The English Reformation Revisited

1996 ◽  
Vol 4 (18) ◽  
pp. 446-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity Heal

I was asked by the Society to provide an introduction to current historical thinking about the English Reformation in the first talk to the 1995 Conference. The ensuing lecture was deliberately intended to provide guidance through the minefield of controversy about the success of Reformation for those with only limited knowledge of sixteenth-century history. Debates about the Reformation have always been of obvious importance to both theologians and historians: they have usually in the past been profoundly influenced by confessional ideologies. In the last thirty years the nature of the questions asked about Reformation has undergone marked change: specifically the issue of popular religious belief and practice has assumed a centrality it never before possessed. But new questions have not brought closer agreement on the nature of religious change, and in recent years fierce debate has continued to rage on such issues as the vitality of late medieval Catholicism, the popularity of the early reformers and the motives of Henry VIII and his successors. Some, at least, of these controversies are still bound up with Protestant, Catholic and Anglican identities in the late twentieth century. Since the continuities between past and present were the theme of last year's Conference, I have touched on these identities, but have left it to others, especially Dr Rowell and Dr Rex to make these connections more explicit.

1985 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 394-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Haigh

Twenty years ago, when Patrick McGrath was writing Papists and Puritans, it made sense to present the history of Tudor Catholicism in terms of early decline and later heroic recovery. Our understanding of the sixteenth century was then dominated by two books, which seemed to demonstrate revolutions in religion and government that breached all continuities in ecclesiastical and political history. In A. G. Dickens's The English Reformation, an increasingly sophisticated laity, discontented with the moral laxity and spiritual torpor of the late medieval clergy, was shown to have accepted with enthusiasm the break with Rome and the new doctrines of Protestantism. Gentlemen, lawyers, merchants and artisans responded to the energetic evangelism of the early reformers, and abandoned medieval obscurantism. Secular and ecclesiastical politicians espoused reform for their own calculations of expediency or experience of spirituality, and threw the weight of the state behind the new doctrines, while conservatives lacked the commitment and imagination to resist change.


2005 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-115
Author(s):  
RONALD H. FRITZE

Religious life and English culture in the Reformation. By Marjo Kaartinen. Pp. vii+210. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. £45. ISBN 0 333 96924 3Preaching during the English Reformation. By Susan Wabuda. Pp. xx+203 incl. 15 figs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. £40. ISBN 0 521 45395 XAuthority and consent in Tudor England. Essays presented to C. S. L. Davies. Edited by G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn. Pp. x+301. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2002. £47.50. ISBN 0 7546 0665 1Keywords and concepts provide important organising principles when historians attempt to make sense of the past. Some keywords are virtual constants of historical discourse, such as ‘continuity’ and ‘change’, although the relative emphasis that historians place on them can fluctuate with circumstances and fashion. Other terms come and go. The study of the English Reformation is no exception to the ebb and flow of historical keywords. For much of the 1960s, 1970s and the early 1980s, ‘popular reformation’ was a central concept of interpretation and research. But no more. Thanks to the historical fashion which has been styled ‘revisionism’, ‘popular reformation’ in early sixteenth-century England at least is widely considered to be an oxymoron. Consequent on the work of A. G. Dickens, ‘official’ or ‘state-sponsored reformation’ went into an eclipse but with the advent of revisionism it has been both revived as well as revised.


2004 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Higgins

Within the theoretical framework of Roland Barthes's writings on myth and ideology, this essay seeks to expose the historical legitimation project through which the mythmaking, universalizing rhetoric of musical genius that has long surrounded the figure of Ludwig van Beethoven came to infiltrate scholarship on Josquin des Prez, culminating in his late twentieth-century apotheosis. Contextualizing the composer's reception history with respect to the debates between Joseph Kerman and Edward Lowinsky in 1965 and especially the 1971 Josquin Festival-Conference, the author suggests that the ideological refashioning of Josquin in the image of Beethoven has simultaneously shaped and derailed the intellectual trajectory of early music scholarship in the past thirty years. By privileging a discourse of musical genius in the service of which, among other concerns, the canon of works attributed to the composer is being decimated beyond historical recognition, the richness and complexity of the musical culture of which he was a vital part risks being overshadowed and obfuscated by the disproportionate amount of attention invested in his singular accomplishments. The essay advocates a resolute historicization of sixteenth-century discourses of creative endowment, a critical reassessment of the role of authentication scholarship in Josquin studies, and a renewed sensitivity to the imbrication of mythologies of musical genius in music historiographies of both the past and the present.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-44
Author(s):  
Barbara Baert

Die eingefassten Gärten oder horti conclusi der Augustiner-Schwestern von Mechelen in Belgien stammen aus dem frühen 16. Jahrhundert und bilden einen außergewöhnlichen Teil des spätmittelalterlichen Kulturerbes. Aufgrund von mangelndem Verständnis und Interesse sind die meisten eingefassten Gärten verloren gegangen. Nicht weniger als sieben dieser Gärten sind allerdings bis in das späte 20. Jahrhundert in ihrem ursprünglichen Kontext erhalten geblieben: Der kleinen Gemeinschaft der Augustiner-Schwestern in Mechelen. Gleich ›schlafenden Schönheiten‹ sind sie in den Zellen der Schwestern als Hilfestellung bei der Andacht verborgen geblieben. In meinem Beitrag stelle ich diese Gärten vor als eine Symbolisierung des Paradieses und der mystischen Unio, als ein Heiligtum der Verinnerlichung, als eine Sublimierung des sensorium (insbesondere des Geruchs), als Gartenbau, der im Prozess der Entstehung Sinn gewinnt und als ein Paradigma des Nests </br></br>The early sixteenth-century Enclosed Gardens or horti conclusi of the Augustinian Hospital Sisters of Mechelen, Belgium, form an exceptional part of late medieval world heritage. Most Enclosed Gardens have been lost, through the ravages of time exacerbated by lack of understanding and interest. No fewer than seven Enclosed Gardens, however, were preserved until the late twentieth century in their original context: the small community of Augustinian nuns in Mechelen. Like ›sleeping beauties‹, they remained secluded in the sisters’ rooms as aids to devotion. In this paper I discuss these gardens as a symbolisation of Paradise and the mystical union, as a sanctuary for interiorisation, as a sublimation of the sensorium (particularly smell), as horticulture that gains meaning in the making process and as a paradigm for the nest.


1963 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 392-414
Author(s):  
Claus-Peter Clasen

The problem of a possible continuity of late medieval heresies and sixteenth century sects in Switzerland and Germany has not been thoroughly investigated yet. Of course some historians have touched upon the problem. Thus in 1886 Ludwig Keller advanced the thesis that Anabaptism was closely connected with the Waldensian tradition. Recently a Marxist historian, Gerhard Zschäbitz, pointed out that certain ideas of the Hussite tradition had infiltrated Anabaptism in Thuringia. On the whole, however, it is assumed that medieval heresies did not survive the fifteenth century. The sixteenth century German sects are considered a product of the Reformation. This is implying that the Reformation constituted a complete break with the past and opened an altogether new age. It hardly needs pointing out that this is a hazardous assumption. It is rather hard to believe that heresies, which had secretly lived on in certain towns and villages for one or two hundred years should suddenly have died out by 1500.


1990 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 335-344
Author(s):  
Susan Wabuda

‘Mistress Glover … you are a woman hearty in God’s cause’, wrote Nicholas Ridley in 1555 to Mary Glover of Baxterley in JL? JL Warwickshire. Hearing that her husband had been incarcerated ‘for God’s word sake’, and that ‘old father Latimer is your uncle’, Ridley commended her own zealous commitment to the reformed faith, and her assistance of others: ‘… you be hearty in God’s cause, and hearty to your master Christ, in furthering of his cause and setting forth his soldiers to his wars to the uttermost of your power’. In the past twenty-five years we have begun to determine why women on the Continent and in England were attracted to, encouraged, or inhibited the spread of religious change, but there is still much to be done to understand the role of individual women and women generally during the Reformation. Mary Glover, despite her association with prominent figures, is almost unknown to historians. The purpose of this paper is to describe a type of patronage which had important local and national implications, and a distinct role exercised by Mary Glover and others in the sixteenth and following centuries: the practical assistance which women offered to itinerant preachers.


What did it mean to be a man in Scotland over the past nine centuries? Scotland, with its stereotypes of the kilted warrior and the industrial ‘hard man’, has long been characterised in masculine terms, but there has been little historical exploration of masculinity in a wider context. This interdisciplinary collection examines a diverse range of the multiple and changing forms of masculinities from the late eleventh to the late twentieth century, exploring the ways in which Scottish society through the ages defined expectations for men and their behaviour. How men reacted to those expectations is examined through sources such as documentary materials, medieval seals, romances, poetry, begging letters, police reports and court records, charity records, oral histories and personal correspondence. Focusing upon the wide range of activities and roles undertaken by men – work, fatherhood and play, violence and war, sex and commerce – the book also illustrates the range of masculinities that affected or were internalised by men. Together, the chapters illustrate some of the ways Scotland’s gender expectations have changed over the centuries and how, more generally, masculinities have informed the path of Scottish history


Author(s):  
James Tweedie

This chapter introduces the concept of the “archaeomodern” and its connection to the aging of the quintessential modern medium of film. It sketches the historical and cultural background of the archaeomodern turn in the late twentieth century, including the development of an obsession with the past in the heritage industry and the rise of postmodernism. It then discusses two phenomena from the 1980s and 1990s—a mannerist or baroque revival, and the development of media archaeology—that complicate the habitual association between tradition and the past or modernity and the future. The introduction suggests that archaeomodern cinema was characterized by the return to failed or abandoned modern experiments and other relics from the modern past.


1996 ◽  
pp. 415-426
Author(s):  
Joseph Dan

This chapter examines the third century of hasidism, considered the most enduring phenomenon in Orthodox Judaism in modern times. Gershom Scholem described hasidism as the ‘last phase’ in a Jewish mystical tradition that spanned nearly two millennia. Yet at the conclusion of his account of the movement in the last chapter of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, he appeared, with some regret, to view his subject as a phenomenon of the past. The contrast between this view of hasidic history and the reality of Jewish life in the late twentieth century could not be greater. The hasidism of today cannot be treated as a lifeless relic from the past. It appears to have made a complete adjustment to twentieth-century technology, the mass media, and the intricate politics of democratic societies without surrendering its traditional identity in the process.


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