Religious Instruction for Children and Adolescents in the Early English Reformation

1984 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippa Tudor

In an article published inPast and Presentsome years ago, Professor Strauss drew attention to an area of activity that early sixteenth-century reformers considered to be of vital importance - evangelical effort amongst the young. The overwhelming impression left by this article and by a subsequent full-scale study of the indoctrination of the young in the German Reformation is that – in Professor Strauss's terms – failure, not success, was the dominant note.

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-29
Author(s):  
Stephanie Thomson ◽  
Katie Barclay

Through an analysis of a large corpus of sixteenth-century wills and testaments, this article explores Englishwomen’s end-of-life religious patronage a site for the production of family identity and memory, and as a mechanism by which family and faith were woven together. It considers both the influence of the family on women’s post-mortem piety, and their role as executrices for their husbands. In doing so, it argues that women were integral to producing the commemorative practices that ensured their families’ immortality, and that these practices were in turn an important means by which religious practice and belief were renegotiated and refigured during the early English Reformation.


1974 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dewey D. Wallace

It has typically been said of the English Reformation that the doctrine of unconditional predestination (that is, predestination without foreknowledge of merit or repentance but soley as an act of God's will to redeem some of mankind as a manifestation of grace) was neither emphasized nor of central importance until the “Genevan” influence of the returning Marian exiles and the wide dissemination of Calvin's writings in England after the accession of Elizabeth. It is the purpose of this article to show that, (1) a soteriologically rooted doctrine of unconditional predestination of the type characteristic of the so-called “Rhineland Reformers” was central to key figures of the early English Reformation, was accepted and expressed by many other leaders and theological writers of the English Reformation prior to the accession of Mary and was upheld by important and influential continental divines resident in England; (2) the doctrine of predestination in the English Reformation had been developed to the point of reprobation and double predestination and frequently expressed as such before 1553; (3) while this predestinarian emphasis in English Protestant theology was to a large extent the result of the influence of the continental Reformation, it had been received prior to the return of the Genevan exiles and the pervasive influence of Calvin in Elizabethan England. Thus the Genevan influence reinforced and further refined English predestinarian theology. It might be added that Calvin's influence ought not to be considered an unusually harsh one with respect to predestination; not only does Calvin follow the general pattern of earlier Reformed theology, but also does Reformed theology in the later part of the sixteenth century tend toward a more rigid and scholastic version of the doctrine quite apart from Calvin, whose real influence could well operate in the opposite direction, as the recent study by Brian Armstrong shows.


Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann

Mythographies were books that collected, explained, and interpreted myth-related material. Extremely popular during the Renaissance, these works appealed to a wide range of readers. While the European mythographies of the sixteenth century have been utilized by scholars, the short, early English mythographies, written from 1577 to 1647, have puzzled critics. The first generation of English mythographers did not, as has been suggested, try to compete with their Italian predecessors. Instead, they made mythographies into rhetorical instruments designed to intervene in topical debates outside the world of classical learning. Because English mythographers brought mythology to bear on a variety of contemporary issues, they unfold a lively and historically well-defined picture of the roles myth was made to play in early modern England. Exploring these mythographies can contribute to previous insights into myth in the Renaissance offered by studies of iconography, literary history, allegory, and myth theory.


1951 ◽  
Vol 10 (03) ◽  
pp. 204-212
Author(s):  
S. R. Searle

Although the subject of probability is of such vital importance to insurance, no great detailed study was given to it until the sixteenth century. This was nearly two thousand years after the world's first insurance venture, that of Antimenes on behalf of Greek slave-owners against loss of their slaves (the early Greeks had also a good system of marine insurance). As in many fields of study, the early students of probability met with a great deal of opposition, which must have extended well into the nineteenth century, judging from the evidence of de Morgan's book of 1838.


2019 ◽  
pp. 157-190
Author(s):  
J. Patrick Hornbeck

Chapter 5 takes as its starting point the premiere of Robert Bolt’s historical play about the life of Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons. It goes on to consider Wolsey’s representation in academic writings and influential historical fictions in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. The chapter explores the five biographies of the cardinal that appeared during this period, discussing at the same time how Wolsey has been represented in the broader historiography of the early reign of Henry VIII. While revisionists of the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated little interest in Wolsey, their discoveries about the early English Reformation have shaped the most recent academic representations of the cardinal. At the same time, however, some of the most influential representations of Wolsey in the past half-century have been fictional. Therefore, the chapter also analyzes Bolt’s play, the controversial television drama The Tudors, and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall novels.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
J. Patrick Hornbeck

This chapter introduces the subject of the book, namely, the myriad ways in which Thomas Wolsey has been represented and commemorated since his death in 1530. His name and image have been invoked in a bewildering, and often surprising, variety of contexts, including retellings of the early English Reformation and narratives about the development of British democracy. It enumerates the major purposes for which cultural producers have told the story of Wolsey’s life, and situates this book’s contribution within recent scholarly discussions about collective memory and mnemohistory. The chapter distinguishes between mnemohistory and reception history and further describes how the terms memory, commemoration, and representation will be used throughout the book. It illustrates the book’s mnemohistorical method with a case study about the representation of Wolsey as obese. Finally, it previews the arguments of the chapters that follow.


2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Webster Newbold

Abstract Two noteworthy and successful vernacular rhetoric manuals printed in sixteenth-century England are actually writing manuals, books on how to compose letters: William Fulwood's The Enimie of Idlenesse (1568), and Angel Day's The English Secretorie (1586). Both works reflected and sought to influence literacy habits in the book-reading public, and reveal a wider range of cultural engagement than has previously been thought. In particular, three aspects are likely to have stirred reader interest: a connection for vernacular learners with both the humanist and dictaminal epistolary traditions that formed the core of prestige education; a focus on practical letter exchanges that carry familial and social significance; and a large collection of model letters, in which readers would have found exemplary discourse coupled with proto-fictional and amatory elements that could be enjoyed as entertainment. Understanding the varied appeals of these two books helps us fill out the larger picture relating to how vernacular literacy was valued, developed, and applied.


1971 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 327-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie P. Fairfield

Sixteenth-Century Englishmen were not frequently given to self-scrutiny—at least not in writing. This was a disinclination which they shared with their medieval forbears, since autobiography was not a very common form of literary activity in the Middle Ages. Monastic self-analysis, sub specie aeternitatis and guided by the standard categories of virtues and vices—yes. Coherent study of the self, for its own sake and in all its quirks and idiosyncracies—scarcely ever. In the early sixteenth century, the murmur of new ideas from Italy did begin to touch England: a sense of distance and of difference between the present and the past, and an awakened appreciation for the discrete, the singular in human personality.


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