Introduction to the Book of Isaiah, pp. 4, 16 sqq., London,
1895; C. F. Kent, Student's O. T., ii. 282 saq., New York,
1905; Schrader, KAT, i. 54 sqq., 262; DB, iv. 843-845; EB, iv. 5240-44; JE, xii. 393-394.
RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Uzziah Valdes
V
VADIANUS. See Wart, Joacnim von.
VAGANTES, va-gan’tiz or gan’tés (Clerici vagantes, or vagi): A term applied in early canon law to those clergy who led a wandering life either because they had no benefice or because they had deserted the church to which they had been attached. As early as the fifth and sixth centuries measures were taken against them, as when the Council of Chalcedon forbade ordination without appointment to a specific church, or when the Council of Valencia (524?) threatened the vagantes with excommunication, a penalty extended by the Synod of Arles (524) to those who should give them shelter. Nevertheless, the vagantes still flourished, and frequently aided bishops and other clergy in the discharge of their duties or became chaplains in the castles of the knights, thus making their profession a trade and interfering with the orderly conditions and ministrations of the regular clergy. In 789 Charlemagne renewed the Chalcedon injunctions, and also forbade the entertainment of any clergy who could not produce letters from their bishops. But even these measures failed, and in the ninth century several synods (e.g., Mainz, 847, and Pavia, 845-850) sought to check the vagantes, and their efforts to take possession of benefices already conferred on others, while such prelates as Agobard of Lyons, in his De privilegio et jure sacerdotit, also opposed them. In the twelfth century Gerhoh of Reichersberg (q.v.) again complained of them in his Liber de simonia, but matters became far worse in the following century, when the Synods of Mainz (1261), Aschaffenburg (1292), Treves (1310), and St. Pélten (1284) declared against the vagantes, while in Bavaria they were expressly excluded from the king’s peaces of 1244, 1281, and 1300.
A peculiar type of vagantes arose in France in the twelfth century, later spreading to England and Germany. These were the roving minstrels, mostly dissolute students or wandering clergy, first called clerict vagantes or ribaldi (‘‘ rascals’’), and later, after the early thirteenth century, chiefly known as goliardi or goliardenses, terms apparently meaning “sons of Goliath,” i.e., ‘‘ sons of giants.” They were masters of poetic form, but many councils of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries sought to restrict the goliards and their excesses. These measures seem practically to have suppressed the goliards in France by the end of the thirteenth century; but in Germany they survived until late in the fifteenth century under various names. Hugo of Trimberg devoted a special chapter of his Renner to the ribaldi and other vagantes, while in England Chaucer alluded to them in no complimentary terms. (A. Hac.)
Brsuiocraruy: Bingham, Origines, VI., iv. 5, VII., ii. 12, XVL., xii. 19; G. J. Planck, Geschichte der christlich-kirchlichen Gesellschaftsverfassung, i. 375, ii. 100 sqq., 5 vols., Hanover, 1803-09; W. Giesebrecht, in Allgemeine Monatsschrift fiir Wissenschaft und Literatur, 1853, pp. 10-43, 344-381; J. Grimm, Kleinere Schriften, ui. 1 sqq., Berlin, 1866; O. Hubatsch, Die lateinischen Vagantenlieder des
Mittelalters, Gorlitz, 1870; J. von Pflugk-Harttung, Diplomatisch-historische Forschungen, pp. 50 sqq., Gotha, 1879; W. Meyer, in Festschrift der Géttinger Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, Géttingen, 1901; Neander, Christian Church, vol, iii. passim,
VALDES, val-des’, JUAN and ALFONSO DE.
Alfonso on the Sack of Rome (§ 1).
Juan’s ‘‘ Mercury and Sharon”; Alfonso (§ 2).
Juan’s Relations with Rome, and with Giulia Gonzaga (§ 3). Later Writings (§ 4).
Theological Views (§ 5).
The Hispano-Italian reformers, Juan and Alfonso de Valdés, were born as twins at Cuenca (84 m. s.e. of Madrid), Castile, about the end of the fifteenth century, Juan dying at Naples in the summer of 1541, and Alfonso at Vienna early in Oct., 1532. Alfonso, in 1520, accompanied the young
King Charles to his coronation at
1. Alfonso Aachen, and then went to Worms, on the Sack where he witnessed the burning of
of Rome. Luther’s writings, which he, unlike the
majority, considered but the beginning of the tragedy of the Reformation. A few years later he was imperial secretary to the high chancellor, Mercurino Arborio da Gattinara, and when the Spanish monks raged against Erasmus, Alfonso warmly defended the Basel scholar. In May, 1527, Rome was stormed and sacked by an imperial army, though without imperial sanction, and the pope himself was made prisoner. Alfonso voiced the sentiment of the court in a dialogue on the catastrophe between Lactantius, a cavalier of the emperor, and an archdeacon just come from Rome to Valladolid. Lactantius, through whom Alfonso expresses his own views, declares that the pope, as a disturber of the peace and as faithless to his word, brought the sack of Rome upon himself. He advocates the surrender of the papal temporal power and asserts that, since the exposure of ecclesiastical corruption by Erasmus and the sedition incited by Luther had alike failed to reform the papacy, God had turned to other means of conversion and had found them in the sack of Rome. The archdeacon himself concludes the dialogue with the hope that the emperor would now take the reformation of the Church in hand. The papal nuncio, Count Baldassare Castiglione, and Alfonso’s fellow secretary, Juan Aleman, both sought to have this “ultra-Lutheran ’’ document condemned to the flames, but the archiepiscopal grand inquisitor declared that the dialogue contained nothing heretical.
Meanwhile, probably in Dec., 1528, Juan had written his dialogue ‘‘ Mercury and Sharon,” a piece full of biting satire on false Christians. At the same time, Spain is declared more happy than Germany, where Lutheranism had given birth to many other sects. The justice of the punishment of Rome is maintained, and the absolute need of reform is stressed. Both the ‘‘ Mercury ” and the “ Lactantius ” were printed anonymously, probably in 1529, repeated editions following; modern editions are by Usdzi Rio in Reformistas antiguos espaiioles,
Valdes Valens