assumptions about relics dominated the life of both great and small;
Luther’s own prince, Duke Frederick the Wise of Saxony, had an
enormous collection of relics.^104 The banality of the sacred, the selling of
forgiveness, the diffuse character of redemption,^105 in the minds of the
Reformers, all arose from the sacramental, sacerdotal system of the
medieval Church.
Basic then to Reformation assumptions was that the Renaissance
Church stood in desperate need of correction in piety and devotion. In
this they were not original, as the late medieval church had been littered
with reform movements, and the elusive goal of purity in devotion
animated most of the monastic reform movements in the medieval
world. This ambition for purity was so universally held, and so
numerous, abundant and widespread were new monastic orders and
institutions – almost all established either for the purpose of reform, or
in response to the perceived decline in existing monastic institutions –
that the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 banned the introduction of any
new orders. Yet this did not daunt the reform-minded. By the fifteenth
century, the expedient of adopting as a rule the flexible and more open
regula of St Augustine (a better pedigree than Benedict) had
circumvented this attempted institutional brake on reforming monastic
activities. The Augustinian rule served for two of the more popular and
strict of the fifteenth-century orders: The Brothers and Sisters of the
Common Life; and the Austin Friars, that Order which embraced the
Observant movement of which Luther himself was a part.^106 Thedevotio
moderna, often narrowly identified with the Brethren of the Common
Life, exercising a vast influence over numerous and influential
individuals,^107 sought to alter the very notion of communal life. Its piety,
stripped of the usual conventions of the monastic disciplines, still
exhibited a strong austerity and moral rigorism, all witnessed to by à
Kempis’s De imitatio Christi.^108
80 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
an apple to eat”; and for this reason he eats the last quarter with the paring, as little boys
do not peel their apples.’ The Waning of the Middle Ages(London, 1924), p. 137. But see
especially all of Chapter XII, ‘Religious Thought Crystallizing into Images’, pp. 136–59.
(^104) Martin Treu gives the figure of 19,033 relics housed within 12 galleries in the nave
of the Wittenberg castle church. Martin Luther in Wittenberg(Wittenberg, 2000), p. 15.
(^105) ‘It was an irresistible tendency to reduce the infinite to the finite, to disintegrate all
mystery.’ Huizinga, Waning, p. 139.
(^106) That Observantism and the devotio moderna were not the same see Heiko Oberman
The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism(Durham,
1983), pp. 343–46.
(^107) Including Jean Gerson, Thomas à Kempis, Gabriel Biel, Nicholas of Cusa, Luther,
and of course, Erasmus.
(^108) See Francis Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages(Ithaca, 1979),
pp. 100–12.
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