What role did the laity movements in Christianity play in the political upheavals of the late Middle Ages?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary. Challenging the authority of the Catholic Church in the late Middle Ages was a sense of frustration on the part of the laity that saw the reform movements within the church as insufficient or not going in a desired direction. At a time of crisis in the world, the laity saw religion as their only comfort, but found significant problems within the church, particularly the lack of ministering. While the church was happy to encourage devotion, its leaders were less happy and eventually deeply uncomfortable with public expressions of religious enthusiasm. At the same time, the church's restriction on lay participation remained tight because the church sought to retain its unchallenged authority. People were increasingly curious about religion and wanted to study it in new ways and means, to partake of its greater meaning among their own settings, not just restricted to church-supervised and -directed0020explorations. Catherine of Sienna was a particular example of a secular individual who became deeply entrenched in mysticism. She was originally a nun but was seen as such a holy individual that she felt free to weigh in with her opinion on day-to-day politics and current events. The church saw this as problematic because, although technically ordained, she was a woman and was expressing these ideas outside the church environment. Speaking about her experiences and visions with rapture and enthusiasm made the church feel as though she was beyond their power. Lollards more directly challenged the authority of the church, however, by providing criticisms of policies and individual leaders in the church. Their leader, John Wycliffe, wrote works that questioned the church's authority, and his followers were persecuted with the threat of heresy, and were thus forced to flee and go underground. An even more radical form of criticism was found in Bohemia, where the Czech leader Jan Hus wrote confrontational tracts and the Hussites dispensed with any distinction between the laity and the clergy. Hus was burned at the stake. The popularity of these movements was disturbing to the church because its leaders feared they were losing their monopoly on religion.