REFORMERS, CONFLICT, AND REVISIONISM: THE REFORMATION IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY HADLEIGH

1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN CRAIG
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Town

The cloth-making town of Hadleigh in Suffolk has often been cited in the annals of the English Reformation as a town that early embraced Protestantism apparently effortlessly. This view owes much to John Foxe's famous description of this ‘Universitie of the learned’, yet a closer examination of the surviving evidence from Hadleigh indicates that the Reformation was as bitterly contested here as it was in many another mid-Tudor community. And the nature of the bitter struggle between the advocates of reform and a group of conservatives in the town may have proved so fierce that the energies for further reform under Elizabeth all but dissipated.

The English Reformation Revisited

1996 ◽  
Vol 4 (18) ◽  
pp. 446-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity Heal
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Marked Change ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

I was asked by the Society to provide an introduction to current historical thinking about the English Reformation in the first talk to the 1995 Conference. The ensuing lecture was deliberately intended to provide guidance through the minefield of controversy about the success of Reformation for those with only limited knowledge of sixteenth-century history. Debates about the Reformation have always been of obvious importance to both theologians and historians: they have usually in the past been profoundly influenced by confessional ideologies. In the last thirty years the nature of the questions asked about Reformation has undergone marked change: specifically the issue of popular religious belief and practice has assumed a centrality it never before possessed. But new questions have not brought closer agreement on the nature of religious change, and in recent years fierce debate has continued to rage on such issues as the vitality of late medieval Catholicism, the popularity of the early reformers and the motives of Henry VIII and his successors. Some, at least, of these controversies are still bound up with Protestant, Catholic and Anglican identities in the late twentieth century. Since the continuities between past and present were the theme of last year's Conference, I have touched on these identities, but have left it to others, especially Dr Rowell and Dr Rex to make these connections more explicit.

Reformation without end

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Civil Unrest ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Reformation

Reformation without end reinterprets the English Reformation. No one in eighteenth-century England thought that they lived during ‘the Enlightenment’. Instead, they thought that they still faced the religious, intellectual and political problems unleashed by the Reformation, which began in the sixteenth century. They faced those problems, though, in the aftermath of two bloody seventeenth-century political and religious revolutions. This book is about the ways the eighteenth-century English debated the causes and consequences of those seventeenth-century revolutions. Those living in post-revolutionary England conceived themselves as living in the midst of the very thing which they thought had caused the revolutions: the Reformation. The reasons for and the legacy of the Reformation remained hotly debated in post-revolutionary England because the religious and political issues it had generated remained unresolved and that irresolution threatened more civil unrest. For this reason, most that got published during the eighteenth century concerned religion. This book looks closely at the careers of four of the eighteenth century’s most important polemical divines, Daniel Waterland, Conyers Middleton, Zachary Grey and William Warburton. It relies on a wide range of manuscript sources, including annotated books and unpublished drafts, to show how eighteenth-century authors crafted and pitched their works.

Revisionism, the Reformation and the History of English Catholicism

1985 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 394-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Haigh
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political History ◽  
The State ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

Twenty years ago, when Patrick McGrath was writing Papists and Puritans, it made sense to present the history of Tudor Catholicism in terms of early decline and later heroic recovery. Our understanding of the sixteenth century was then dominated by two books, which seemed to demonstrate revolutions in religion and government that breached all continuities in ecclesiastical and political history. In A. G. Dickens's The English Reformation, an increasingly sophisticated laity, discontented with the moral laxity and spiritual torpor of the late medieval clergy, was shown to have accepted with enthusiasm the break with Rome and the new doctrines of Protestantism. Gentlemen, lawyers, merchants and artisans responded to the energetic evangelism of the early reformers, and abandoned medieval obscurantism. Secular and ecclesiastical politicians espoused reform for their own calculations of expediency or experience of spirituality, and threw the weight of the state behind the new doctrines, while conservatives lacked the commitment and imagination to resist change.

Persecution and Toleration in the English Reformation

1984 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 163-187
Author(s):  
G. R. Elton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Real ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
External Pressures ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

The century of the Reformation, in England as elsewhere, sharpened all conflicts and augmented persecution. As the unity of Christendom broke up, the rival parties acquired that sort of confidence in their own righteousness that encourages men to put one another to death for conscience sake; an era of moderation and tolerance gave way to one of ever more savage repression. To the openminded willingness which characterized the humanism of Erasmus and More as well as the Rome of Leo X there succeeded the bigotry typical of Carafa, Calvin, Knox and the English puritans; only the gradual evaporation of such passions, produced by each side’s inability to triumph totally, produced a weariness with religious strife which made the return of mutual sufferance possible. That, at least, is the received story. Historians of toleration, as for instance Jordan and Lecler, firmly described the history of persecution in this way. Jordan identified six developments which led to its decline in sixteenth-century England: a growing political strength among dissident sects, the impossibility of preventing splintering and preserving uniformity, the needs of trade which overrode religious hostility, experience of travel, the failure to suppress dissident publications, and finally a growing scepticism which denied the claims to exclusive truth advanced by this or that faction. In other words, only two things moved men, once they had fallen away from the generosity of the pre-Reformation era, to substitute an uneasy toleration for a vigorous persecution: the external pressures of experience and the decline of religious fervour. By implication, men of power called for repression and only those who could not hope to win favoured toleration, until general exhaustion set in. It is a convincing enough picture, and much evidence no doubt supports it. But it is a picture—a general and rather schematic panorama which makes little allowance for the real opinions of individuals. On this occasion I should like to test it by looking at the attitudes of two highly articulate sixteenth-century Englishmen—Thomas More, humanist and loyal son of the universal Church, and John Foxe, humanist and faithful protestant. Both, we know, were men of sensitivity and sense. How did they stand to the problem of persecution?

The English Reformation: Obedience, Destruction and Cultural Adaptation

2005 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-115
Author(s):  
RONALD H. FRITZE
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
English Culture

Religious life and English culture in the Reformation. By Marjo Kaartinen. Pp. vii+210. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. £45. ISBN 0 333 96924 3Preaching during the English Reformation. By Susan Wabuda. Pp. xx+203 incl. 15 figs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. £40. ISBN 0 521 45395 XAuthority and consent in Tudor England. Essays presented to C. S. L. Davies. Edited by G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn. Pp. x+301. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2002. £47.50. ISBN 0 7546 0665 1Keywords and concepts provide important organising principles when historians attempt to make sense of the past. Some keywords are virtual constants of historical discourse, such as ‘continuity’ and ‘change’, although the relative emphasis that historians place on them can fluctuate with circumstances and fashion. Other terms come and go. The study of the English Reformation is no exception to the ebb and flow of historical keywords. For much of the 1960s, 1970s and the early 1980s, ‘popular reformation’ was a central concept of interpretation and research. But no more. Thanks to the historical fashion which has been styled ‘revisionism’, ‘popular reformation’ in early sixteenth-century England at least is widely considered to be an oxymoron. Consequent on the work of A. G. Dickens, ‘official’ or ‘state-sponsored reformation’ went into an eclipse but with the advent of revisionism it has been both revived as well as revised.

Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Middle Part ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literary Renaissance

This book attempts to see the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England as a whole and to explain the relationship between the Reformation and the literary renaissance of the Elizabethan period. Its central theme is ‘the common’ in its double sense of something shared and something base, and it argues that making common the work of God is at the heart of the English Reformation, just as making common the literature of antiquity and of early modern Europe is at the heart of the English Renaissance. The book addresses the central question of why the Renaissance in England arrived so late in terms of the relationship between humanism and Protestantism and the tensions between democracy and the imagination which persist throughout the century. The first part of the book establishes a social dimension for literary culture in the period by exploring the associations of ‘commonwealth’ and related terms. It then addresses the role of Greek in the period before and during the Reformation in disturbing the old binary of elite Latin and common English. It argues that the Reformation principle of making common is coupled with a hostility towards fiction, which has the effect of closing down the humanist renaissance of the earlier decades. The final part of the book discusses the Elizabethan literary renaissance and deals in turn with poetry, short prose fiction, and the drama written for the common stage. In between, the middle part of the book presents translation as the link between Reformation and Renaissance.

The Reformation and Elizabeth Bowes: a Study of a Sixteenth-century Northern Gentlewoman

1990 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 325-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine M. Newman
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Role Of Women ◽  
To Come

More than twenty years ago, in the Introduction to his influential article which focused upon the life of Anne Locke, Patrick Collinson bemoaned the lack of recognition given to the role of women in the English Reformation. Happily, over the last few years this situation has been somewhat rectified, as modern scholarship has increasingly emphasized the degree of feminine participation in the spiritual upheavals of the period. The problem, however, remains that there is little evidence of personal feminine testimony, especially for the immediate post-Reformation period. The example of Elizabeth Bowes is, unfortunately, a case in point. Mrs Bowes, the wife of a prominent Durham gentleman, is well known to historians as a devoted follower and later the mother-in-law of the Scottish reformer, John Knox. Particularly during the early 1550s, Elizabeth maintained a regular correspondence with Knox. Of this, some thirty of Knox’s letters have been preserved, mainly in the form of a transcript copied from the originals in 1603. These letters, indeed, provide the main source of evidence for the life of the reformer during this period. Yet it is also apparent, from the tone of Knox’s replies, that much of the correspondence was devoted to the discussion and analysis of Mrs Bowes’s religious anxieties and aspirations, as she struggled to come to terms with her conversion to the Protestant Faith.

CATHOLIC MUSIC IN THE DIOCESE OF AUGSBURG c.1600: A RECONSTRUCTED TRICINIUM ANTHOLOGY AND ITS CONFESSIONAL IMPLICATIONS

2002 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 117-173
Author(s):  
Christian Thomas Leitmeir
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Catholic Clergy ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Town

After decades of suffering and agony, Catholicism in Augsburg entered a phase of gradual recovery around 1550. The first half of the sixteenth century was characterised by the rapid expansion of the Reformation and the marginalisation of the Catholics in the town. At the zenith of Protestant predominance, the Lutherans even managed to force the entire Catholic clergy into exile from 1537 to 1547 and for a few months in 1552. The episcopate of Cardinal Otto Truchsess von Waldburg (1543-73), however, marked a turning point for Catholics in Augsburg. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) conceded political parity to the Catholic minority in town. Due to Otto von Waldburg's zealous activities, his severely decimated flock even managed to grow again slowly over the years.

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