Ecclesiastical Representation in Parliament in Post-Reformation Scotland: The Two Kingdoms Theory in Practice

1999 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALAN R. MacDONALD
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Two Kingdoms

Jean Calvin, in his Institutes of the Christian religion, wrote that ‘there is a twofold government of man; one aspect is spiritual…the second is political…. There are in man, so to speak, two worlds, over which different kings and different laws have authority’. He emphasised this further by stating that ‘we must keep in mind that distinction which we previously laid down so that we do not (as commonly happens) unwisely mingle these two, which have a completely different nature’. The idea of the separation of spiritual and temporal jurisdictions was, of course, no post-Reformation innovation but had been a theme over centuries of conflict between popes and secular princes throughout Europe. With the fragmentation of western Christendom in the sixteenth century, the issue came to prominence within individual states, not least Scotland. As early as 1559, during the civil war which led to the Reformation, a letter to the regent, Mary of Guise, from ‘the professouris of Christis ewangell’ mentioned two ‘kingdomes’. It asserted that there was ‘ane kingdome temporall’ and ‘Christis kingdome’, the Kirk, and that the former ought to be ruled by ‘mortell men’ and the latter by Christ alone. The regent was described as ‘ane servand and na quein havand na preheminence nor authoritie above the kyrk’.

scholarly journals Belief in the Reformation Era: Reflections on the State of Confessionalization

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-52
Author(s):  
Helmut Puff
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Francois Rabelais ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
French Writer ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Long Chain ◽  
Divine Order

That Christian religion pervaded many, if not most, aspects of life in sixteenth-century Europe, even the lives of those who were not Christian, is undisputed. “From birth to death stretched a long chain of ceremonies, traditions, customs, and observances, all of them Christian or Christianized, and they bound a man in spite of himself, held him captive even if he claimed to be free,” as Lucien Febvre remarked in 1942 inThe Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. Most everyone, including the French writer François Rabelais—the subject of Febvre's study—understood their own existence within the divine order. Accordingly, “a world without God” made little or no sense. Even if,paceFebvre, early modern people occasionally entertained the idea that there was no God, individuals rarely faced charges of atheism, as Francisca Loetz has shown. Our task in researching early modern religion is, then, to chart religious thought, practice, and experience as a complex and capacious phenomenon—its scope, shape, contours, and dynamics.

Broken Promises and the Rise of a Stereotype

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koji Yamamoto
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Political History ◽  
Negative Image ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Balance Of Trade

Projects began to emerge during the sixteenth century en masse by promising to relieve the poor, improve the balance of trade, raise money for the Crown, and thereby push England’s imperial ambitions abroad. Yet such promises were often too good to be true. This chapter explores how the ‘reformation of abuses’—a fateful slogan associated with England’s break from Rome—came to be used widely in economic contexts, and undermined promised public service under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. The negative image of the projector soon emerged in response, reaching both upper and lower echelons of society. The chapter reconstructs the social circulation of distrust under Charles, and considers its repercussions. To do this it brings conceptual tools developed in social psychology and sociology to bear upon sources conventionally studied in literary and political history.

‘The healthe of my soule’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Clark
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Family ◽  
Kinship Relations ◽  
Royal Supremacy ◽  
The Church

Throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, the Howards are usually described as religiously ‘conservative’, resisting the reformist impulse of the Reformation while conforming to the royal supremacy over the Church. The women of the family have played little part in this characterization, yet they too lived through the earliest stages of the Reformation. This chapter shows that what we see is not a family following the lead of its patriarch in religious matters at this early stage of the Reformation, but that this did not stop them maintaining strong kinship relations across the shifting religious spectrum.

Communicatio Idiomatum

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Cross
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Divine Attributes ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
Comprehensive Account ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Communicatio Idiomatum

This book offers a radical reinterpretation of the sixteenth-century Christological debates between Lutheran and Reformed theologians on the ascription of divine and human predicates to the person of the incarnate Son of God (the communicatio idiomatum). It does so by close attention to the arguments deployed by the protagonists in the discussion, and to the theologians’ metaphysical and semantic assumptions, explicit and implicit. It traces the central contours of the Christological debates, from the discussion between Luther and Zwingli in the 1520s to the Colloquy of Montbéliard in 1586. The book shows that Luther’s Christology is thoroughly Medieval, and that innovations usually associated with Luther—in particular, that Christ’s human nature comes to share in divine attributes—should be ascribed instead to his younger contemporary Johannes Brenz. The discussion is highly sensitive to the differences between the various Luther groups—followers of Brenz, and the different factions aligned in varying ways with Melanchthon—and to the differences between all of these and the Reformed theologians. And by locating the Christological discussions in their immediate Medieval background, the book also provides a comprehensive account of the continuities and discontinuities between the two eras. In these ways, it is shown that the standard interpretations of the Reformation debates on the matter are almost wholly mistaken.

scholarly journals ERASMUS AND JUAN LUIS VIVES ON RHETORICAL DECORUM AND POLITICS

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
KAARLO HAVU
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
Rhetorical Theory ◽  
History Of Rhetoric ◽  
Rhetorical Situation ◽  
Internal Development ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

Abstract The article analyses the emergence of decorum (appropriateness) as a central concept of rhetorical theory in the early sixteenth-century writings of Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives. In rhetorical theory, decorum shifted the emphasis from formulaic rules to their creative application in concrete cases. In doing so, it emphasized a close analysis of the rhetorical situation (above all the preferences of the audience) and underscored the persuasive possibilities of civil conversation as opposed to passionate, adversarial rhetoric. The article argues that the stress put on decorum in early sixteenth-century theory is not just an internal development in the history of rhetoric but linked to far wider questions concerning the role of rhetoric in religious and secular lives. Decorum appears as a solution both to the divisiveness of language in the context of the Reformation and dynastic warfare of the early sixteenth century and as an adaptation of the republican tradition of political rhetoric to a changed, monarchical context. Erasmus and Vives maintained that decorum not only suppressed destructive passions and discord, but that it was only through polite and civil rhetoric (or conversation) that a truly effective persuasion was possible in a vast array of contexts.

The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in Renaissance Italy

1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. J. McNair
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
The One

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.

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