Revolution in Religion. The English Reformation, 1530–1530. By David Loades. (The Past in Perspective.) Pp. viii + 134 incl. maps. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992. £5.95. 0 7083 1141 5 - The Reformation of the Ecclesiastical Laws of England, 1552. Ed. and trans, by James C. Spalding. (Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, xix.) Pp. xviii + 320 incl. 9 ills. Kirksville, Mo: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1992. $35. 0 940474 20 4

1993 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 308-310
Author(s):  
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Medieval Thought

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Luscombe
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Reformation

This chapter examines contributions made by Fellows of the British Academy in the past century to the study of medieval thought. It explains that medieval thought is a lost term used to refer to the period between Late Antiquity and the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and a range of intellectual endeavour that embraces the arts of the trivium and the quadrivium, as well as the other branches of philosophy. It suggests that the British academic contribution to the study of medieval thought has been substantial but not very distinctive.

Anabaptism: Abortive Counter-Revolt Within the Reformation

1957 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell H. Zuck
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation

Within the past thirty years a painstaking literature has been produced by the descendants of the sixteenth century Anabaptists, mostly Mennonites, in an effort to replace the traditional European interpretation of Anabaptism as fanaticism beginning with the revolutionary mystic, Thomas Muentzer, and ending with the revolutionary polygamous debacle at Muenster in Westphalia ten years later. Thus were the Anabaptists discredited for centuries by Lutheran and Reformed theologians within the majority churches of Europe, the American Anabaptist historians say.

Unity and Diversity in the Church of the Fourth Century

1996 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Andrew Louth
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Look Back ◽  
The Church

To look back to the early Church as a theologian and historian, and ask questions about her unity, is to enter on a long tradition, which goes back at least to the Reformation, if not to the Great Schism of 1054 itself. Once the Church had split, the various separated Christians looked back to justify their position in that tragedy. They scoured the early sources for evidence for and against episcopacy, papacy, authority confided to tradition or to Scripture alone: they questioned the form in which these early sources have come down to us - the sixteenth century saw reserves of scholarly genius poured into the problem, for instance, of the genuineness of the Ignatian correspondence, and what fired all that, apart from scholarly curiosity, was the burning question of the authenticity of episcopal authority on which Ignatius speaks so decisively. Out of that the critical discipline of patristics emerged. It was, in fact, rather later that the fourth century became the focus of the debate about the unity, authority, and identity of the Church - Newman obviously springs to mind and his Arians of the Fourth Century (London, 1833) and his Essay on the Development of Doctrine (London, 1845). Later on, the fourth century attracted the attention of scholars such as Professor H. M. Gwatkin and his Studies in Arianism (Cambridge, 1882), and Professor S. L. Greenslade and his Schism in the Early Church (London, 1953), and in quite modern times Arianism, in particular, has remained a mirror in which scholars have seen reflected the problems of the modern Church (a good example is the third part of Rowan Williams’s Arius: Heresy and Tradition [London, 1987], though there are plenty of others). Continental scholars such as Adolf von Harnack also studied the past, informed by theological perspectives derived from the present; in a different and striking way Erik Peterson turned to the fourth century to find the roots of an ideology of unity that was fuelling the murderous policies of Nazism. In all these cases the fourth century seemed to be a test case ‒ for questions of modern ecclesiology: Rome defended by development in the case of Newman, the justification for the ecumenical movement in the case of Greenslade.

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