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.

Revisionism and the Irish Reformation A Rejoinder

2000 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 587-591
Author(s):  
BRENDAN BRADSHAW
Keyword(s):  
Prima Facie ◽  
The State ◽  
British History ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Large Sections

Karl Bottigheimer succeeds in consigning my study of the ‘English Reformation in Wales and Ireland’ to a genre of outmoded nationalist historiography by means of a distortingly reductionist account of it. In the first place, despite its title and large sections of the analysis, he assures the reader that its concern is simply the Reformation in Ireland. In fact it seeks to address a problem presented by the Reformation as a phase of what is variously called the ‘new British history’ or the ‘history of the Atlantic archipelago’, namely the contrasting outcome of the attempt to extend the state-sponsored reform of religion to the English crown's two Celtic borderland dominions, to Wales, where it succeeded, and to Ireland where it failed. Prima facie that outcome seems puzzling since it faced similar obstacles in both places, a deeply traditionalist society, remote from the intellectual currents that helped prepare the ground for the religious changes in England, and beyond the reach of effective government from the centre. Two questions arise therefore. How were these obstacles overcome in Wales, and since they proved surmountable there why not so in the case of Ireland?Second, Bottigheimer makes my explanation for the Irish outcome seem naively idealistic by representing it as attributing the failure totally to the pastoral zeal with which the Franciscan Observants campaigned against the change, and to the devotion of the Irish to ‘faith and fatherland’.

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.

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?

Remembering Wolsey

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Patrick Hornbeck II
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lord Chancellor ◽  
Papal Legate

Remembering Wolsey seeks to contribute to our understanding of historical memory and memorialization bexamining in detail the posthumous commemoration and representation of Thomas Wolsey, the sixteenth-century cardinal, papal legate, and lord chancellor of England. Its questions are at once historical and ethical. Analyzing the history of Wolsey’s legacy from his death in 1530 through the present day, this book shows how images of Wolsey have been among the vehicles through which historians, theologians, and others have contested the events known collectively as the English Reformation(s). Over the course of nearly five centuries, Wolsey has been at the center of the debate about King Henry’s reformation and the virtues and vices of late medieval Catholicism. His name and image have been invoked in a bewildering, and often surprising, variety of contexts, including the works of chroniclers, historians, theologians, dramatists, or more recently screenwriters. Cultural producers have often related the story of Wolsey’s life in ways that have buttressed their preconceived opinions on a wide variety of matters. The complex history of Wolsey’s representation has much to teach us not only about the historiography of the English Reformation but also about broader dynamics of cultural and collective memory.

Sword, Word and Strategy in the Reformation in Ireland

1978 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan Bradshaw
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Satisfactory Explanation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

The single most intriguing problem posed by the history of the Reformation in Ireland is the failure of the state-sponsored religion to take root in any section of the indigenous population. Perhaps because this outcome has been taken so much for granted a satisfactory explanation of it has yet to be offered. Historians are now coming to recognize that the central question cannot be properly discussed without a prolegomenon ranging over the political, social and intellectual history of the period. What follows is intended as a contribution to such a series of preliminary studies. It investigates the sources of tension within reforming circles in sixteenth-century Ireland and considers the implications of this aspect of its internal history for the external history of the movement.

A. G. Dickens as a Yorkshire historian

2004 ◽  
Vol 77 (195) ◽  
pp. 111-126
Author(s):  
Claire Cross
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Local Context ◽  
History Of Religion ◽  
International History ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

AbstractFor thirty years after graduating from Oxford in 1932 Dickens, a devoted Yorkshireman, produced a stream of articles on the intellectual, social and political history of the county in the sixteenth century, which culminated in 1959 in his pioneering work Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York, 1509–58. After leaving Hull for London in 1962 he never found a county in the south of England to replace Yorkshire in his affections, and moved from the history of the Reformation in its local context to concentrate upon the national and international history of religion in the early modern period.

A Reappraisal of William Tyndale's Debt to Martin Luther

1962 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. J. Trinterud
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Christian Humanism ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

The colorful and powerful figure of Martin Luther dominates all study of the early years of the Reformation. Inevitably the first pages of the history of the Reformation in any region will begin with an effort by the author to trace the manner in which Luther's influence reached that area. In the study of the English Reformation one of the common ways of showing Luther's influence is to point to the work of the Bible translator William Tyndale. Numerous books on the English Reformation, on the history of the English Bible, and on Tyndale himself, have made of him a follower and an interpreter of Luther who played a major role in introducing the thought of the great reformer into England. A careful study of Tyndale's works, however, will show that his debt to Luther, and the “Lutheranism” of his views, has been over-stated. Tyndale, like many early sixteenth century religious reformers, made much use of Luther's name, fame, and works but without becoming a follower of those distinctive ideas of the German reformer which set him off from the other advocates of reform at the time. Tyndale's greatest debt was first to Christian humanism and then to the German-Swiss reformers of Zurich and Basel.

The development of the movement for the communist labour at the Tyumen shipbuilding plant in days of the seven-year plan (1959-1965): the experience of microhistorical study

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-172
Author(s):  
Sergey S. Pashin ◽  
Natalia S. Vasikhovskaya
Keyword(s):  
Political History ◽  
The State ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Industrial Enterprise ◽  
State Archive ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
History Of

The article is devoted to the study of the movement for communist labour at the Tyumen Shipbuilding Plant during the period of the seven-year plan (1959-1965). The authors seek to fill a historical narrative with the particular facts connected with the peculiarities and specifics of such phenomenon as the movement for communist labour. They consider it in the context of microhistory and as the most important element of production routine. The employees of the largest industrial enterprise of Soviet Tyumen — Shipbuilding Plant in concrete historical circumstances came under the spotlight of the authors. The submitted article is written with attraction of a wide range of archival documents, taken from the funds of the State Archive of the Tyumen Region and also funds of the State Archive of Socio-Political History of the Tyumen Region. Having studied the documents the authors come to conclusion that the movement for communist labour had little effect on the production progress of the plant employees.

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