Literature on Church History, 1914–1920. III. The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation

1924 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-49

In treating the history of the Reformation, I am especially indebted to the material gathered by Dr. Preserved Smith under the title, ‘A Decade of Luther Study,’ in this Review for April, 1921 (pp. 107–135). This enables me to be brief in dealing with the general literature of the subject, but as Dr. Smith in many cases gave only references without comment, and as he was not able to include the Scandinavian literature, at least a few works of special value must be noted here.

Author(s):  
Stefan Bauer

This chapter begins by examining the interrelationship of history and theology. From the Reformation onwards, church history presented a challenge to each confession in its own right. Protestants re-invented the prevailing models of church history; Catholics responded by underlining the uninterrupted continuity of the apostolic traditions. The second section of the chapter concentrates on the genre of papal biography, reviewing the various contemporary authors who wrote on the subject. By editing and continuing the humanist Bartolomeo Platina’s standard papal biographies from the fifteenth century, Panvinio put himself in the position of being considered the most important authority on papal history. The censorship of historical works by Catholic theologians is then discussed by comparing the cases of other important authors including Carlo Sigonio. The chapter investigates the question of the extent to which Panvinio’s unpublished Church History (Historia ecclesiastica) was an expression of the confessionalization of historiography. There follows a discussion of the censorships of several of Panvinio’s works, including that of his history of papal elections carried out by the Spanish jurist Francisco Peña and the German Jesuit Jakob Gretser.


1974 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 504-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Voegelin ◽  
Mary ◽  
Keith Algozin

The task of sketching the history of liberalism, though modest, is for methodological reasons difficult. For we stand before the question of whether there is even such a thing as liberalism as a clearly definable subject and whether this subject, should it not be clearly definable, can have a history. We touch here upon a general methodological problem. Toynbee, for example, opens his great work with the question whether England has a history; he concludes that the English nation as a society is so closely related to the society of Western civilization that one cannot write an English history without going into the entire history of Western civilization. It is in this sense that there arise the questions of how liberalism is to be delimited and whether it has a history. And they arise more acutely because the case of liberalism is much more complicated than that of England. For even if some phases of English history, for example the Reformation, can be dealt with only in relation to the general European history of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, still there are long periods of isolated, specifically English history. In the case of liberalism, a narrowing of the subject to national societies — German, French, English or American — is hardly justifiable. For all the regional phases of liberalism are only parts of a common Western movement; and furthermore, this movement can only with difficulty be isolated from other movements which run parallel with it in time.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-219
Author(s):  
Paulina Michalska-Górecka

The history of the lexeme konfessyjonista shows that the word is a neologism that functioned in the literature of the sixteenth century in connection with religious documents/books, such as the Protestant confessions. Formally and semantically, it refers to Confessio Augustana, also to her Polish translations, and to the Konfesja sandomierska, as well as konfessyja as a kind of genre. In the Reformation and Counter-Reformation period, the word konfessyja was needed by the Protestants; the word konfessyjonista was derived from him by the Catholics for their needs. The lexeme had an offensive tone and referred to a confessional supporter as a supporter of the Reformation. Perhaps the oldest of his certifications comes from an anonymous text from 1561, the year in which two Polish translations of Augustana were announced. The demand for a konfessyjonista noun probably did not go beyond the 16th century, its notations come only from the 60s, 70s and 80s of this century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (2 SELECTED PAPERS IN ENGLISH) ◽  
pp. 31-42
Author(s):  
Bogumił Szady

The Polish version of the article was published in “Roczniki Humanistyczne,” vol. 61 (2013), issue 2. The article addresses the question of the fall of the Latin parish in Chorupnik that belonged to the former diocese of Chełm. The parish church in Chorupnik was taken over by Protestants in the second half of the 16th century. Unsuccessful attempts at recovering its property were made by incorporating it into the neighbouring parish in Gorzków. The actions taken by the Gorzków parish priest and the bishop together with his chapter failed, too. A detailed study of such attempts to recover the property of one of the parishes that ceased to exist during the Reformation falls within the context of the relations between the nobility and the clergy in the period of Counter-Reformation. Studying the social, legal and economic relations in a local dimension is important for understanding the mechanisms of the mass transition of the nobility to reformed denominations, and then of their return to the Catholic Church.


Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 458
Author(s):  
David Aers

Charity turns out to be the virtue which is both the root and the fruit of salvation in Langland’s Piers Plowman, a late fourteenth-century poem, the greatest theological poem in English. It takes time, suffering and error upon error for Wille, the central protagonist in Piers Plowman, to grasp Charity. Wille is both a figure of the poet and a power of the soul, voluntas, the subject of charity. Langland’s poem offers a profound and beautiful exploration of Charity and the impediments to Charity, one in which individual and collective life is inextricably bound together. This exploration is characteristic of late medieval Christianity. As such it is also an illuminating work in helping one identify and understand what happened to this virtue in the Reformation. Only through diachronic studies which engage seriously with medieval writing and culture can we hope to develop an adequate grasp of the outcomes of the Reformation in theology, ethics and politics, and, I should add, the remakings of what we understand by “person” in these outcomes. Although this essay concentrates on one long and extremely complex medieval work, it actually belongs to a diachronic inquiry. This will only be explicit in some observations on Calvin when I consider Langland’s treatment of Christ’s crucifixion and in some concluding suggestions about the history of this virtue.


1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76
Author(s):  
Edwin Jones

John Lingard (1771–1851) was the first English historian to attempt to look at the history of England in the sixteenth century from an international point of view. He was unconvinced by the story of the Reformation in England as found in the works of previous historians such as Burnet and Hume, and believed that new light needed to be thrown on the subject. One way of doing this was to look at English history from the outside, so to speak, and Lingard held it to be a duty of the historian ‘to contrast foreign with native authorities, to hold the balance between them with an equal hand, and, forgetting that he is an Englishman, to judge impartially as a citizen of the world’. In pursuit of this ideal Lingard can be said to have given a new dimension to the source materials for English history. As parish priest in the small village of Hornby, near Lancaster, Lingard had few opportunities for travel. But he made good use of his various friends and former pupils at Douai and Ushaw colleges who were settled now in various parts of Europe. It was with the help of these friends that Lingard made contacts with and gained valuable information from archives in France, Italy and Spain. We shall concern ourselves here only with the story of Lingard's contacts with the great Spanish State Archives at Simancas.


Author(s):  
Alexander Cowan

Urban centers had an influence on the development of Renaissance Europe disproportionate to their overall demographic importance. Most of the population continued to live and work in the countryside, but towns and cities functioned as key centers of production, consumption and exchange, political control, ecclesiastical organization, and cultural influence. Historians still debate the relative roles of urban and rural areas in facilitating the development of capitalism in the long term. Writing on urban history has a very long pedigree dating back to the 16th century, but as an academic discipline it began to flourish in the late 19th century. Since the 1960s, the range of approaches to the field has widened considerably from concerns with political and economic organization to take in issues of governance, social structure, and, most recently, overlapping urban cultures. The role of religious belief, particularly in the context of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, runs as a thread throughout the history of the urban experience.


1994 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 569-592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Greig

ABSTRACTThe aim of the high church agitation in the 1690s for a convocation was to establish doctrinal discipline within the anglican church. When convocation met in 1701 the lower house produced censures on Toland's Christianity not mysterious and Burnet's Exposition of the thirty-nine articles.It was Francis Atterbury who insisted that Burnet's Exposition was heretical. He had long been critical of Burnet's views on the trinity and his erastian interpretation of English church history in his History of the reformation. And if Burnet's History was an attempt re-write English church history from the perspective of a latitudinarian, then his Exposition was its theological counterpart.It was assumed that the charges against Burnet were lost. But a copy of them has surfaced and it confirms that it was the connection between latitudinarians and dissent which led to the attack on Burnet. In his zeal to heal divisions within anglicanism and between anglicans and other protestants Burnet had introduced a ‘latitude and diversity of opinions’ which misrepresented true anglican doctrine. This was dangerous, because Burnet intended his Exposition as ‘a platform laid for Comprehension’ with the dissenters and other ‘Adversaries of our Church’. These included obvious heretics like socinians and the deist Toland.


2013 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory D. Dodds

When post-Reformation English authors sought to describe pre-Reformation Catholicism, they turned to the writings of Desiderius Erasmus for historical evidence to back up their arguments justifying the break from Rome. For many later English schoolboys, Erasmus was one of the only Catholic authors they read and the depictions of Catholicism found in the Praise of Folly and, especially, in the Colloquies, became their picture of Catholic clergy, as well as foundational imprints for their mental image of relics, pilgrimages, and other Catholic practices. References to Erasmus as a historical authority for his times appear in dozens, if not hundreds, of texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ignoring the literary and fictitious nature of Erasmus's satirical texts, they used Erasmus to justify their depictions of Catholic corruption, superstition, and irrationality. Over time, these descriptions became an almost uncritically accepted portrayal of the Catholic world prior to the rise of Protestantism. This constructed reality thus became the worldview of English speaking Protestants from the mid-sixteenth century up to nearly the present. Examining how later English authors used Erasmus helps us understand the subsequent nature of English historical consciousness and the development of English and Protestant narratives of Church history.


1889 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 185-204
Author(s):  
Frank Hugh Foster

The problems of anthropology depend for their solution in an unusually large degree upon psychology. While the evangelical church looks to the Bible for the materials of its theology, it still depends upon the use of human reason in the interpretation and adjustment of the materials there presented. Especially is this true in the matter of conversion and related doctrines. The language of the Bible is general, rhetorical, theological, practical, or popular, as you may choose to call it, but not strict, philosophical, theoretical, or scientific. The ultimate facts of the doctrine may be perfectly clear to the biblical student, but the adjustment of those facts in a dogmatic system will depend largely upon his ability as a thinker to see in the facts what the biblical writers have not thought fit to utter in express terms, and this upon his mental equipment for his task, or, in other words, upon his knowledge of the constitution and operations of the human mind, within which the process of conversion goes on. The history of Melancthon's “synergism” brings this peculiarity of the subject before us in a very interesting way, for clearer ideas as to the nature of the soul went, in his case, hand in hand with the alterations of the theological system; and thus his efforts to arrive at a statement of the process of conversion which should be at once true to the Scriptures and to the consciousness and the moral necessities of man, are not only interesting as the mental history of a great mind, but throw light upon the interrelations of anthropology and psychology, give us many suggestions as to the interpretation to be put upon the Reformation theology at the present day, and may serve to reveal the lines upon which all progress in respect to these questions is to be sought.


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