The Woman in the Wilderness

2021 ◽  
pp. 12-46
Author(s):  
John Howard Smith
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
First Century ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
The Reformation

Medieval and early modern Christianity wrestled uncomfortably with Christianity’s fundamentally chiliastic nature. Just as first-century Christians strove to dissociate their religion from its radical Jewish roots in order to cultivate legitimacy, so did theologians of subsequent centuries strive to downplay apocalypticism in favor of vague millennialism. The magnetic imagery of the Book of Revelation gripped the popular imagination, with its compelling imagery of seven-headed beasts, Christ’s glorious return armed for the final battle with Satan, and descriptions of signs presaging the dawning of the Latter Day. Some theologians could not resist the lure of apocalyptic analysis, and many laypeople yearned to witness the events of Revelation, while others sought to play leading roles in bringing it on. The Reformation refreshed apocalyptic millennialism, and Calvinist Puritans from England transplanted this to the “New World,” which Massachusetts Bay–founder John Winthrop predicted would be a “city on a hill.”

Theological Constructions of Scottish National Identity

2019 ◽  
pp. 288-302
Author(s):  
Doug Gay
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
First Century ◽  
Public Theology ◽  
Theological Ethics ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
The Reformation

This chapter reflects theologically on the historical development of theological constructions of Scottish identity, considering disputed assessments of ‘nationalism’ in the light of insights from both political theology and theological ethics. It explores how early modern developments, from the Reformation through to the Unions of 1603 and 1707, continued to be reflected and refracted in nineteenth- and twentieth-century constructions. It traces the influence of two world wars, decolonization, and the end of the British Empire on the development of contested public theology accounts of Scotland’s twenty-first century history, in which arguments for devolution and independence continue to play a leading role.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Victoria Van Hyning
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth

The Introduction maps the landscape of the early modern English convents in exile, and situates the literature of the nuns of St Monica’s and Nazareth within a broader history of monastic literature and culture, medieval to modern, with emphasis on the period shortly after the Reformation, through to the late eighteenth century. The case studies at the heart of the subsequent five chapters are briefly outlined, and reveal a broad range of literary styles and motifs spanning epistolary, chorographical, confessional, and devotional expression, by anonymous as well as named authors. This section introduces the concepts of anonymous and subsumed autobiography, which trouble the still well established, if deeply contested, definitions of autobiography propounded by Philippe Lejeune. These new genres are informed by scholarship of the late twentieth and twenty-first century, devoted to the subjects of women’s writing, and autobiography, self- or life-writing.

scholarly journals Objects, Words, and Religion: Popular Belief and Protestantism in Early Modern England

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-145
Author(s):  
Joanna Ludwikowska
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Popular Belief ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
The Way

Abstract This article deals with selected aspects of popular belief in post-Reformation England as compared to the pre-Reformation popular tradition of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. Through a discussion of the politics of superstition and religiously-shaped concepts of reason in Early Modern England, this article discusses medicinal magic, and the power of objects and words in the context of religion and popular belief, focusing in particular on leprosy and exorcism. By examining the Protestant understanding of the supernatural as well as its polemical importance, the article investigates the perseverance of popular belief after the Reformation and outlines some of the reasons and politics behind this perseverance, while also examining the role of the supernatural in the culture of belief in Early Modern England by tracing the presence and importance of particular beliefs in popular imagination and in the way religion and confessional rhetoric made use of popular beliefs.

Shakespeare and Derivatives

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 83-96
Author(s):  
David Hawkes
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Financial Derivatives ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Popular Resistance ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Twenty First Century

The twenty-first century has witnessed the rise to power of images in every aspect of human endeavour. Speculative financial derivatives have achieved a predominant place in the economy, spin and perception rule the political sphere, and technological media ensure that we spend our lives surrounded by images of all kinds. Reading the works of Shakespeare reveals the roots of this process in the early modern period, when the iconoclasm of the Reformation, popular protests against usury, and the campaign against ritual magic combined to provide an ethically based popular resistance to the power of signs.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas I. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Michel De Montaigne ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Northern European ◽  
Political Conception ◽  
Legal Principle ◽  
Ethical Disposition

In academic debates and popular political discourse, tolerance almost invariably refers either to an individual moral or ethical disposition or to a constitutional legal principle. However, for the political actors and ordinary residents of early modern Northern European countries torn apart by religious civil war, tolerance was a political capacity, an ability to talk to one’s religious and political opponents in order to negotiate civil peace and other crucial public goods. This book tells the story of perhaps the greatest historical theorist-practitioner of this political conception of tolerance: Michel de Montaigne. This introductory chapter argues that a Montaignian insistence that political opponents enter into productive dialogue with each other is worth reviving and promoting in the increasingly polarized democratic polities of the twenty-first century.

Reading Revelations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Brownlee
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
End Point ◽  
Special Revelation ◽  
Good And Evil

This chapter explores the end-point of typological history, apocalypse. The discussion of the Book of Revelation focuses on the ways in which the ongoing struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism was filtered through an eschatological lens. Post-Reformation interpretation of this book claimed a special revelation, one that understood the historic juncture of religious change as the final battle between good and evil. Within this schema, the narratives and figures of Revelation became a mechanism to delineate Protestantism visually and ideologically from Catholicism. The work of Spenser, Dekker, and Middleton illuminates the extent to which drama and poetry participated in the extrapolation of Revelation’s meaning for the present. Yet these literary interpretations also highlight the intrinsic difficulty of reading Revelation’s apocalypse in relation to the early modern present, namely, the progression of time. These reimaginings of apocalypse question if the final typological uncovering will be perennially delayed.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
First Century ◽  
Philosophical Theology ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Metaphysics Of Time ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Impact

This Conclusion draws the study to a close, and recounts its developmental theses. The first thesis is that the complexity of positions on time (and space) defended in early modern thought is hugely under-appreciated. An enormous variety of positions were defended during this period, going far beyond the well-known absolutism–relationism debate. The second thesis is that during this period three distinct kinds of absolutism can be found in British philosophy: Morean, Gassendist, and Newtonian. The chapter concludes with a few notes on the impact of absolutism within and beyond philosophy: on twenty-first-century metaphysics of time; and on art, geology, and philosophical theology.

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