Texts in Context:
The Dowry of Our Lady
By Gabriel Blanchard
At the same time as a high tide of mysticism in England, the synthesis of Christendom was collapsing, thanks in part to its founder, the papacy.
A Pope Neither Urbane Nor Clement
Europe’s woes in the Late Middle Ages were not confined to war and plague. From 1378 until 1417, half of Europe was deluded by an antipope (a false claimant to the papacy) enthroned in Rome. By an extraordinary coincidence, the other half of Europe was also subject to an antipope at the same time, ensconced in Avignon. There was really nothing coincidental here, of course; which was the antipope depended on whom you asked. It is easier to explain from the beginning.
In 1377, St. Catherine of Siena had persuaded Pope Gregory XI to return the Holy See to its proper city, rather than reigning from Avignon—which, besides amounting to His Holiness’s chateau on the French Riviera (something many people felt was in questionable taste for the successor of St. “silver and gold have I none” Peter), was painfully on the nose regarding at whose political beckon call1 the papacy stood. But His Holiness died the next year, and Urban VI was elected.
Unluckily, Urban VI was himself one of these “popes probably shouldn’t own chateaux on the French Riviera” chaps; worse still, he was an “other bishops probably shouldn’t either” chap. Moreover, he lacked the gentleness, patience, tact, and subtlety that even a minor world leader needs. In a matter of months, he had offended such a large number of cardinals that the French contingent (then a significant majority) had gathered outside Rome, declared Urban’s election invalid due to pressure from the people of Rome, and proceeded to elect a new pontiff, Clement VII. Clement naturally resumed the practice of reigning from Avignon, as if for the express purpose of making the political motives of the schism obvious.2 Yet still, Urban did little to aid matters by growing increasingly rash, dictatorial, and paranoid. He was said by enemies at the time to have gone mad, and it is not impossible; he even reached the unprecedented low of having bishops who were not only on his side, but had been for a while imprisoned with him, tortured and executed for disloyalty.
A Game of Sees
Along with the Papal States, the Holy Roman Emperor (and so theoretically his empire, though in practice there were many local exceptions and one large, conspicuous one we’ll come back to shortly) recognized the Roman claim. So too did the kingdoms of England, Hungary, Ireland, and Portugal, the three crowns of the Kalmar Union, the Teutonic Order state on the Baltic coast, the leading Italian city-states of Florence, Genoa, and Venice, and the Catholic parts of Lithuania and Poland.3 The Aragonese, Bohemian, Breton, Castilian, Cypriot, French, Navarrese, Neapolitan, Provençal,4 Scottish, and Sicilian realms, on the other hand, were all obedient to Avignon.
A situation so ridiculous obviously needed to be made worse. To meet this need, a compromise papacy was set up in Pisa in 1409, and, as anyone could have foreseen with any thought whatsoever, this simply resulted in its being a three-way schism instead of a two-way schism. The English, French, Hungarians, Irish, Lithuanians, Poles, Portuguese, Teutons, and Scandinavians all peeled off to the Pisan obedience, while everyone else did what they’d been doing before—giving us, e.g., the somewhat hilarious spectacle of Aragon remaining loyal to the Avignonese pope, whom it first recognized due to French influence, while France recognized the claimant at Pisa. And then Hungary, Poland, and Portugal switched back to the Roman obedience when … oh, never mind. Explaining won’t help.
The rift was finally healed at the Council of Constance (1414-1418). However, like the large and significant exception in the Empire’s loyalty to the Roman lineage, we’ll be picking that up again in a moment.
Schism in Latin Christendom; wars in the Baltic, in Castile, in England, in Flanders, in Gascony, in Romagna, in Scotland, in Tuscany, in Wales; the Black Death over all Eurasia. Small wonder, maybe, that for some people in the Late Middle Ages, the only clear way out … was up.
The Anglian Anchoress
The fourteenth century saw a great flowering of mysticism in England. It is exemplified in figures like Richard Rolle (c. 1300-1349), a hermit who wrote vernacular commentaries on Psalms and parts of Job, along with many other works; in Walter Hylton (c. 1340-1396), an Augustinian priest who encouraged laity not to wait until they could become monks or nuns to pursue holiness; and in Margery Kempe (c. 1373-c. 1440), a housewife who had visions of Christ and was inspired to wailing outbursts of tears, rendering her a frequent public nuisance. Though tried repeatedly for heresy, Kempe was never condemned, and earnestly sought the advice of more traditional religious and of clergy. English Catholic mysticism reaches its arguable zenith in an anonymous fourteenth-century master: the author of The Cloude of Unknowynge, a brilliant example of “negative theology,”5 and perhaps also of the Devout Treatise of Discerning of Spirits, Very Necessary for Ghostly Livers (i.e., practitioners of the spiritual life). This was part of a general period of lively interest in religion; not everyone was a contemplative, but almost anyone might be. It is no accident that, though some of the tales are bawdy or ridicule corrupt clergy, Chaucer‘s most famous book is about a group of pilgrims on their way to the grave of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury.
He shewed me a little þing, the quantitie of a hasel-nutt, lying in þe palme of my hand, as meseemed; and it was as round as a ball. I looked þeron ... and þought: What may þis be? And it was answered generallie þus: It is all þat is made. I maruelled how it might last: for meþought it might sodenlie have fallen to naught for litlenes. And I was answered in my understanding, It lasteþ, and euer shall: for God loueþ it. And so haþ all þing being by þe loue of God.
Dame6 Julian of Norwich is the most celebrated petal of this flower. Her Revelation of Divine Love records a series of visions she had during an illness in May of 1373, around the age of thirty, after which she became an anchoress—a type of female hermit, often immured in a cell built into the wall of a church. (Hers was built into Norwich’s Church of St. Julian, from which she takes the name “Julian.” Her own name is unknown; in other words, she was good at being an anchoress!) Even in her own day, Julian was recognized as an insightful counselor; Kempe came to her for advice and encouragement. Her “shewings” themselves are, in some ways, common Medieval devotional fare: visions of Christ’s Passion, the Mother of God, and so on. Yet the meaning she took from them is far from common. It is at times rather shocking. Julian is often classified as a universalist, and may have been; certainly, she says that while hell is quite real, she “saw no hell but sin”; and it is in relation to sin that, as she said, the Lord told her that
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of þing shall be well.” Þese words were said full tenderly, showing no manner of blame to me nor to any þat shall be saued. Þen were it a great unkindness to blame or wonder on God for my sin, since He blameþ not me for sin. And in þese words I saw a maruellous high mystery hid in God, which mystery He shall openly make known to us in Heauen: … we shall uerily see þe cause why He suffered sin to come. In which sight we shall endlessly joy in our Lord God.*
Caustic Clergy
Late Medieval England was so aflush with contemplatives and shrines of pilgrimage as to earn it the nickname “the dowry of Our Lady.” But not all Englishmen were happy with the Church—small wonder, this. Besides the sorry spectacle of divisions wracking Christendom (of which antipopes might be the worst, but were not the sole, example), financial and moral corruption were rampant. It would be misleading to call the orthodox “wing” of the apostolic poverty movement a failure; yet it did not accomplish its purifying purpose, or if it did, the achievement was short-lived. As for its heretical wing, the Waldenses of Occitania persisted: Broadly speaking, they were for knowledge of the Bible in the vernacular and against ritualism, hierarchy, wealth, and violence. (A tiny number of them still exist.) And there were other preachers here and there, especially in the wake of the Black Death, who saw in catastrophe God’s judgment not just in general, but specially upon the formalist, hypocritical, opulent Church.
In no one was this souring upon the Church more famously evident than in the priest, scholar, and pamphleteer John Wycliffe (who had gotten to know a pair of Waldenses at Oxford a couple of years before receiving his degree). He blamed the woes of his day on the corruption of the Church, and that corruption on her wealth. He advocated poverty not only for mendicants, who were specially dedicated to it, but for all priests, as well as the translation of the Bible into the vernacular. With time, his critiques became more strident—and, curiously, took a nationalist turn, not only rejecting the papacy and but calling for the Church to be subjected to the governance of the state. Official criticisms, warnings, and explicit condemnations of several theological ideas in his writings did not deter Wycliffe. He lost much support when he denounced transubstantiation in 1380; and though he opposed it himself, Wycliffites were among the spiritual leaders of the abortive Peasants’ Revolt the following year. But, while several of his doctrines were vehemently condemned, he was never excommunicated; though summoned to Rome7 in 1383 for examination, he was excused from the journey due to a stroke, and died the following year.
A thin but definite thread linked England and Bohemia, then a constituent sub-realm of the Holy Roman Empire (and an important one, since the kings of Bohemia were among the imperial electors8). Its capital, Prague, had a recognized9 university from 1347, equal in official dignity and intellectual vigor to Cambridge and Oxford; moreover, though they had no children, Richard II of England’s queen was Anne of Bohemia, who overcame a quite unfair popular prejudice against her by both her piety and her persistent intercession with the king for the people. (Her death of plague in 1396 devastated Richard, and is thought to have contributed to his eventual overthrow in 1399.) The modern meaning of “bohemian” owes something to the medieval nation, which long had a touch of the avant-garde; and before and after Wycliffe’s death, his writings made their way to Prague.
There they were read by another Catholic priest with a deep-seated loathing for corruption, a man called Jan Hus, who lived from about 1369 to 6th July, 1415. Sharp readers may notice that that’s not long after the opening of the Council of Constance, where the papal schism was resolved. They may also be struck by the great precision of the latter date. Thereby, gentle reader, hangs a tale.
*NOTES. Middle English is easily recognizable as English, but shifts in spelling and word meanings can make it tricky. Here the spelling has been simplified, save that þ (thorn) for th has been kept and that u and v are not distinguished. (Originally these were one letter—V as a capital, u in lower-case—pronounced as a vowel or consonant based on context, as j has different values in jar and hallelujah.) Most oddities of spelling or vocabulary are below except uses of Þ/þ in place of Th/th.
· euer—ever
· Heauen—Heaven
· litlenes—littleness: insignificance, insubstantial-ness
· loueth—loveth
· maruelled, maruellous—marveled, marvelous
· saued—saved
· sodenlie—suddenly
· uerily—verily: truly, assuredly
· unkindness—disloyalty, faithlessness
1Often misinterpreted as “beck and call,” beckon call is the correct idiom. The beckon is the hand gesture in which the palm is upturned, usually with the three other fingers under the thumb, and the index alternately extended and retracted in a hook shape. As this is commonly used to summon children, it is widely seen as rude in other contexts—in some cultures it is an extreme insult. To have someone “at one’s beckon call” is thus nearly the same as the idiom of having a person “wrapped around one’s finger.”
2The Roman lineage is now recognized as valid, which is hard to dispute: The French cardinals’ claims, even if true, would not have entitled them to declare themselves a quorum able to elect a new pontiff.
3Lithuania was then a sizable land power, encompassing modern Lithuania and Belarus plus parts of Russia; moreover, it was in personal union with Poland (i.e., one person was both King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, though the two countries remained legally distinct).
4Aragonese, Cypriot, Navarrese, Neapolitan, Breton, and Provençal correspond to the Kingdoms of Aragon, Cyprus, Navarre, and Naples (whose original name was Neapolis), the Duchy of Brittany, and the County of Provence, respectively.
5Negative or apophatic theology is a way of thinking about the divine in terms of what it is not, accenting its transcendence and incomprehensibility: e.g., the Christian idea that God is “without body, parts, or passions” (apart from the Incarnation) is a basic piece of apophatic theology.
6Dame is the feminine equivalent of Sir among British honorifics (from the Lat. domina, “mistress, lady of the house”), used because Julian has never been canonized. This is not due to distrust of her theology—on the contrary, she is quoted as an authority in the Catholic Catechism; rather, almost nothing is known of her life, so it cannot really be evaluated for “heroic virtue.”
7One might have hoped their shared hostility to “clergy owning things” would endear Urban VI and Fr. Wycliffe to one another. Alas, Wycliffe’s “the papacy is fake and never happened” thesis was for some reason not well received by His Holiness, while it seems Wycliffe was disappointed with Urban’s policy of “kill everyone now.”
8The Holy Roman Emperor was elected—not by the populace, nor the nobility in general, but by seven designated prince-electors. Four were secular lords: the King of Bohemia; the Count Palatine of the Rhine (this rank has no direct equivalent in the British peerage system, but is similar to that of an archduke); the Duke of Saxony; and the Margrave of Brandenburg (a margrave is equivalent to a marquess). The other three were the Archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier.
9I.e., authorized by the papacy to teach in all faculties, of which the medieval university had exactly four. The first was that of the Arts—not the fine but the liberal arts, prerequisites to all further education, analogous to undergrad “gen. ed.” requirements. (Fine arts were apprenticed for under master sculptors, painters, etc., in their workshops; they were not, or not primarily, a subject of academic study at all.) The other three faculties were more like graduate-level specialties. They were: Medicine, which we would probably call “the natural sciences”; Law, or “human affairs”—law in our sense, but also history, heraldry, ethnography, etc.; and Divinity, i.e. Catholic theology.
Gabriel Blanchard has worked for CLT since 2019, where he serves as the company’s editor-at-large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
If you enjoyed this piece, and want some more context for it, you can find our introduction to the High and Late Middle Ages here, and our timeline of the Early Middle Ages (with links to further individual posts) here. Or, if you’d like to keep reading but want a change of pace, you might enjoy our series on informal fallacies, or our long-running series profiling our Author Bank. Thank you for reading the Journal.
Published on 9th June, 2025. Page image of the octagon over the crossing in the Cathedral of the Holy and Undivided Trinity in Ely, Cambridgeshire, England; Ely is not far from the border with Norfolk, of which Norwich (where Dame Julian resided) is the county town. The octagon is of genuine fourteenth-century make, though the cathedral was then devoted to St. Peter the Apostle and St. Audrey. Photo by David Iliff, used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license (source). The map of the early phase of the Western Schism was created with the aid of mapchart.net, which provides easy-to-use, free map-making software to users.
