Between Death and Judgment: Conflicting Images of the Afterlife in Late Seventeenth-Century English Eulogies

1994 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
William M. Spellman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
Whole Person ◽  
The Status ◽  
Unique Interpretation ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Other World ◽  
Personal Understanding

One of the more troublesome issues facing Protestant reformers after the abolition of the Roman Catholic purgatory in the early sixteenth century was the need to explain the status of body and soul in the interim between death and resurrection. Eager to identify the precise destination of the whole person after bodily expiration but before the general judgment, preachers sought to bring comfort to bereaved survivors of the recently departed by formulating an acceptable counterpoise to the centuries-old Roman Catholic geography of the other world. Unlike the authors of learned theological treatises on the nature of the soul and body, eulogists faced the unenviable task of interpreting the experience of death and its sequel to an audience that often lacked the sophistication required for the rigors of sustained exegesis. The task of the eulogist was to attempt to make plain the contours of postmortem existence in a manner designed both to warn and to reassure. In their efforts to define an emotionally satisfying alternative to the Roman Catholic story, however, English Protestants formulated an increasingly wide variety of disparate—and sometimes contradictory—accounts of life after death, each of which was normatively based upon a personal understanding of scripture. By the late seventeenth century, even as English funeral sermons that treated the afterlife began to reflect a broad consensus regarding the separate destinations of body and soul, there remained much confusion over the precise condition of those eternal partners before Christ's promised return. The failure to resolve this dilemma in a satisfactory manner and the inability to arrive at an acceptable consensus on a matter of central concern to believing Christians contributed to the growth of mortalist and annihilationist theories by the close of the century. Conceptual disarray within the orthodox camp, then, provided an opportunity for more innovative thinkers to step forward, persons whose understanding of eschatological time, anchored in their own unique interpretation of the Christian scriptures, negated any need for continued debate about a putative “middle place”.

Finance and Mobility

The Perraults ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 37-51
Author(s):  
Oded Rabinovitch
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
High Stake ◽  
Literary Life ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Status ◽  
Legal Professions ◽  
Family Strategy ◽  
Financial Administration

The second chapter analyzes the Perrault family strategy up to about 1660. Initially, the Perraults had no connections to literary life, and they were involved in legal professions. However, the status of lawyers was declining in the last years of the sixteenth century and early years of the seventeenth century, and the careers of the couple’s sons represented attempts to diversify the family’s educational and professional investments. Most significantly, Pierre II developed a career in the monarchy’s financial administration, built on the venality of office. Responding to the monarchy’s thirst for cash, financiers like Pierre played a high-stake game: while they could go bankrupt, they also stood to make immense profits from loans to the monarchy and from tax collecting. Thus this chapter demonstrates the importance of “court capitalism” and office-holding to the first literary endeavors of the family.

The Effects of Confessional Strife on Religious Authority in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century

2021 ◽  
pp. 303-324
Author(s):  
Henk Nellen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Hard Core ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Biblical Authority ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

This chapter discusses the confessional controversies on biblical authority and ecclesiastical tradition in the first half of the seventeenth century. While Protestant theologians upheld the status of the Bible as a divinely inspired, unique, coherent, and self-evident source of faith and stressed the subordinate significance of the patristic legacy, the Roman Catholic camp embraced the importance of the teachings of the Church Fathers, conciliar decrees, and papal decisions as a rock-solid criterion for a sound interpretation of the Bible. On the basis of treatises authored by eminent and hard-core exponents of Calvinism like Abraham Scultetus, Jean Daillé, Louis Cappel, and André Rivet, set against the views of the Jesuit Denis Pétau, expert in the history of the primitive church, it is argued that debates led to a reciprocal undermining of viewpoints, which eventually paved the way for more radical positions at the end of the century.

William Perkins versus William Bishop on the Role of Mary as Mediator

2004 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 249-258
Author(s):  
W.B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Extensive Experience ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Status ◽  
Protestant Theologian

William Perkins and William Bishop, two of the leading spokesmen for their respective religious traditions in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, clashed in print over the status of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as well as a number of other issues. They were formidable adversaries. Perkins, the most widely-read English Protestant theologian of the day, helped to make Cambridge University a centre of Reformed thought and practice. Bishop, an Oxford-trained theologian with extensive experience and associations on the continent, eventually became the first Roman Catholic bishop in England since the death of the last surviving bishop of Mary I’s reign. Though discussions of the Virgin Mary were not major themes in the books of either writer, their views on this subject are significant in showing how the two traditions developed, in competition with each other, during this phase of the long English Reformation.

The Church of Ireland: a critical bibliography, 1536–1992 Part II: 1603–41

1993 ◽  
Vol 28 (112) ◽  
pp. 352-358
Author(s):  
Alan Ford
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

There is a marked difference between the history of the Church of Ireland in the sixteenth century and in the early seventeenth century. The historian of the early Reformation in Ireland has to deal with shifting religious divides and, in the Church of Ireland, with a complex and ambiguous religious entity, established but not necessarily Protestant, culturally unsure, politically weak, and theologically unselfconscious. By contrast, the first part of the seventeenth century is marked by the creation of a distinct Protestant church, clearly distinguished in structural, racial, theological and political terms from its Roman Catholic counterpart. The history of the Church of Ireland in the first four decades of the seventeenth century is therefore primarily about the creation of this church and the way in which its new structures and exclusive identity were shaped.

John Dury, Advocate of Christian Reunion

1932 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 222-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Batten
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Storm And Stress ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Differences Of Opinion ◽  
Theological Differences ◽  
The Church

Richard Baxter correctly described the seventeenth century as a “contentious, dividing Age”. Divisive tendencies had been dominant in the preceding century. But the Protestant leaders in the Age of the Reformation had generally maintained that there was but one universal church. Their protests against Roman Catholic abuses and the consequent counter-charges of a revived Roman Catholicism produced the cleavage of Western Christendom and broke the formal unity of the church. Despite the inevitable differences of opinion which emerged amid the storm and stress of the time, the Protestant leaders often expressed their interest in the promotion of the visible unity of the church and they shared a common hope for the ultimate establishment of a new catholicity expressed in terms of universal free communion in place of the old Catholicism under the headship of the pope. But tendencies which the reformers failed to curb soon produced a succession of divisions. The separatists from Rome showed a marked inclination to form separate communions which, at first, followed territorial and national lines. Due to territorial, national, personal, political, and theological differences, the lines of demarcation between the groups into which Christendom was being divided gradually became defined with more pronounced clearness. In the latter part of the sixteenth century new lines of cleavage appeared. The development of rigid types of Protestant scholasticism intensified the strife over confessional differences and the Wars of Religion increased the hatreds of the age.

Miles Hogarde: Artisan and Aspiring Author in Sixteenth-Century England

1981 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. W. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic

Miles Hogarde has been recognized, both by his Protestant antagonists in Queen Mary's reign and by modern historians,as the best of the Roman Catholic propagandists in the bitter pamphlet war of 1553-58. But there is more to Hogarde than the polemic brilliance of The displaying of the Protestantes, and little attention has been given to these other aspects—particularly that implicit in his characterization by Anthony Wood, the seventeenth-century Oxford antiquarian, as “the first trader or mechanic that appeared inprint for the catholic cause, I mean one that had not received any monastical or academic breeding.” Whether or not Hogarde was statistically the first, he was certainly regarded (both by his opponents and himself) as unusual in his role, though Protestant lay preachers had been unobtrusively present in England for years past. He is unusual in various ways: for one thing, instances of sixteenth-century London artisans expressing themselves in print are certainly not numerous.

The Eucharistic Theology and Ethics of Balthasar Hubmaier

2012 ◽  
Vol 105 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-245
Author(s):  
Kirk R. MacGregor
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Spiritual Formation ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Academic Training ◽  
Eucharistic Theology ◽  
The Status ◽  
Balthasar Hubmaier ◽  
The University ◽  
Internal Transformation

During the initial decade of the Protestant Reformation, the German Anabaptist theologian Balthasar Hubmaier (1480–1528)1 functioned as a transitional figure between radical and magisterial reform. This observation is seen most clearly in the fact that Hubmaier, while concurring with his Anabaptist coreligionists on the necessity of believers’ baptism, dissented from their anti-statism and strict pacifism.2 Earning his doctor theologiae from the University of Ingolstadt under famous Catholic polemicist John Eck in 1512, Hubmaier was an essentially independent thinker who employed his academic training in an attempt to formulate doctrine that not only transcended the controversies of his day but also pointed Christians to the necessity of spiritual formation within a life of common discipleship. With this approach, Hubmaier turned to the Eucharist, second only to justification as the most divisive doctrine of the sixteenth century.3 Hubmaier objected to Roman Catholic transubstantiation, Lutheran consubstantiation, and Zwinglian sacramentarianism on the grounds that all of them, in their concern with the status of the elements, had lost sight of the internal transformation that Christ accomplishes in the faithful during the meal.

Mathematics and the New Sciences

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niccolo Guicciardini
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz ◽  
Mathematical Methods ◽  
The Status ◽  
Mathematical Sciences ◽  
Late Renaissance ◽  
Work Done ◽  
The Way

This article examines the mutual influences between mathematics and the new sciences that emerged in the long seventeenth century, whereby new scientific enterprises fostered the development of new mathematical methods and mathematical developments in turn paved the way for new scientific research. It begins with an overview of the revolutions in mathematics in the long seventeenth century and the status of the mathematical sciences in the Late Renaissance, followed by a discussion on the work of mathematicians in the late sixteenth century including Galileo, René Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Jacob Bernoulli, Gerhard Mercator, and Edmond Halley. It also describes the work done in the areas of organic geometry and mechanical curves, infinitesimals, and mechanics.

‘Turky Labours’

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-64
Author(s):  
Simon Mills
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Community Or ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scholarly Inquiry ◽  
Detailed Picture

Chapter 1 sets out the institutional history of the Levant Company in London and Aleppo. It argues that the infrastructures developed from the late sixteenth century to facilitate trade – the legal protection provided by the capitulations, regular shipping routes, systems of postal communication – laid the foundations for a ‘literarum commercium’, a commerce of letters, that would have implications beyond the immediate mercantile concerns of the Levant Company. New opportunities for scholarly inquiry were augmented by the growth of the English community, or ‘factory’, in Aleppo, and, in particular, by the appointment, from the early seventeenth century, of a line of clergymen employed to minister to the expatriate merchants and consular staff. Drawing on the Levant Company archive, the chapter paints a detailed picture of this small outpost, positioning it alongside the more established Venetian and French (and later Dutch) communities and the various Roman Catholic missions then stationed in Aleppo. The chaplains came to serve as the crucial link between Syria, London, and the English universities (predominantly Oxford), with whose members many of them remained in touch from abroad. The chapter also provides an overview of intellectual developments which sets the scene for the more detailed investigations of individual projects explored in the remainder of the book.

Academic Feud, Bloodfeud, and William Welwood: Legal Education in St Andrews, 1560–1611-Part I

1998 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W Cairns
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Joint Meeting ◽  
Academic Education

This article, in earlier versions presented as a paper to the Edinburgh Roman Law Group on 10 December 1993 and to the joint meeting of the London Roman Law Group and London Legal History Seminar on 7 February 1997, addresses the puzzle of the end of law teaching in the Scottish universities at the start of the seventeenth century at the very time when there was strong pressure for the advocates of the Scots bar to have an academic education in Civil Law. It demonstrates that the answer is to be found in the life of William Welwood, the last Professor of Law in St Andrews, while making some general points about bloodfeud in Scotland, the legal culture of the sixteenth century, and the implications of this for Scottish legal history. It is in two parts, the second of which will appear in the next issue of the Edinburgh Law Review.

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