Refraining the Reformation

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (144) ◽  
pp. 598-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Gillespie

The Reformation in Ireland has never lacked chroniclers, defenders and detractors. The reason for this is not hard to discern. The older literature that grappled with the processes of religious change in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ireland was based on a number of well-recognised and widely agreed propositions. The first of these was that confessional and political positions were inextricably linked, and the fate of one served not only as a proxy for the other but as an explanation for the trajectory of change; thus, to explain the failure of the reform process to strike deep roots in sixteenth-century Ireland, one had only to invoke the failure of the Tudor conquest.

1999 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 407-419
Author(s):  
Christine M. Newman

The Bowes of Streatlam, in the bishopric of Durham, were notable on two counts in the later part of the sixteenth century. On the one hand, they were highly regarded for their uncompromising loyalty to the Crown, an attachment which was to bring them disastrously close to the brink of financial ruin under the parsimonious Elizabeth, who repeatedly failed to reimburse and compensate them for activities undertaken in her name. On the other hand, the family was particularly noted in the religiously conservative north for its staunch adherence to the Protestant faith. The seeds of this Protestantism were in evidence from the earliest years of the Reformation, but it was given greater definition and inspiration by the example of Elizabeth Bowes, the ardent adherent and later mother-in-law of the Scottish reformer John Knox. Yet, if Elizabeth was the first, she was certainly not the only uncompromisingly Protestant matron in the Bowes family during this period. Towards the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century the second wife of her grandson Sir William Bowes was to assume Elizabeth’s spiritual mantle, thereby reinforcing still further the family’s attachment to the Reformed faith.


Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.


1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. J. McNair

Between the execution of Gerolamo Savonarola at Florence in May 1498 and the execution of Giordano Bruno at Rome in February 1600, western Christendom was convulsed by the protestant reformation, and the subject of this paper is the effect that that revolution had on the Italy that nourished and martyred those two unique yet representative men: unique in the power and complexity of their personalities, representative because the one sums up the medieval world with all its strengths and weaknesses while the other heralds the questing and questioning modern world in which we live.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-186
Author(s):  
R. V. Young

Although T.S. Eliot's phrase “dissociation of sensibility,” applied to the changes in poetry during the seventeenth century, made a stir when he introduced it in the review essay “The Metaphysical Poets” in 1921, it draws less attention now, and seems never to have been adequately explained. Since Eliot's claims are, in part, historical, it makes sense to consider the most historically significant changes occurring during the seventeenth century. It is during this period that the Reformation culminates and its effects become permanently established. Several recent studies of the Reformation by Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory, and Carlos M.N. Eire provide clues about how the religious and social cataclysm of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may have affected the poetic imagination. James Smith's classic essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” offers a way of analyzing the figurative language of seventeenth-century poetry in order to grasp the impact of the religious change. The investigations by Taylor, Gregory, and Eire into the dynamic of the reforming tendency, beginning in the late Middle Ages, as well as the Scotist and nominalist intellectual underpinnings of the Reformation, prove to be pertinent to Eliot's insight regarding seventeenth-century poetry. The growth of individualism, personal anxiety about religious choice, and materialism portend a general movement towards secularization and influence the way poets see the world. Dissociation of sensibility can thus be understood as a result of the effect of the religious and social dislocations of the Reformation in the realm of poetry.


Zograf ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 153-163
Author(s):  
Dragan Vojvodic

In the katholikon of the monastery of Praskvica there are remains of two layers of post-Byzantine wall-painting: the earlier, from the third quarter of the sixteenth century, and later, from the first half of the seventeenth century, which is the conclusion based on stylistic analysis and technical features. The portions of frescoes belonging to one or the other layer can be clearly distinguished from one another and the content of the surviving representations read more thoroughly than before. It seems that the remains of wall-painting on what originally was the west facade of the church also belong to the earlier layer. It is possible that the church was not frescoed in the lifetime of its ktetor, Balsa III Balsic.


2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 93-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossana Barragán Romano

AbstractLabour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.


2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-33
Author(s):  
Gregory D. Dodds

Abstract Henry Care and Roger L’ Estrange fought a bitter battle in the public press in Restoration England. Exploring the ways in which each employed the writings and reputation of Desiderius Erasmus provides insight into the deep fault lines dividing English society in the decade from 1678 to 1688. Their divergent uses of Erasmus demonstrate how late-seventeenth-century interpretations of the early sixteenth-century Reformation became critical points of conflict in the most significant political and religious debates of the period. Paying attention to the reception of Erasmus also helps explain how these two bitter enemies eventually joined William Penn in supporting James II’s Indulgence for Liberty of Conscience.


1996 ◽  
Vol 4 (18) ◽  
pp. 446-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity Heal

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.


2004 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 654-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER SHERLOCK

The Reformation simultaneously transformed the identity and role of bishops in the Church of England, and the function of monuments to the dead. This article considers the extent to which tombs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bishops represented a set of episcopal ideals distinct from those conveyed by the monuments of earlier bishops on the one hand and contemporary laity and clergy on the other. It argues that in death bishops were increasingly undifferentiated from other groups such as the gentry in the dress, posture, location and inscriptions of their monuments. As a result of the inherent tension between tradition and reform which surrounded both bishops and tombs, episcopal monuments were unsuccessful as a means of enhancing the status or preserving the memory and teachings of their subjects in the wake of the Reformation.


Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram

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.


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