Censorship and Sacred Drama

Author(s):  
Jan-Melissa Schramm

The programme of entertainment on offer on the English public stage at the dawn of the nineteenth century was notably secular. The cumulative effect of Tudor injunctions, early modern legislation, and Protestant taste had been to banish the representation of scriptural subjects from the stage. This regulatory framework was underpinned by anti-theatrical anxieties and prejudices popularized and seemingly confirmed by the Reformation, which continued to be felt into the nineteenth century. Indeed, the enactment of the Catholic Relief Act in 1829 and the subsequent return of Catholicism to a position of public and artistic prominence at mid-century seems to have enhanced Victorian concern about the potentially deleterious effects of Catholic materialism and visual art. The composition and regulation of sacred drama serve as a test case, then, to probe and expose nineteenth-century anxieties about the form in which apprehensions of God could legitimately be expressed.

Author(s):  
Katrina Jennie-Lou Wheeler

From the sixteenth through to the eighteenth centuries, Christians in Western Europe and North America celebrated Christmas in a variety of ways. Some of the practices or elements of celebration are familiar as they are still a part of many Christmas celebrations today, such as gift-giving, hospitality, feasting, singing, and decorating with greenery and Christmas trees. Other aspects of Christmas revelry were reduced during this period, as reformers in both the Protestant and Catholic Churches worked to rid the holiday of some of its excessive forms of festivity, such as misrule, social inversion, or superstitious practices. While in some areas, namely Scotland, England, and New England, radical reformers, including the Puritans, did away with Christmas festivities in the late-sixteenth and early- to mid-seventeenth centuries, these legal strictures were difficult to enforce and were not long-lasting. Instead, in both Protestant and Catholic countries, Christmas celebrations continued, though they often changed from what they had been in the Middle Ages. By the nineteenth century, traditions such as Christmas carols, Christmas trees, Nativity scenes, and Saint Nicholas iconography had been established that were taken up and popularized on a wider scale, but claims that those traditions were not invented until the nineteenth century are often rather overstated. Instead, many of these traditions grew and blossomed throughout the early modern period, sometimes despite radical Reformation attempts to get rid of Christmas, sometimes because of reforms in its celebration.


1991 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 320-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
John McCavitt

One of the liveliest debates in recent early modern Irish historiography has concerned the ‘failure’ of the Reformation in Ireland and when this occurred. Originally Professor Canny took issue with Dr. Brendan Bradshaw on this topic. Canny rejected Bradshaw’s thesis that the Reformation had failed in Ireland by 1558 and argued that counter-reformation catholicism only triumphed in the nineteenth century. Other contributions were then made to the debate by Dr. Alan Ford and later Karl Bottigheimer. Ford considered the 1590–1641 period as crucial, while Bottigheimer favoured the early seventeenth century as the key era. In the light of the work of Ford and Bottigheimer, Canny reconsidered the issue in an article published in 1986. He rejected what he believed to be Ford’s overly-pessimistic assessment that the Church of Ireland clergy soon despaired of the Reformation’s success in the seventeenth century. Instead, it is contended, Protestant clergy and laymen alike were optimistic that penal prosecution might still pave the way for considerable advances at this time. Moreover, Canny further argued that Ford was ‘mistaken in treating the clergy as an autonomous group and mistaken also in allowing excessive influence to ideology as the determinant of policy’.


1985 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Bottigheimer

In an important article published in this Journal in 1979, Professor Nicholas Canny attacked the notion that the Protestant Reformation had failed in Ireland by 1558 and argued that the entire question was misformulated, in part because no such decisive event occurred until the nineteenth century. It is the argument of the present article that Professor Canny did not disprove the relevance or usefulness of the question, and that ‘why the Reformation failed in Ireland’ remains a central problem of early modern Irish history.


2012 ◽  
Vol 51 (3–4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vilmos Voigt

This study analyses a book which was published in 1830 in Halberstadt (Kingdom of Prussia) by Carolus Brüggeman: Historia Ecclesiae Evangelicae Augustanae Confessioni addictorum in Hungaria universe; precipue vero in Tredecim Oppidis Scepusii. The author, Antal Lajos Munyay, a Lutheran preacher whose name did not appear in the book, interpreted the history of the Lutherans of the county of Szepes (comitatus Scepusiensi) from the Reformation to the nineteenth century. Munyay did not mention the word “martyr” even in the context of the Protestan persecutions of the 1670s. The present study thus tries to disclose the reasons for this surprisingly neutral narrative of early modern Lutheran history in Upper Hungary.


2015 ◽  
Vol 94 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catriona M. M. Macdonald

The career and posthumous reputation of Andrew Lang (1844–1912) call into question Scottish historiographical conventions of the era following the death of Sir Walter Scott which foreground the apparent triumph of scientific methods over Romance and the professionalisation of the discipline within a university setting. Taking issue with the premise of notions relating to the Strange Death of Scottish History in the mid-nineteenth century, it is proposed that perceptions of Scottish historiographical exceptionalism in a European context and presumptions of Scottish inferiorism stand in need of re-assessment. By offering alternative readings of the reformation, by uncoupling unionism from whiggism, by reaffirming the role of Romance in ‘serious’ Scottish history, and by disrupting distinctions between whig and Jacobite, the historical works and the surviving personal papers of Andrew Lang cast doubt on many conventional grand narratives and the paradigms conventionally used to make sense of Scottish historiography.


Author(s):  
Yiying Pan

Abstract This article investigates the collective responsibility organizations among boatmen in nineteenth-century Chongqing, when the city became one of the most important metropolises on the southwest Qing frontier. It also introduces two successive turning points in self-organization that were associated with two different classes of boatmen – skippers and sailors. First, in 1803, skippers gained the authority to institutionalize their organizations through their negotiations with the local state regarding official services and service fees. Second, when similar service and fiscal tensions emerged between skippers and sailors in the mid-nineteenth century, the skippers facilitated and supervised the institutionalization of collective responsibility organizations that were run by the sailors themselves. By contextualizing this expansion of collective responsibility organizations within the multilayered interactions between skippers and sailors, this article proposes that the perspective of interclass networks is crucial for deepening the study of state−society interactions, the capital−labor relationship, as well as the tension between imperial integration and regional diversity in early modern China.


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