Varieties of Uniformity: The First Century of the Church of Ireland

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 105-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aidan Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Head Of State ◽  
Sufficient Cause ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Change Of Perspective ◽  
The Church

The historiographical background to this paper is provided by a recent dramatic change of perspective in the study of the Reformation in Ireland. Traditionally the failure of Protestant reform has been explained in ways that amounted to determinism. In its crudest expression, this involved the self-sufficient premise that the Catholic faith was so deeply ingrained in the Irish as to be unshakable. More subtly, it assumed a set of equations, of Protestantism with English conquest and Catholicism with national resistance, that acted to consolidate the faith. In the 1970s, these simplicities were questioned. Dr Bradshaw and Dr Canny argued that religious reform had made sufficient headway in its initial phase to suggest that the replacement of Catholicism by Protestantism was at least within the bounds of possibility, and raised a fresh question; why did this not happen? That the debate which followed was inconclusive was due in part to an inability to shake off an old habit of circular thought, so that the issue has remained one of deciding whether Protestantism failed because Catholicism succeeded, or Catholicism succeeded because Protestantism failed. Both Dr Robinson-Hammerstein, when she observed that ‘Ireland is the only country in which the Counter-Reformation succeeded against the will of the Head of State’, and Dr Bottigheimer, when he insisted that the failure of the Reformation must ‘concentrate our attention on the nature and limits of political authority’, implied that what needs to be explained is how actions were deprived of their effect. The alternative possibility is that the actions themselves were inherently ineffectual. The premise of this paper is that the failure of Protestantism and the success of Catholicism were the necessary condition, but not the sufficient cause, of each other, and its object is simply to recall attention to the existence of very practical reasons why the Church of Ireland should have evolved as it did in the hundred years or so between the first and second Acts of Uniformity, that is, from an inclusive Church, claiming the allegiance of the entire community, to one that excluded all but a privileged minority.

Lord Deputy Chichester and the English Government’s ‘Mandates Policy’ in Ireland, 1605–1607

1991 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 320-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
John McCavitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Protestant Clergy ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

One of the liveliest debates in recent early modern Irish historiography has concerned the ‘failure’ of the Reformation in Ireland and when this occurred. Originally Professor Canny took issue with Dr. Brendan Bradshaw on this topic. Canny rejected Bradshaw’s thesis that the Reformation had failed in Ireland by 1558 and argued that counter-reformation catholicism only triumphed in the nineteenth century. Other contributions were then made to the debate by Dr. Alan Ford and later Karl Bottigheimer. Ford considered the 1590–1641 period as crucial, while Bottigheimer favoured the early seventeenth century as the key era. In the light of the work of Ford and Bottigheimer, Canny reconsidered the issue in an article published in 1986. He rejected what he believed to be Ford’s overly-pessimistic assessment that the Church of Ireland clergy soon despaired of the Reformation’s success in the seventeenth century. Instead, it is contended, Protestant clergy and laymen alike were optimistic that penal prosecution might still pave the way for considerable advances at this time. Moreover, Canny further argued that Ford was ‘mistaken in treating the clergy as an autonomous group and mistaken also in allowing excessive influence to ideology as the determinant of policy’.

Select document: Catholic ownership of tithes: a County Wexford widow’s dispensation, 1595

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (162) ◽  
pp. 336-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Mac Cuarta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Rural Population ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
Ecclesiastical Authority ◽  
Agricultural Produce ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

AbstractDown to the mid-nineteenth century, the rural population in Ireland was obliged by law to contribute to the upkeep of the Church of Ireland clergy by means of tithes, a measure denoting a proportion of annual agricultural produce. The document illustrates what was happening in the late sixteenth century, as separate ecclesial structures were emerging, and Catholics were beginning to determine how to support their own clergy. Control of ecclesiastical resources was a major issue for the Catholic community in the century after the introduction of the Reformation. However, for want of documentation the use of tithes to support Catholic priests, much less the impact of this issue on relationships within that community, between ecclesiastics and propertied laity, has been little noted. This text – a dispensation to hold parish revenues, signed by a papally-appointed bishop ministering in the south-east – illustrates how the recusant community in an anglicised part of Ireland addressed some issues posed by Catholic ownership of tithes in the 1590s. It exemplifies the confusion, competing claims, and anxiety of conscience among some who benefited from the secularisation of the church’s medieval patrimony; it also preserves the official response of the relevant Catholic ecclesiastical authority to an individual situation.

From Venetian Visitor to Curial Humanist: The Development of Agostino Steuco's “Counter“-Reformation Thought*

1994 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald K. Delph
Keyword(s):  
Church Reform ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Spiritual Crisis ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

The study of Italian humanism in the age of the Reformation has focused almost exclusively on the relationship between humanism and the Italian Spirituali. This emphasis can be traced back to the many works of Delio Cantimori. Cantimori persistently argued that humanism, with its emphasis on scriptural studies, philology, and spiritual and ecclesiastical renewal promoted evangelical spirituality and church reform among Italians. He saw the Spirituali—many of whom were humanists—as pious, devout individuals caught between their own evangelical convictions and the traditions of a spiritually unsatisfying and morally corrupt ecclesiastical system. It was the dynamics of this spiritual crisis, fueled by the clash between evangelism and the doctrines of the church, that formed the basis of many of Cantimori's works on humanism and reform in Italy.

scholarly journals Unholy Territory

2020 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 526-549
Author(s):  
David van der Linden
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Safe Haven ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
The Hague ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

Abstract This article studies the mission of French Discalced Carmelite friars in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Established from 1647 onwards in The Hague, Leiden, and Amsterdam, the missionaries’ aim was to minister to the French-speaking Catholics of Holland, but they also sought to convert expatriate French Protestants as part of the wider Counter-Reformation campaign to win back souls lost to the Reformation. Despite conflict with the Walloon churches, however, the Carmelite mission was surprisingly successful in converting Huguenots to the Church of Rome, repatriating many of them to France in the wake of the Revocation. As such, this article sheds new light on the relationship between expatriate communities in Holland, arguing that the Dutch Republic was not only a safe haven for refugees, but also the scene of ongoing conflict between French Protestants and Catholics during the reign of Louis XIV.

Notes On Persons's “Memorial for the Reformation Of England” (1596)

1959 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
T.H Clancy
Keyword(s):  
Council Of Trent ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Face ◽  
Imperfect Knowledge ◽  
The Church ◽  
Insight Into

The late Harold Laski, in a letter to O. W. Holmes, characterized Persons’s Jesuit’s Memorial as “the most cold-blooded plot for exterminating opponents known outside St. Bartholomew.” On the face of it, this tends to confirm the suspicion which was expressed by Holmes in this very correspondence, and which reviewers have voiced since the letters were published, that Laski often wrote about books of which he had a very imperfect knowledge. And yet there is a sense in which the Jesuit’s Memorial is cold blooded, iust as the whole Counter-Reformation was in a certain sense cold-blooded. Whenever the Church is faced with a new challenge she must tighten up her lines of discipline and ruthlessly prune certain: venerable practices and customs or at least establish an order of priority among them. Many view with distaste the mentality engendered by the Council of Trent. It would be well, however, to try and see what the Counter-Reformation was trying to do before we condemn it. And for a real insight into the Counter Reformation spirit few books can equal the Jesuit’s Memorial.

The Church of Ireland: a critical bibliography, 1536–1992 Part I: 1536–1603

1993 ◽  
Vol 28 (112) ◽  
pp. 345-352
Author(s):  
James Murray
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
The State ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Irish Context ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Church

One of the things which has united historians across the generations when writing about the Reformation in its Tudor Irish context is the conviction that the state was ultimately unsuccessful in securing the allegiance of the indigenous population to its religious dictates. Where this agreement has broken down, and continues to break down, is in the significance attached to the Tudor state’s failure, and in determining precisely when it became apparent.Until the end of the 1960s most examinations of sixteenth-century Ireland identified the Tudor failure as being synonymous with the practical and absolute failure of the Protestant Reformation. These studies were generally characterised by a partipris approach and by their employment of an interlinked and deterministic vision to explain this failure. Echoing the observations of contemporaries like Archbishop Loftus of Dublin, who spoke of the Irish people’s ‘disposition to popery’, writers of all religious persuasions saw the Reformation’s failure as an inevitable consequence of the inherently conservative character of the island’s inhabitants.

Church and Chapelry in Sixteenth-Century England

1979 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 279-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Kitching
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Great Difficulty ◽  
Entire Population ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Harvest Time ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

The church has always experienced great difficulty in ministering to those dwelling in the remotest parts of its parishes. In this paper I shall look briefly at how the sixteenth century church coped with the problem, and attempt to answer two questions: what facilities for worship were available in outlying districts, and what was the impact of the reformation changes upon them?Chapels abounded in England on the eve of the reformation. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that wherever he lived a parishioner could, without an unreasonably arduous journey, reach a place where mass was sung or said. Quite apart from matters of spiritual and moral discipline, it was important for very practical reasons that he should be able to get quickly to church. Disaster could take hold in villages and townships if the entire population had set off on a long hike to a remote parish church and was unlikely to return for some hours. Moreover, the length of the hike determined the extent of the diversion of labour from other pursuits, notably in the fields at harvest time: indeed, this was to influence government rulings on the number of saints’ days to be observed by the laity.

Catholic Revival in the Eighteenth Century

1990 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 99-108
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
American Scholar ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

In his famous essay on von Ranke‘s history of the Popes, Thomas Babington Macaulay remarked that the ‘ignorant enthusiast whom the Anglican Church makes an enemy… the Catholic Church makes a champion’. ‘Place Ignatius Loyola at Oxford. He is certain to become the head of a formidable secession. Place John Wesley at Rome. He is certain to be the first General of a new Society devoted to the interests and honour of the Church.’ Macaulay’s general argument that Roman Catholicism ‘unites in herself all the strength of establishment, and all the strength of dissent’, depends for its force on his comparison of the Catholic Regular Orders with the popular preachers of Nonconformity. As the son of a leader of the Clapham Sect, his witness in the matter has its interest for scholars of the Evangelical Revival, and has been echoed by Ronald Knox in his parallel between Wesley and the seventeenth-century Jesuit, Paolo Segneri, who walked barefoot 800 miles a year to preach missions in the dioceses of northern Italy. More recently the comparison has been drawn again by Owen Chadwick, with the judgement that the ‘heirs of the Counter-Reformation sometimes astound by likeness of behaviour to that found in the heirs of the Reformation’, and Chadwick’s volume on the eighteenth-century Popes contains some fascinating material on the resemblances between the religion of the peoples of England and of Italy. An historian of Spanish Catholicism has compared the Moravians and the mission preachers of eighteenth-century Spain, not least in their rejection of modern commercialism, while an American scholar has traced some of the parallels between nineteenth-century Protestant and Catholic revivalism in the United States. Not that Wesleyan historians have been attracted to study the great movements of revival religion in the Catholic countries in Wesley’s lifetime—a neglect which is hardly surprising. One point of origin of the Evangelical revival was among refugees from Roman Catholic persecution, and for all the popular confusion, encouraged by men like Bishop Lavington, between Methodists and Papists, and for all Wesley’s belief in religious toleration and tenderness for certain Catholic saints and devotional classics, he was deeply hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, as David Hempton has recently shown. Yet there are many points of likeness as well as difference between the enthusiasts of Protestant and Catholic Europe, and both these need to be declared if Catholics and Protestants are ever to attempt to write an ecumenical history.

scholarly journals Hermetiske reformationer i det 15.-16. århundrede

2018 ◽  
pp. 39-50
Author(s):  
Tim Rudbøg
Keyword(s):  
Martin Luther ◽  
English Abstract ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Singular Event ◽  
Event Based ◽  
The Church

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This article seeks to nuance the classic narrative of the Reformation in which Martin Luther is singled out and the Reformation, directly linked to Luther, is equally portrayed as a very specific singular event. Based on a perspective of pluralism this article shows that several reformative attempts inspired by Hermetism and the notion of a prisca theologia had already begun prior to Luther and was subsequently continued in connection with the Counter-Reformation and in other circles. Persons such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola and later heirs of Hermetism, are for example only very rarely mentioned directly in connection with the ongoing reformations of the Church. The reason why these persons are overlooked might be rooted in the concept of the Reformation itself and the Christian antipathy for the foreign pagan traditions by which these very persons sought to reform the Church. DANSK RESUME: Denne artikel forsøger at nuancere den klassiske fortælling om Reformationen, hvor alene Martin Luther bliver fremhævet, og hvor Reformationen direkte forbundet med Luther ligeledes er afbilledet som en meget specifik og enkeltstående begivenhed. Baseret på et pluralistisk perspektiv viser artiklen, at flere forsøg på reformation af den kristne kirke, inspireret af hermetisme- og prisca theologia-tanken, allerede var begyndt før Luther og fortsatte efterfølgende i forbindelse med modreformationen og i andre kredse. Personer som Marsilio Ficino og Pico della Mirandola samt senere hermetiske arvetagere bliver fx kun meget sjældent nævnt i direkte forbindelse med de fortsatte reformationer af kirken. Grunden, til at disse personer traditionelt bliver overset, er måske rodfæstet i selve reformationsbegrebet og den kristne antipati mod de fremmede hedenske traditioner, som netop disse personer forsøgte at reformere kirken med.  

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