‘A Dose of Physick’: Medical Practice and Confessional Identity within the Household

2014 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 282-293
Author(s):  
Sophie Mann
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Medical Practices ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Family ◽  
Confessional Identity

In early modern England the place where most people experienced and treated illness was the home. Medical practices were therefore invariably centred on the family, and in many cases, sufferers diagnosed and nursed their ailments without seeking advice from a practitioner, instead favouring the counsel of a family member or friend. Centred on the personal transactions between patients, kin, neighbours, and in some cases a practitioner, how might the religiously plural context of the Reformation era have shaped these close social relationships? The subjects of this study belonged to two Catholic families: Nicholas Blundell (1669–1737) of Little Crosby in Lancashire, and Catharine Burton (1668–1714) of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. Focusing on the sickness experiences, lay healing practices and medical treatment described at length in their diaries, this essay asks three central questions. First, in what ways did confessionally opposed families integrate or separate from one another in relation to matters of health? Second, did these subjects forge more exclusive ties with medical practitioners of their own confession, or, conversely, did they find a way to coexist comfortably with, and interact in, the ‘medical marketplace’? Third, by examining the practices through which religion and medicine interrelated within the household, I aim to challenge longstanding assumptions concerning the progressive ‘secularization’ or ‘medicalization’ of the sickbed. I hope to shed fresh light on the ways in which medical practices were embedded in social relations and community experiences; and to begin to unravel some of the complex channels through which confessional identity was experienced and expressed in relation to healing.

Custom, Festival and Protest in Early Modern England: The Little Budworth Wakes, St Peter's Day, 1596

Rural History ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Hindle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Festive Culture ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The One

The myriad forms of ‘popular culture’ have attracted an increasing amount of attention from historians of early modern and modern England. Students of English social relations are now familiar with several episodes of ‘cultural conflict’ in which there was putative friction between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ (or ‘patrician’ and ‘plebeian’) notions of acceptable behaviour. As the epigraphs to this article suggest, two particular era of ‘cultural polarisation’ have attracted considerably more attention than any others. On the one hand, historians of the Reformation, and especially of its ‘enforcement’ in late Elizabethan and Jacobean local communities, have identified the suppression of traditional, festive culture as one of the ‘cultural reverberations’ of the spread of protestantism. On the other, Edward Thompson has encouraged students of eighteenth-century England to think in terms of a tension between ‘patrician society’ and ‘plebeian culture’, and of the possibilities that this ‘field of force’ raised for ‘class struggle without class’.

scholarly journals Domesticating the Reformation: Material Culture, Memory, and Confessional Identity in Early Modern England

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 566-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Walsham
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Status ◽  
Confessional Identity

AbstractThis article explores domestic artifacts that testify to the afterlife of the European Reformation in the British Isles. Focusing especially on decorated and commemorative delftware, it investigates how the memory of the Protestant past was appropriated and altered in the English context and how it infiltrated the household in the guise of consumer goods in which taste, piety, politics, and private sentiment were intertwined. It analyzes their changing meanings as they moved in space and time, examines their role in cementing and complicating senses of confessional identity, and probes the process of selective remembering and forgetting by which the Reformation acquired the status of a momentous event.

scholarly journals Speaking for the People in Early Modern England*

2019 ◽  
Vol 244 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Coast
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Common People ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
The People ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Voice

Abstract The voice of the people is assumed to have carried little authority in early modern England. Elites often caricatured the common people as an ignorant multitude and demanded their obedience, deference and silence. Hostility to the popular voice was an important element of contemporary political thought. However, evidence for a very different set of views can be found in numerous polemical tracts written between the Reformation and the English Civil War. These tracts claimed to speak for the people, and sought to represent their alleged grievances to the monarch or parliament. They subverted the rules of petitioning by speaking for ‘the people’ as a whole and appealing to a wide audience, making demands for the redress of grievances that left little room for the royal prerogative. In doing so, they contradicted stereotypes about the multitude, arguing that the people were rational, patriotic and potentially better informed about the threats to the kingdom than the monarch themselves. ‘Public opinion’ was used to confer legitimacy on political and religious demands long before the mass subscription petitioning campaigns of the 1640s.

Rethinking Iconoclasm in Early Modern England: the Case of Cheapside Cross

2000 ◽  
Vol 4 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 379-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Budd
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Traditional Beliefs ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Complex Variety ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

AbstractProtestant iconoclasm has generally been understood as an assault on the beliefs and practices of traditional religion. This article challenges that understanding through a detailed study of Cheapside Cross, a large monument that was repeatedly attacked by iconoclasts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It draws on contemporary pamphlets and the manuscripts records of the City of London to reveal the complex variety of associations that Cheapside Cross acquired before and during the Reformation era. It argues that perceptions of the monument were shaped not only by its iconography but also by its involvement in ceremonies and rituals, including royal coronation processions. The iconoclastic attacks on Cheapside Cross should be interpreted not merely as a challenge to traditional beliefs but as attempts to restructure the monument's associations. The paper concludes that attacks on other images may be understood in a similar manner.

Annotating the Golden Legend in Early Modern England

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 816-862
Author(s):  
Morgan Ring
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
History Of Reading ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Golden Legend

This article discusses annotations to some eighty surviving copies of William Caxton's “Golden Legend.” It assesses reactions from male and female readers across the religious spectrum, exploring the varied ways in which early modern readers engaged with a book that quickly became—and has remained—a shorthand for medieval religion. It seeks to contribute to the history of the “Legend” itself, to historical understanding of annotation, and to the history of reading during the Reformation.

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