For almost forty years, from 1378 to 1417, the Western Church
was divided into rival camps headed by two--and eventually
three--competing popes. The so-called Schism provoked a profound
and long-lasting anxiety throughout Europe--an anxiety that
reverberated throughout clerical circles and among the ordinary
faithful. In Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism,
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski looks beyond the political and
ecclesiastical storm and finds an outpouring of artistic, literary,
and visionary responses to one of the great calamities of the late
Middle Ages.
Modern historians have analyzed the Great Schism mostly from the
perspective of church politics. Blumenfeld-Kosinski shifts our
attention to several groups that have not before been considered
together: saintly men and women (such as Catherine of Siena, Pedro
of Aragon, Vincent Ferrer, and Constance de Rabastens), politically
aware and committed poets (such as Philippe de Mezieres and
Christine de Pizan), and prophets (for example, the mysterious
Telesphorus of Cosenza and the authors of the anonymous Prophecies
of the Last Popes). Not surprisingly, these groups often saw the
Schism as an apocalyptic sign of the end times. Images abounded of
the divided Church as a two-headed monster or suffering widow.
A twelfth-century "prelude" looks at the schism of 1159 and the
role the famous visionaries Hildegard of Bingen and Elisabeth of
Schonau played in this earlier crisis in order to define common
threads of "mystical activism" as well as the profound differences
with the later Great Schism. Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the
Great Schism will be of interest to students and scholars of
medieval and early modern history, religious studies, and
literature.
General
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