The Established Church

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Aston
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
European State ◽  
Majority Population ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Swiss Cantons ◽  
Primary Form ◽  
Established Church

Ancien Régime Europe had an ineradicably Christian character that was publicly embodied and expressed in its established churches. It was and remained a divided continent confessionally after the Peace of Westphalia (1648) with the churches of the Reformation established (sometimes precariously) in Scandinavia, Britain, Switzerland, much of Germany, and parts of eastern Europe; Roman Catholicism predominated elsewhere except within Russia and inside the Ottoman Empire where various forms of Orthodoxy were the primary form of Christian expression. Irrespective of confessional variations, every European state c .1700 exhibited and upheld an established church, at once a fundamental component and final sanction of its institutional life. The concept of establishment found different legal expression from state to state, from a kingdom the size of France to the tiny principalities of Protestant Germany and the Swiss cantons, and it was not necessarily the confession of the majority population, as the instances of early modern Ireland and Bohemia indicate.

Shifting Identities: Foreign State Servants in France and the Ottoman Empire

2004 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Isom-Verhaaren
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Basic Component ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Personal Choice ◽  
Charles V ◽  
Foreign State ◽  
Shifting Identities ◽  
French Identity

AbstractThis essay compares the use of "foreign" state servants in the early-modern kingdom of France and the Ottoman Empire. In both realms, identity was understood as a matter of loyalty not to a defined territory but rather to a dynasty; hence service to the dynasty offered a ready path for assimilation. For a contemporary Ottoman historian, "the inhabitants of Rum" were a people of diverse origins, often descended from converts to Islam. For French jurists, the basic component of citizenship in the kingdom was personal choice; thus French "identity" was gained or lost as outsiders chose to serve the king, or natives of France chose to serve one of his rivals. This fluidity in matters of identity may be illustrated by three careers. George Paleologus Dysphatos (d. 1496), having converted to Roman Catholicism, rose to prominence under Kings Louis XI and Charles VIII, while a man known only as Hüseyn, the subaşt of Lemnos, was important as a diplomat and intelligence-gatherer in the service of Sultan Bayezid II; only from a chance reference in a letter of Charles VIII concerning Hüseyn do we know that he was George's cousin, obviously a convert to Islam. Christophe de Roggendorf (1510-post 1585) who was an Austrian nobleman and who had fought in Austrian armies against Ottoman forces. When Emperor Charles V ruled against him in an inheritance dispute he switched sides, moving to Istanbul where he served Sultan Süleyman for a time. But since he would not convert to Islam, preventing his being eligible for an important office, Roggendorf changed his allegiance again, ending his active career as an honored commander and diplomat under Kings Henri II and Charles IX. As these examples suggest, this was an era in which rulers competed for the loyalty of talented men, regardless of their origins, and potential state servants chose identities that served their own ambitions.

Understanding Long Reformation in Eastern Europe: The Case of Hungarian Puritanism Revisited

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-341
Author(s):  
Zsombor Tóth
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Historical Evolution ◽  
Entire Process ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Hungarian Case ◽  
Religious Cultures

AbstractWith the focus on Calvinist Reformation I propose a case study on Hungarian Puritanism that will allow further extrapolations, projections, and some general remarks regarding the entire process of the Hungarian Reformation. This paper draws on the findings of my research examining the reception of English Puritanism in early modern Royal Hungary and Transylvania. I intend to unearth the problematic aspects of cultural and intellectual transfers in an attempt to decipher the intricacies of how Puritan-Calvinist ideas were accepted and incorporated in the religious culture of Hungarian Calvinists. My concern is primarily related to the receiving Hungarian context and its historical evolution. For both the Hungarian Reformation and Hungarian Puritanism appear to have been newly emerging religious cultures resulting from a mixed tradition consisting of transferred ideas and native components. My contention is that the process of transfers and translations are not mechanical takeovers, borrowings or replacements, but a rather complex hermeneutical process of understanding, explaining and applying ideas to the needs of the receivers. One of the major findings of my article is that the application of the concept of long Reformation to the Hungarian case, in line with the latest developments of the field, will not only provide a more suitable historical framework, but it will put to use a repertoire of methodological novelties nurturing the understanding of the entire process of the Reformation based on the transfers of ideas and their consequent reception.

POST-MEDIEVAL CROSS SLABS IN SOUTH-EAST WALES: CLOSET CATHOLICS OR STUBBORN TRADITIONALISTS?

2016 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 207-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine Gray
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Established Church

In England, crosses on commemorative carvings are unusual in the two centuries after the Reformation. In south-east Wales, however, there are numerous examples, in a range of styles, suggesting the work of several groups of stonemasons. A number have the IHS trigram, in the square capitals format popularised by Ignatius Loyola as the emblem of the Jesuits. Some of these memorials commemorate known recusants, but most seem to exemplify the characteristic Welsh combination of traditionalism and loyalism. There is plenty of other evidence for Welsh communities in the early modern period continuing with traditional ‘Catholic’ practices (pilgrimage, veneration of relics and wells) while still regarding themselves as members of the Established Church. Some similar stones are found over the border into Herefordshire, but there are very few in north and west Wales, suggesting that this was a purely local fashion.

Tweaking a Medieval Antecedent

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore G. Van Raalte
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Regular Part ◽  
Swiss Cantons ◽  
University Training

Whereas disputations were a regular part of both elementary pedagogy and university training in the medieval and early-modern eras, not all disputations were of the same kind. This chapter explains the differences between the dialectic and scholastic disputations, of which Chandieu’s works belong to the latter. Further, it shows that Chandieu wrote his works “for the better practice of disputations,” and that his “theological and scholastic” treatises thus have an organic connection to the classroom. The use of disputations in the academies of the Swiss cantons more widely is also described. Comparisons to the structure of Thomas’s disputations occurs, as well as to that of an earlier Arabic philosopher.

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.

Briton and Scythian: Tudor representations of Irish origins

1993 ◽  
Vol 28 (112) ◽  
pp. 390-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Hadfield
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Medieval Chronicles ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Origin Myths ◽  
Origin Myth ◽  
John Leland

It is a commonplace of recent British historiography that in the early modern period a sophisticated and sceptical concept of writing history began to develop which involved, among other things, historians becoming significantly less credulous in their use of sources. Often the crucial break with medieval ‘chronicles’ is seen to have been brought about by the triumph of the exiled Italian humanist, Polydore Vergil, over the fervently nationalistic band of British historians and antiquarians led by John Leland, establishing that the Arthurian legends were no more than an origin myth. Jack Scarisbrick, for example, has argued that ‘early Tudor England did not produce a sudden renewal of Arthurianism … As the sixteenth century wore on, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s patriotic fantasies received increasingly short shrift from reputable historians.’ However, this comforting narrative of increasingly thorough and careful scholarship ignores the fact that there was a form of history writing in which the reliance upon origin myths such as the Arthurian legends and the ‘matter of Britain’ actually increased dramatically after the Reformation, namely English histories of Ireland.

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