Being, Belief, Comprehension and Confusion: An Exploration of the Assemblages of English Post-Reformation Parochial Religion

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jude Jones
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Activities ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
The People ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
The Many ◽  
Selection Of

The religious temperature of post-Reformation early modern England was constantly over-heating. Given that Protestant belief was frequently challenged by residual dissent, religious identity of whatever kind was crucial to both individual and parochial cosmological understanding. Hence, the many spatial, sensory, material and performative changes which were visited on parish churches over this period were designed to shape and redirect belief, but could also act to confuse believers. In order to penetrate this mass of religious reaction and response, I employ Assemblage Theory, particularly that of the political theorist, Jane Bennett, whose thinking is currently strongly influential amongst archaeologists. Using her work on the vitality of matter and the importance of the assemblage as a phenomenon containing material, non-material and human components, I apply a selection of her ideas to diagnostic elements of being and belief visible in the religious activities and materiality of the early modern parish church. While I refrain from discussing particular human individuals or groups, my chosen examples are intended to foreground the ontology of early modern parishioners, their perception of their hierarchical status within Anglican cosmology, their territorial conceptions of religious space and the workings of time as seen through the sequential assemblages of monumental tombs. Following Bennett, but departing from the current archaeological concentration on the primacy of materiality, this essay is designed to plug some of the people-shaped holes which are sometimes left unfilled by their surrounding material networks.

Resistance and Romans 13 in Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex

2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan McAnnally-Linz
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Literal Sense ◽  
Charles I ◽  
The People ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Governmental Power ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

AbstractThe many conflicts around the reformation of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries drew the problem of political resistance to the forefront of European political thought. Thinkers in all of the various religious camps considered scripture to be politically normative. Consequently, both pro- and anti-resistance thinkers from a variety of traditions had to engage with Romans 13:1–7, Paul's apparently definitive pronouncement in favour of obedience and, therefore, against resistance. The opponents of resistance could cite Romans 13 with fairly little explanation, but the resisters and revolutionaries faced the challenge of working with the text to draw different political conclusions from it without violating the ‘literal’ sense that they almost universally held to be authoritative. Some even aimed to bring Paul forward as a staunch supporter of the sort of violent political resistance they advocated.Lex, Rex, the political tract of seventeenth-century Scottish theologian Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661), represents a particularly comprehensive early modern justification for violent resistance against a political sovereign. Rutherford was a member of the party of the radical covenanters, who vehemently opposed the church reforms of Charles I and, when hostilities began, fervently supported the war against the king. This article explores the series of arguments, distinctions and theological moves that Rutherford employs to incorporate Romans 13 as a central supporting text for his pro-resistance argument. Among these are: the distinction between God's immediate institution of governmental power and the constitution of particular governments mediately through the people, the positing of a conditional covenant agreed upon at the constitution of any government, the scholastic distinction between voluntas beneplaciti and voluntas signi in the divine will, and the distinction between the royal office in abstracto and its concrete occupant. Using these and other arguments and distinctions, Rutherford constructs a conceptual apparatus that is able, to a great extent, to appropriate Paul's exhortation to obedience in the service of a justification of resistance. In so doing, Rutherford illustrates some of the array of theological and philosophical resources that early modern resistance theorists could marshal in support of their cause, while still maintaining their fundamental theological commitments.

‘More, I prithee, more’: Melancholy, Musical Appetite and Medical Discourse in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Iselin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
Musical Event ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Many

Pierre Iselin broaches the subject of early modern music and aims at contextualising Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s most musical comedies, within the polyphony of discourses—medical, political, poetic, religious and otherwise—on appetite, music and melancholy, which circulated in early modern England. Iselin examines how these discourses interact with what the play says on music in the many commentaries contained in the dramatic text, and what music itself says in terms of the play’s poetics. Its abundant music is considered not only as ‘incidental,’ but as a sort of meta-commentary on the drama and the limits of comedy. Pinned against contemporary contexts, Twelfth Night is therefore regarded as experimenting with an aural perspective and as a play in which the genre and mode of the song, the identity and status of the addressee, and the more or less ironical distance that separates them, constantly interfere. Eventually, the author sees in this dark comedy framed by an initial and a final musical event a dramatic piece punctuated, orchestrated and eroticized by music, whose complex effects work both on the onstage and the offstage audiences. This reflection on listening and reception seems to herald an acoustic aesthetics close to that of The Tempest.

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.

Ritual Time and Popular Expectations of Papal Rule in Early Modern Rome

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-49
Author(s):  
John M. Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
The Political ◽  
The People ◽  
The Future ◽  
Imminent Death ◽  
Early Modern Rome ◽  
The City

The political and ritual life of early modern Rome provided its inhabitants ample opportunities not only to express grievances with papal government but also to voice expectations of newly elected pontiffs. Three ritual moments in particular—each linked as a cycle related to the pope’s reign—looked toward the future. These were the papal election, the possesso (the newly elected pontiff’s procession to San Giovanni in Laterano), and the pope’s death. As the papal election commenced in the conclave, Romans communicated their hopes for a pontiff who would adhere to a traditional moral economy by keeping the city abundantly supplied with grain and other foodstuffs. The ceremonies connected to the possesso reinforced these concerns; during the pope’s procession from Saint Peter’s to San Giovanni, the people greeted him with placards, statues, and ritual shouts, which reminded him to uphold this sacred duty. A pope who failed to abide by this moral economy faced popular discontent. This took the form of murmuring and pasquinades that wished for his imminent death, thus anticipating an end to his odious reign and to the future freedoms of the vacant see, a time in which the machinery of papal government and justice halted, allowing the people to vocalize their anger. Immediately on the heels of the pope’s death came the papal election, starting the cycle anew. This paper will argue that the rhythms of papal government enabled the people to articulate their expectations of papal rule, both present and future, grounded in traditional paternalism.

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