Representing and Misrepresenting the History of Puritanism in Eighteenth-Century England

2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 205-218
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram

An Englishman living during the mid-eighteenth century would have known that his country had been, at least since the late sixteenth century, a decidedly and, for the long-foreseeable future, an unalterably Protestant nation. But what sort of Protestant nation? One that needed a legally estabhshed church? And, if so, what sort of church should that church as established by law be? Did it, for instance, necessarily require a certain kind of church government? In its relation to the English state, did the church need to be the senior, equal or junior partner? And what rights, if any, should those not conforming to the estabhshed church have? These were vexing questions, and the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars had mostly been an intra-Protestant fight over them. Yet neither those internecine religio-political wars nor the subsequent political revolution of the late seventeenth century had resolved definitively any of the fundamental questions about church and state raised originally by the sixteenth-century religious Reformations. Those who had lived through the Sacheverell crisis, the Bangorian controversy or the fiercely anti-clerical 1730s recognized this all too well: historians, alas, have not.

Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.


1912 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 79-115
Author(s):  
Edward Tanjore Corwin

The decades clustering about the year 1700 were unusually important in reference to the subsequent ecclesiastical history of New York. The previous history of the Church in that province, except during the political episode of the Leisler troubles, had been comparatively tranquil; but in the decades alluded to, new elements were introduced and complications ensued, which modified all former conditions, and caused not a little friction in ecclesiastical affairs down to the Revolution. Nevertheless, new phases of Christian activity were also thereby developed, which became very influential; and the discussions which ensued clarified the atmosphere in reference to the proper relations of Church and State and prepared the way for their separation. In order to get a proper background for the consideration of the period alluded to, permit a brief reference to some antecedent conditions.


1970 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Baker

‘No portion of our annals’, Macaulay wrote in 1828, ‘has been more perplexed and misrepresented by writers of different parties than the history of the Reformation’. In the early years of the nineteenth century, when polemicists turned to history more often than to philosophy or theology, the Reformation was the subject most littered with the pamphlets of partisan debate. Macaulay could have cited numerous examples. Joseph Milner's popular History of the Church of Christ (1794–1809) set the Reformation in sharp contrast to the ‘Dark Ages’ when only occasional gleams of evangelical light could be detected, thus providing the Evangelical party with a historic lineage; Robert Sou they, in his Book of the Church (1824), presented a lightly-veiled argument for the retention of the existing order of Church and State as established in the sixteenth century; and in 1824 William Cobbett began the first of his sixteen weekly instalments on a history of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, in order to call attention to the plight of labourers in the British Isles. In the history of the Reformation, duly manipulated (‘rightly interpreted’), men found precedents for their own positions and refutation of their opponents' arguments.


1989 ◽  
Vol 121 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. E. Marrison

Mrs. Jacob has provided us with a translation, for the first time in English, of the most important text in classical Cambodian literature, with an introduction and critical notes and lists, which will be of great help to anyone studying the Cambodian text. The Cambodian Rāmāyaṇa was composed anonymously by at least three authors over three centuries, and is divided into two parts. The earliest writer, of the sixteenth century, accounts for about a fifth of the first part, covering the main events of the Bālakāṇḍa and Ayodhyakāṇḍa. It was continued in the seventeenth century with the story up to Rāvaṇa's assembling the remnants of his army for the final battle with Rāma: but Rāvaṇa's death, the rescue of Sītā and her trial by fire, and the triumphant return to Ayodhya, are all missing. The second part of the Cambodian Rāmāyaṇa relates those events from the Uttarakāṇḍa which deal specifically with the later history of Rāma and Sītā: her second rejection and exile, the birth of their two sons, the meeting again, and Sītā's going down into the earth. This part is believed to have been composed in the eighteenth century.


Costume ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Arch

As a concept, the idea of product branding offers insights into the history of uniform in Britain. The creation of a brand, by which a product is understood and recognised by its name, fits the cultural history of the red coat, that part of his uniform by which the British infantryman was known for over three hundred years. While the earliest references to the redcoat in this context occur in the sixteenth century, it is really from the eighteenth century onwards that the term becomes widely employed to denote the soldier. However, a review of royal portraiture in Britain from the late seventeenth century onwards also reveals that monarchs used the red coat as a way of uniting the ideals of patriotism with the monarch — a device that was particularly important for the Hanoverian dynasty. Both literature and the visual arts helped identify the red coat as a synonym for the soldier. Numerous references may be adduced, from Jane Austen writing of polite society, to Rudyard Kipling's Tommy. Lady Elizabeth Butler was perhaps the most famous artist to depict red-coated heroes in battles, which marked the defence or development of the Empire.


1961 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 214-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. M. Holt

The period of nearly three centuries which lies between Selīm I's overthrow of the Mamluk sultanate in 1517, and Bonaparte's landing at Alexandria in 1798 is one of the most obscure in the history of Muslim Egypt. For the latter part of the period, from the early twelfth/eighteenth century, there are ample materials for the reconstruction of the political history in the famous chronicle by Jabartī. The Ottoman invasion, and the years which immediately succeeded it have also received some attention, thanks to the detailed information provided by the chronicler Ibn Iyās. In contrast, there has been virtually no investigation of the last seventy-five years of the sixteenth century and the whole of the seventeenth.


Zograf ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 115-129
Author(s):  
Branislav Todic

The history of the iconostasis in the central nave of the church in Decani can be divided into two periods. The icons of Christ, the Mother of God, John the Baptist and St. Nicholas on the original altar screen, painted around 1343, were related to the relics of King Stefan Decanski and with the wall painting in the church space in front of the altar. The removal of those icons at the end of the sixteenth century and their replacement with new ones explains the strengthening cult of St. Stefan Decanski. In 1577 an icon of St. Stephen was placed over the king?s portrait depicted in the fourteenth century fresco painting, and by 1593/1594, the new despotic icons of Christ and the Virgin were painted for the iconostasis, then an expanded Deesis that was placed above them, with a large cross fixed on the top. The central icons were painted by the painter Longin, and the cross is attributed to Andreja, a painter known for his frescoes from the seventh and eighth decade of the seventeenth century.


1993 ◽  
Vol 28 (112) ◽  
pp. 352-358
Author(s):  
Alan Ford

There is a marked difference between the history of the Church of Ireland in the sixteenth century and in the early seventeenth century. The historian of the early Reformation in Ireland has to deal with shifting religious divides and, in the Church of Ireland, with a complex and ambiguous religious entity, established but not necessarily Protestant, culturally unsure, politically weak, and theologically unselfconscious. By contrast, the first part of the seventeenth century is marked by the creation of a distinct Protestant church, clearly distinguished in structural, racial, theological and political terms from its Roman Catholic counterpart. The history of the Church of Ireland in the first four decades of the seventeenth century is therefore primarily about the creation of this church and the way in which its new structures and exclusive identity were shaped.


1968 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toivo Harjunpaa

Liturgical questions have never aroused wider public interest and more intense emotions in the history of Sweden and Finland than they did during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The Reformation movement was fully seventy years old in Sweden before that nation became definitely and officially committed to the Confessional Standard of Lutheranism. The Augsburg Confession was accepted by the Church and State in Sweden and Finland in 1593 as a binding religious symbol. The developments which led to this final settlement in Sweden need a brief presentation since they are in many ways related to liturgical matters.


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