‘Truth Never Needed the Protection of Forgery’: Sainthood and Miracles in Robert Hegge’s ‘History of St. Cuthbert’s Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Dunholme’ (1625)

2011 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 270-283
Author(s):  
Sarah Scutts
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Religious Polemic ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Church

Robert Hegge’s ‘History of St. Cuthbert’s Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Dunholme’ was one of many texts produced in the early modern period which portrayed and assessed the Anglo-Saxon Church and its saints. This Protestant antiquarian work fits into a wider tradition in which the medieval past was studied, evaluated and employed in religious polemic. The pre-Reformation Church often played a dual role; as Helen Parish has shown, the institution simultaneously provided Protestant writers with historical proof of Catholicism’s league with the Antichrist, while also offering an outlet through which to trace proto-Protestant resistance, and thereby provide the reformed faith with a past. The Anglo-Saxon era was especially significant in religious polemic; during this time scholars could find documented evidence of England’s successful conversion to Christianity when Pope Gregory the Great sent his missionary, Augustine, to Canterbury. The See of Rome’s irrefutable involvement in the propagation of the faith provided Catholic scholars with compelling evidence which not only proved their Church’s prolonged existence in the land, but also offered historic precedent for England’s subordination to Rome. In contrast, reformed writers engaged in an uneasy relationship with the period. Preferring to locate the nation’s Christian origins in apostolic times, they typically interpreted Gregory’s conversion mission as marking the moment at which Catholic vice began to creep into the land and lay waste to a pure primitive proto-Protestant faith. In order to legitimize the establishment of the Church of England, Catholicism’s English foundations needed to be challenged. Reformers increasingly placed emphasis upon the existence of a proto-Protestant ‘strand’ that predated, but continued to exist within, the Anglo-Saxon Church. Until the Norman Conquest, this Church gradually fell prey to Rome’s encroaching corruption, and enjoyed only a marginal existence prior to the Henrician Reformation in the 1530s. Thus Protestants had a fraught and often ambiguous relationship with the Anglo-Saxon past; they simultaneously sought to trace their own ancestry within it while exposing its many vices. This paper seeks to address one such vice, which was the subject of a principal criticism levied by reformers against their Catholic adversaries: the unfounded creation and veneration of saints. Protestants considered the degree of significance the medieval cult of saints had attached to venerating such individuals as a form of idolatry, and, consequently, the topic found its way into countless Reformation works. However, as this essay argues, reformed attitudes towards sainthood could often be ambivalent. Texts such as Hegge’s prove to be extremely revealing of such ambiguous attitudes: his own relationship with the saints Cuthbert, Oswald and Bede appears indistinct and, in numerous instances, his understanding of sanctity was somewhat contradictory.

Past Belief

2019 ◽  
pp. 13-40
Author(s):  
Anthony Grafton
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Saint Augustine ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Early History ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Royal Road ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Church

This chapter examines the centrality of early modern ecclesiastical history, written by Catholics as well as Protestants, in the refinement of research techniques and practices anticipatory of modern scholarship. To Christians of all varieties, getting the Church's early history right mattered. Eusebius's fourth-century history of the Church opened a royal road into the subject, but he made mistakes, and it was important to be able to ferret them out. Saint Augustine was recognized as a sure-footed guide to the truth about the Church's original and bedrock beliefs, but some of the Saint's writings were spurious, and it was important to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. To distinguish true belief from false, teams of religious scholars gathered documents; the documents in turn were subjected to skeptical scrutiny and philological critique; and sources were compared and cited. The practices of humanistic scholarship, it turns out, came from within the Catholic Church itself as it examined its own past.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
Early Modern English Literature ◽  
The Church

This pioneering handbook offers a comprehensive consideration of the dynamic relationship between English literature and religion in the early modern period. The years from the coronation of Henry VII to the death of Queen Anne were turbulent times in the history of the British Church—and produced some of the greatest devotional poetry, sermons, polemics, and epics of literature in English. The early modern interaction of rhetoric and faith is addressed in forty chapters of original research, divided into five sections. The first analyses the changes within the Church from the Reformation to the establishment of the Church of England, Puritanism, and the rise of Nonconformity. The second section discusses ten genres in which faith was explored, such as poetry, prophecy, drama, sermons, satire, and autobiographical writings. The third section focuses on individual authors, including Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton. The fourth section examines a range of communities in which writers interpreted their faith: lay and religious households, including Quakers and other sectarian groups, clusters of religious exiles, Jewish and Islamic communities, and settlers in the New World. The fifth section considers key topics in early modern religious literature, from ideas of authority and the relationship of body and soul, to death, judgement, and eternity. The handbook is framed by an introduction, a chronology of religious and literary landmarks, a guide for new researchers in this field, and a bibliography of primary and secondary texts relating to early modern English literature and religion.

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, Volume X

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern Philosophy ◽  
Annual Series ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Selection Of

Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy is an annual series, presenting a selection of the best current work in the history of early modern philosophy. It focuses on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the extraordinary period of intellectual flourishing that begins, roughly, with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. It also publishes work on thinkers or movements outside of that framework, provided they are important in illuminating early modern thought. The core of the subject matter is philosophy and its history. But the volume’s chapters reflect the fact that philosophy in the early modern period was much broader in its scope than it is currently taken to be and included a great deal of what now belongs to the natural sciences. Furthermore, philosophy in the period was closely connected with other disciplines, such as theology, law and medicine, and with larger questions of social, political, and religious history. Volume 10 includes chapters dedicated to a wide set of topics in the philosophies of Thomas White, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume.

Changing Thegns: Cnut's Conquest and the English Aristocracy

1984 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharin Mack
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Edward The Confessor

England was conquered twice in the eleventh century: first in 1016 by Cnut the Dane and again in 1066 by William Duke of Normandy. The influence of the Norman Conquest has been the subject of scholarly warfare ever since E.A. Freeman published the first volume of his History of the Norman Conquest of England in 1867—and indeed, long before. The consequences of Cnut's conquest, on the other hand, have not been subjected to the same scrutiny. Because England was conquered twice in less than fifty years, historians have often succumbed to the temptation of comparing the two events. But since Cnut's reign is poorly documented and was followed quickly by the restoration of the house of Cerdic in the person of Edward the Confessor, such studies have tended to judge 1016 by the standards of 1066. While such comparisons are useful, they have imposed a model on Cnut's reign which has distorted the importance of the Anglo-Scandinavian period. If, however, Cnut's reign is compared with the Anglo-Saxon past rather than the Anglo-Norman future, the influence of 1016 can be more fairly assessed.

scholarly journals “When the King Goeth a Procession”: Chapel Ceremonies and Services, the Ritual Year, and Religious Reforms at the Early Tudor Court, 1485–1547

2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Kisby
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Court ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Fundamental Fact ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Royal Household

There is general agreement now that the court of Henry VIII and his father wasthecenter of politics, patronage, and power in England. It is also well understood how access to the king—the sole font of that power—and the ability to catch “either his ear or his eye” headed, to a large extent, the agenda of any ambitious courtier. Patronage is a theme that has accordingly dominated the historiography of the Tudor royal household, and indeed this is one of the two major concerns of court historians of the early modern period in general. Ceremony is the second, and the Tudor court has been the focus of study in this respect too, as the work of Jennifer Loach and Sidney Anglo attests. Yet while the occasional ceremonies of state (funerals, coronations, royal entries) and of “spectacles” (revels, pageants, and plays) have been the subject of detailed investigation, those that took place on a regular basis exclusively within the physical confines of the royal houses have received very little attention. Consequently historians have failed to notice a fundamental fact of which all courtiers were aware: that, by the early Tudor period and quite probably well before, the weekly routine of ceremony at the English court was structured by the liturgical calendar and thus dominated by religious culture.It is possible that this historiographical lacuna has arisen because the history of the chief organ of religious ceremonial in the royal household—the chapel royal—has largely been neglected.

scholarly journals Towards a New History of European Sport

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 487-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Tomlinson ◽  
Christopher Young
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
European Commission ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
European Identity ◽  
Potential Contribution ◽  
Sports History ◽  
Everyday Activity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The European Commission has invested much symbolic capital in sport's potential contribution to European identity, recently stating ‘that sport has a role in forging identity and bringing people together’. Yet such claims must be strongly qualified. Whilst sport is conspicuously present in Europe as an everyday activity, it is elusively variegated in its social and cultural forms and impacts, and historically informed scholarship points to a more sophisticated approach to the understanding of the subject. At the same time, national histories – conceived largely within national frameworks – hold sway in the field of sports history. There is little truly comparative work and this lack allows the European Commission to put out its statements unchallenged. This article proposes a number of ways in which European sports history might be conceived comparatively. It outlines four different models of European sport (British, German, Soviet, Scandinavian), whilst highlighting the problems inherent in such modelling; argues for greater historical depth (e.g. the importance of Italy in the early modern period); warns against the dangers of presentism (e.g. highlighting the proximity of dance and gymnastics in earlier periods); challenges the hegemony of British sport; and champions the cause of a serious consideration of Eastern Europe.

The Puritans

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David D. Hall
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Cultural Changes ◽  
Transatlantic History ◽  
Oliver Cromwell ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Movement ◽  
The Church

This book is a sweeping transatlantic history of Puritanism from its emergence out of the religious tumult of Elizabethan England to its founding role in the story of America. Shedding critical new light on the diverse forms of Puritan belief and practice in England, Scotland, and New England, the book provides a multifaceted account of a cultural movement that judged the Protestant reforms of Elizabeth's reign to be unfinished. The book describes the movement's deeply ambiguous triumph under Oliver Cromwell, its political demise with the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, and its perilous migration across the Atlantic to establish a “perfect reformation” in the New World. It examines the tribulations and doctrinal dilemmas that led to the fragmentation and eventual decline of Puritanism. It presents a compelling portrait of a religious and political movement that was divided virtually from the start. In England, some wanted to dismantle the Church of England entirely and others were more cautious, while Puritans in Scotland were divided between those willing to work with a troublesome king and others insisting on the independence of the state church. The book traces how Puritanism was a catalyst for profound cultural changes in the early modern Atlantic world, opening the door for other dissenter groups such as the Baptists and the Quakers, and leaving its enduring mark on what counted as true religion in America.

Naughty Printed Books

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Scott Kastan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Scholarly Discussion ◽  
The Church

TheIndex librorum prohibitorum, first issued in 1559, the Roman Catholic Church’s official effort to ban certain books, is often contrasted with John Milton’sAreopagitica, so often claimed the foundational text of a modern notion of freedom of expression. But the opposition is more a function of a modern desire than of historical fact. The two texts do not so much display this reassuring opposition as their unnerving similarity. This article examines and attempts to undo some of the oppositions that have structured most of the scholarly discussion on the subject of censorship: Catholic versus Protestant, state versus individual, repression versus freedom. All of these play their role in an undeniably appealing history of liberty and toleration, but it is not a history that has much purchase in early modern England, as may be shown by a consideration of the efforts of the Church and authorities in England to prevent the circulation of what they called “naughty printed books.”

NATURALISMS

Think ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (56) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Amanda Bryant
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Scientific Attitudes

The word ‘naturalism’ has a bewildering array of uses in philosophy. Roughly speaking, it connotes pro-scientific attitudes and approaches. This article introduces the subject of naturalism by sketching a history of pro-scientific attitudes and approaches in philosophy, from their origins in the early modern period through to the present day. It then distinguishes a number of distinct families of naturalism: metaphysical, logico-linguistic, epistemological, and methodological. The resulting taxonomy encompasses a plurality of loosely related views rather than a number of variations on a single clear and unified theme.

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