Clerical Marriage and the English Reformation

1992 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Josef Carlson
Keyword(s):  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Acting Out ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Standard View ◽  
Religious Conservatism ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Right

The abolition of clerical celibacy in England was, according to its first great modern student, Henry Charles Lea, “a process of far more intricacy than in any other country which adopted the Reformation.” Since Lea wrote, historians have come to accept an outline of that process. According to this standard view, it was Henry VIII, acting out of his own personal conservatism, who retained and defended mandatory celibacy in the first stage of the English Reformation. Once the king had died and his leaden foot was removed from the brake, the clergy were able to overwhelm ineffective conservative opposition in the Edwardian government and legalize clerical marriage. The gains of the Edwardian years gave way before the reaction of the Marian period, and they were not reinstated after Mary's death because of the anticonnubial tastes and religious conservatism of Elizabeth I. Throughout this period, so the story goes, the clergy (a majority of them, at least) struggled for the right and privilege of marriage, only to find royal resistance (except briefly under Edward VI) impossible to overcome.This traditional outline is misleading in several respects. Elizabeth I's attitude toward the marriage of the clergy is far more complex than has been recognized. Specific regulations of such unions developed from her desire to establish an ordered church worthy of popular respect and cannot simply be ascribed to a general, almost pathological, personal distaste for marriage or quirky personal religious views.

Calvin's Influence on the Theology of the English Reformation

Ecclesiology ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-341
Author(s):  
Martin Davie
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
The Church ◽  
Westminster Assembly

AbstractThis paper traces the influence of John Calvin on the English Reformation from the time of the breach with Rome under Henry VIII until the great ejection of dissenting puritan clergy from the ministry of the Church of England in 1662. It argues that Calvin's teaching only began to have an impact on the English Reformation during the reign of Elizabeth I and that although his theology had a widespread impact on both individuals and groups within the Church of England it never shaped the Church's official doctrine, liturgy or pattern of ministry, although it seemed likely that this would be the case at the time of the Westminster Assembly in the 1640s. It also raises the question of whether Calvin sought episcopacy from the Church of England in the reign of Edward VI.

The Reformation in Anglicanism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alec Ryrie
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The State ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
English National Identity ◽  
Prayer Books ◽  
The Church

The outline of the English Reformation under Henry VIII and the later Tudors is no longer heavily contested. While politically led and slow to take root, it eventually took shape as a decisively Reformed Protestant, even Calvinist, Reformation with a stress on the doctrine of predestination, even though Cranmer retained some traditional trappings in his Prayer Books. Terms such as ‘Anglican’ and ‘via media’ ought not to be applied to the Church of England before 1662. However, that church’s subjugation to the state and the central position it acquired in English national identity helped to sow the seeds of later Anglican distinctiveness. The Reformation’s legacy for modern Anglicans is divisive, and it is used dishonestly, as a weapon, by all sides. This is in part because the true extent of its popularity in its own time remains open to dispute.

English Reformation

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stella Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Royal Supremacy ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Church ◽  
Political Decisions

Fifteenth-century England was solidly Catholic, 17th-century England predominantly Protestant: the difference between them constituted the English Reformation. Scholarly opinion is divided about the nature of the changes that happened in the 16th century, the rate at which they occurred in town and country and from region to region, and whether they came about because of a series of political decisions imposed “from above” by the Tudor monarchs from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I or as the expression of popular religious fervor welling up “from below.” Henry’s reign (1509–1547) witnessed the formal break with Rome, the declaration of royal supremacy over the church in England, and the plundering of the nation’s monastic wealth, but official promotion of more overt expressions of Protestantism had to wait for the brief reign of Edward VI (1547–1553). Mary I (reigned 1553–1558) reversed the policies of her father and brother, thereby placing England at the forefront of Catholic attempts to stem the Protestant tide. The long reign of Elizabeth (1558–1603) witnessed the emergence of an Anglican via media between the Catholic and Puritan extremes on the English ecclesiastical spectrum.

Hooker's Doctrine of the Eucharist

1963 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Parris
Keyword(s):  
English Reformation ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Historical Importance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right ◽  
Secondary Interest

‘The doctrinal history of the English Reformation’, writes J. Brilioth, ‘is only of secondary interest; it contains little creative originality, much imitation and compromise. But the problem of the Eucharist took a prominent place from the very start.’ Indeed, he postulates a ‘special Anglican Eucharistic type’, stemming from the Reformation period. It is with the formulation of the doctrine of the Eucharist in the writings of Richard Hooker that this study is concerned. Hooker is regarded as ‘par excellence the apologist of the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 and perhaps the most accomplished advocate that Anglicanism has ever had’. And since it is maintained that ‘the typical Anglican doctrine of the Eucharist was fashioned in the period between Hooker and Waterland’, Hooker's historical importance for the understanding of Anglican Eucharistic teaching is obvious. Not that Hooker's teaching was normative for his successors, for there were deviations both to the ‘left’ and, more notably, to the ‘right’, especially under the Caroline divines. But Hooker's influence was important for the evolution of the ‘central’ churchmanship that was to be most characteristic of the Anglican Church.

Continental Students and the Protestant Reformation in England in the Sixteenth Century

1979 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 35-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Cross
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Major Change ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Swiss German ◽  
New Information ◽  
The University

Recent studies have demonstrated the insularity of Oxford and, by inference, Cambridge in the later middle ages; far from the two universities being regarded as centres of international scholarship the presence there of students from the continent seems to have been something of a rarity. In the sixteenth century a series of only loosely connected events, Henry VIII’s break with the papacy, and, somewhat later, the explicitly protestant government of Edward VI which happened to coincide with the victory of the imperial forces in Germany brought about a major change in the university world: continental protestant theologians now looked at England with new eyes, seeing it not only, as is well known, as a haven for persecuted protestant leaders, but also as a suitable centre of education for their young men. The first English exiles who went abroad for the sake of their religion in the reign of Henry VIII reinforced by the far greater number who fled from the Marian persecution made no secret of their belief in the vast superiority for the advancement of protestantism of the continental schools, especially those of Strassburg, Zurich and Geneva, but a group of contemporary Swiss, German, and French students adopted a rather different attitude. To them the English universities offered opportunities they did not have at home. One or two aspired to even higher realms and nourished ambitions of influencing thecourseof the religious settlement in England. A fresh account of their experiences in England from the later years of Henry VIII to the death of Elizabeth I may reveal new information on a rather less familiar aspect of the relationship between the great continental reformers and the English reformation.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosamund Oates
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
James I ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Turbulent Times ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
The Church

Tobie Matthew (c.1544–1628) lived through the most turbulent times of the English Church. Born during the reign of Henry VIII, he saw Edward VI introduce Protestantism, and then watched as Mary I violently reversed her brother’s changes. When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, Matthew rejected his family’s Catholicism to join the fledgling Protestant regime. Over the next sixty years, he helped build a Protestant Church in England under Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. Rising through the ranks of the Church, he was Archbishop of York in the charged decades leading up to the British Civil Wars. Here was a man who played a pivotal role in the religious politics of Tudor and Stuart England, and nurtured a powerful strain of Puritanism at the heart of the established Church....

Devotion, Discontent, and the Henrician Reformation: The Evidence of the Robin Hood Stories

2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Field
Keyword(s):  
Social Institution ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Robin Hood ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Local Parish ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Masses

The relationship between popular religious attitudes and the English Reformation has long been the subject of a fierce historical debate. The older “Whig-Protestant” view, championed most notably by A. G. Dickens, draws on evidence for clerical corruption and the spread of Lollardy to show that large numbers of English people were dissatisfied with the state of Catholicism, eager for religious change, and on the whole receptive to Protestant ideas. According to this version of events, Henry VIII and the Reformation Parliament rode a wave of popular discontent in breaking from Rome and dissolving the monasteries. If there was a split between the king and the masses, it came only later when Henry's conservative religious beliefs caused him to attempt to retain much of the substance of Catholicism in the face of popular clamor for more thoroughgoing reform. On the other hand, the “revisionist” camp, which includes such well-known names as J. J. Scarisbrick, Christopher Haigh, and Eamon Duffy, prefers to cite evidence from wills, local parish records, liturgical books, and devotional texts to show that “the Church was a lively and relevant social institution, and the Reformation was not the product of a long-term decay of medieval religion.” In this view, Henry VIII and his advisors pushed through a personally advantageous but widely disliked and resisted Reformation.An examination of the religious content of the tales men and women told about Robin Hood in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries offers a fresh perspective on this long-running dispute.

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