History of the Reformation of the Church of England

1965 ◽  
Vol s3-VII (169) ◽  
pp. 252-252
1980 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 483-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Collinson

With Professor Christianson, one can only deplore the paucity of books dealing with the history of the Church of England between the Elizabethan Settlement and the Civil War. With the exception of histories covering a somewhat longer time span, there has been no attempt at synthesis since Bishop W. H. Frere's The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (1904), which was part of a series answering to a semi-popular and general interest in the Church of England ‘as a factor in the development of national life and character’. It is remarkable and even scandalous that the greatly altered perspectives of twentieth-century historians are not reflected in a more recent and adequate account of the post-Reformation and pre-revolutionary Church. The Jacobean epoch is a particularly neglected subject, to which even Frere devoted no more than 100 of his 400 pages, giving it no particular shape or significance. Jacobean bishops of the calibre of Toby Matthew, James Montague and Thomas Morton were not even mentioned. Today that singular and exemplary figure, Arthur Lake, Laud's predecessor as bishop of Bath and Wells, is totally forgotten. The reason for our myopia is not very flattering to modern historiography. Unlike the Reformation of the Church of England, or the Elizabethan Church, the Jacobean Church was not a subject for Gilbert Burnet or for John Strype, and consequently (or so it seems) it is not a subject for us.


Author(s):  
Jean-Louis Quantin

In his History of the variations of the Protestant Churches, his major work of confessional controversy, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) made a genuine effort to use various primary sources. In the case of England, however, he chose to rely on a single authority, Gilbert Burnet’s (1643-1715) History of the Reformation of the Church of England, which was available to him in a recent French translation. This reflected Bossuet’s tactical determination to employ only authors whom his Protestant adversaries could not object to, but also his paradoxical affinities with Burnet, whose very political reading of the English Reformation fitted well with his own interpretation. Burnet, however, had included in his History a rich collection of records, which Bossuet studied and occasionally used to challenge Burnet’s main text. Although Bossuet’s interests remained those of a polemical divine, he spoke the language of historical erudition to assert his trustworthiness.


2004 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 268-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Mandelbrote

The letter of Scripture suffering various Interpretations, it is plain that Error may pretend to Scripture; the antient Fathers being likewise dead, and not able to vindicate themselves, their writings may be wrested, and Error may make use of them to back itself; Reason too being bypassed by Interest, Education, Passion, Society, &c…. Tradition only rests secure.The 1680s were a difficult decade for the English Bible, just as they were for so many of the other institutions of the English Protestant establishment. Roman Catholic critics of the Church of England, emboldened by the patronage of James II and his court, engaged in controversy over the rule of faith and the identity of the true Church, much as they had done in the early years of the Reformation or in the 1630s. Nonconformists and freethinkers deployed arguments drawn from Catholic scholarship, in particular from the work of the French Oratorian Richard Simon, and joined in ridicule of the Bible as a sure and sufficient foundation for Christian belief.


1974 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-37
Author(s):  
Philip Barrett

An important feature of the ecclesiastical history of the Church of England since the Reformation has been the unique and precious tradition of a choir of men and boys singing daily choral services in the cathedrals of this country. There have been several studies of this tradition and the music written for cathedral services, but there has not yet been a full account of cathedral choirs in the last century. There have been useful brief surveys by Owen Chadwick and Bernarr Rainbow, but these have been only parts of larger works whose main emphasis is elsewhere. Plenty of material exists, however, and the contemporary conditions which led S. S. Wesley to write his polemical pamphlet A Few Words on Cathedral Music in 1849 demand detailed investigation.


Author(s):  
Peter Doll

In this chapter the author argues that church buildings and their architecture influenced by the Oxford Movement cannot be understood apart from their essential grounding in the worship and self-understanding of the Church. This study sets the consideration of such church buildings in the wider context of the history of the Church of England both before and after the Reformation. The churches of the Church of England preceding and following the Oxford Movement articulate an Anglican sense of belonging to the Church universal and are thus a valuable contribution to the faith and witness of the Church far beyond the Anglican Communion.


Author(s):  
Charles Hefling

This book surveys the contents and the history of the Book of Common Prayer, a sacred text which has been a foundational document of the Church of England and the other churches in the worldwide community of Anglican Christianity. The Prayer Book is primarily a liturgical text—a set of scripts for enacting events of corporate worship. As such it is at once a standard of theological doctrine and an expression of spirituality. The first part of this survey begins with an examination of one Prayer Book liturgy, known as Divine Service, in some detail. Also discussed are the rites for weddings, ordinations, and funerals and for the sacraments of Baptism and Communion. The second part considers the original version of the Book of Common Prayer in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation, then as revised and built into the Elizabethan settlement of religion in England. Later chapters discuss the reception, revision, rejection, and restoration of the Prayer Book during its first hundred years. The establishment of the text in its classical form in 1662 was followed by a “golden age” in the eighteenth century, which included the emergence of a modified version in the United States. The narrative concludes with a chapter on the displacement of the Book of Common Prayer as a norm of Anglican identity. Two specialized chapters concentrate on the Prayer Book as a visible artifact and as a text set to music.


Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers

This chapter covers the publishing history of some of the main authors discussed in the book, the Congregationalists Isaac Watts, Philip Doddridge, and Elizabeth Rowe, the Methodists John Wesley and George Whitefield, and the Church of England evangelicals James Hervey, John Newton, and William Cowper; the publications of the major London dissenting booksellers, Edward and Charles Dilly, and Joseph Johnson; the printers and sellers for the smaller denominations, the Quakers and the Moravians; and some important provincial printers and sellers of religious books, Joshua Eddowes, Samuel Hazard, Thomas and Mary Luckman, Robert Spence, William Phorson, and John Fawcett.


Author(s):  
W. B. Patterson

In 1634 Fuller became the minister of the parish at Broadwindsor, in Dorset. This provided him the opportunity to know John White, the minister in nearby Dorchester. White, the spiritual and moral leader of the town became a pastoral model for Fuller. In this setting, Fuller wrote The Historie of the Holy Warre, the first English history of the Crusades. His use of medieval sources was extensive, and his analysis of the motives and tactics of western leaders is shrewd and persuasive. Elected to the clerical Convocation that met in 1640, during sessions of the first Parliament to be called in eleven years, Fuller dissented from the leadership of Archbishop William Laud, who sought to impose more stringent rules or canons on the Church of England. This Convocation, continuing to meet after Parliament was dissolved, passed canons whose legality was contested. War with the Scots ensued over religious issues, forcing the king to call what came to be known as the Long Parliament.


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