this earth, it is in cloister or in school': the monastic ideal in later medieval English literature	11	(15)
Derek Pearsall
The `Chariot of Aminadab' and the Yorkshire priory of Swine	26	(17)
Janet Burton
Godliness and good learning: ideals and imagination in medieval university and college foundations	43	(17)
R. N. Swanson
Hugh of Balsham, bishop of Ely 1256/7-1286	60	(24)
Roger Lovatt
A cruel necessity? Christ's and St John's, two Cambridge refoundations	84	(13)
Malcolm G. Underwood
Coventry's `Lollard' programme of1492 and the making of Utopia	97	(20)
P. J. P. Goldberg
Thomas More's Utopia and medieval London	117	(19)
Sarah Rees Jones
Social exclusivity or justice for all? Access to justice in fourteenth-century England	136
Anthony Musson
Idealising criminality: Robin Hood in the fifteenth century	56	(118)
A. J. Pollard
Fat Christian and Old Peter: ideals and compromises among the medieval Waldensians	174	(14)
Peter Biller
Imageless devotion: what kind of an ideal?	188	(16)
Margaret Aston
An English anchorite: the making, unmaking and remaking of Christine Carpenter	204	(20)
Miri Rubin
Victorian values in fifteenth-century England: the Ewelme almshouse statutes	224	(18)
Colin Richmond
Puritanism and the poor	242	(17)
Patrick Collinson
Realising a utopian dream: the transformation of the clergy in the diocese of York, 1500-1630	259	(18)
Claire Cross
Bibliography of Barrie Dobson's published works	277	(4)
Index	281