Western Humanities 201 08 (Chap 9) (The High Middle Ages) Flashcards
Feudalism
Synonymous with medieval social and political practices, although the term itself never appeared in the middle ages. A kind of government with shared, segmented power and authority; a set of relationships between free men bound to each other in both personal and material ways; or the exploitation of the pleasantry by the nobility.
Chivalry
Warrior Aristocrats shared a guiding ethos: from the French word cheval, horse; so chivalry— chevalerie— means “horsiness,” the way of life for men who fought on horseback. The word also means “knighthood.” The essential values of the chivalric knight were prowess— a knight who cannot fight is a contradiction in terms; courage; loyalty, an ideal that was often violated; and generosity, open-handed giving.
Investiture Controversy
ostensibly a struggle over the right to invest—appoint and install—church-men by laymen, was one of the most significant events of the middle ages.
Friars
Another type of religious order. It appeared in the 13th century with the rise of two major mendicants, or begging, orders, were Franciscan and the Dominican members.
Crusades
were a defining feature of the High Middle Ages. To free the Holy Land, or Palistine, from the Muslims,whom Christians then regarded as unbelievers, the Christian church preached nine crusades between 1095 and 1272, none of which succeeded in the long run. Attracted by a complex set of motives—Christian zeal, the papal promise that all sins would be pardoned, and the anticipation of wealth from plunder—king, bishops, and nobles, along with peasants, priests, workers, and prostitutes, sewed a cross on their garments (crusader, crucesignatus, “ signed by the cross”) qnd walked or sailed the arduous and dangerous journey to the Holy Land.
Cathedral
A bishop’s church, named after his cathedra, or chair, the seat of his authority. Christian value the permeated European cultural life. The Christian was a unifying agent that reconciled the opposing realms of the spiritual and secular, immaterial and material—as symbolized in many cities and towns by the soaring spires.
Scholasticism
is a term applied to the style and substance of learning in the High Middle Ages.
Realism
a controversy that revolved around the question whether or not universals, or general concepts, such as “human being” and “church,” exist in reality or only in the mind.
Nominalism
with the same aspects of Realism were Christian ideas, such as whether Jesus’s sacrifice had removed the stain of original sin from each individual called Nominalism.
via media
Thomas Aquinas steered a middle path which gave Aristotle a central role in his theology while honoring traditional Christian beliefs.
Goliard
Latin poetry especially Latin lyric poetry were rich in metric subtleties, extremely learned in content, and filled withclassical and Christian allusions. Some of the poets (Goliards) or roaming scholars, were probably young clerics who addressed both church intellectual and secular audiences with poems ranging from sophisticated intellectual topics to lighthearted themes of love. The foreground to vernacular literature.
vernacular language
most surprising writing of the spoken language of the age that gave rise to courtly love writing meaning “fine love.”
chanson de geste
composed of old French meaning “song of brave deeds.”
Canzone
meaning “love poem” being the ancestor of all later Western poetry.
Minstrel
professional entertainers that sang songs to the assembled court.
