"Each Should Tend His Own Garden": Anna Bijns and the Catholic Polemic against the Reformation

2007 ◽  
Vol 87 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-45
Author(s):  
Judith Pollmann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Moral Understanding ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe schoolmistress and best-selling poet Anna Bijns was one of the few laypeople in the sixteenth-century Netherlands who was prepared publicly to fight for the Catholic cause. This article contends that Bijns's work, exceptional as it was, reflects a "moral" understanding of the problem of heresy that was not unique to her, but that exemplified the way in which many clerics responded to the threat of Protestantism. They equated heresy with sin, and argued that this required a penitential response from all in society. Yet by contending that each "order" in society was best left to fight its own sins, and that "each should tend his own garden" their arguments also created the impression that heresy was first and foremost a clerical problem. This may help explain the "passive" way in which Catholics in the Netherlands, as well as in many other parts of Northwestern Europe, responded to the Reformation.

Calvin and the Priesthood of all Believers

1968 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-156
Author(s):  
John R. Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Priesthood Of All Believers ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
God's People ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Way

A Mong those elements of Christian doctrine which surged anew to the forefront of Christian thinking during the early sixteenth century was that biblical idea which, in more modern times, we have come to call the ‘priesthood of all believers’. Luther used the doctrine almost as a battle-axe, to hew away at the pretensions of the Roman hierarchy and sacramental system. Almost invariably, it is Luther's name which we find linked to this doctrine in studies of the Reformation period. However, any serious study of the idea of the priesthood of God's people would do well to include an examination of the way in which John Calvin dealt with it, and indeed, the way in which the idea found certain expressions within his system of ecclesiastical organisation. It is our purpose here to see what Calvin taught in relationship to this biblical idea, and what elements of the life of the Genevan church may be considered to be, at least in part, an expression of the idea.

Recent Sources of Information on the Anabaptists in the Netherlands

1917 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 47-71
Author(s):  
Henry Elias Dosker
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Spare Time ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Northeastern Germany

The subject is not of my own choosing. It was assigned to me by our Secretary, when he invited me last summer to write a paper for this meeting of the Society. The raeson for this request lies in the fact that, for the last dozen years, much of my spare time has been spent in special work on this engrossing subject, which is shrouded in much mystery. But we all know something about the great Anabaptist movement, which paralleled the history of the Reformation. We have all touched these Anabaptists in their life and labors, in the sixteenth century, in all Europe, but especially in Switzerland, upper Germany, and Holland. Crushed and practically wiped out everywhere else, they rooted themselves deeply in the soil of northeastern Germany and above all in the Low Countries. And thence, whenever persecution overwhelmed them, they crossed the channel and moved to England, where their history is closely interwoven with that of the Nonconformists in general and especially with the nascent history of the English Baptists.

Anabaptism and English Sectarianism in the Mid-Sixteenth Century

1979 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 59-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Loades
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
Radical Nature ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Return Home ◽  
To Come

From about 1528 onward radical protestants of various kinds from the Low Countries began to seek refuge in England from the pressures of persecution in their homelands. Until the advent of Thomas More as chancellor, persecution in England was sporadic and rather lax. The royal authority had not hitherto been invoked, and the lollards were not commonly of the stuff of martyrs, which induced a certain complacency in the English bishops when faced with the challenges of nascent protestantism. After More’s brief tenure of office was over, persecution under royal auspices continued, but on a very much smaller scale than in the Netherlands, so that the incentive for radicals to come to England, either permanently or temporarily, remained. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them lived in London, Norwich and other towns of the south-east over the next twenty years. A few, like Jan Mattijs, were burned in England, others, like Anneke Jans, met the same fate on their return home, but many lived and worked peacefully, attracting remarkably little attention. Considering their numbers, and the radical nature of their views, they seem to have made only a very slight impact upon their adopted country. A few Englishmen, like that ‘Henry’ who turned up as the sponsor of the Bocholt meeting in 1536, embraced their ideas wholeheartedly, but for the most part the effect seems to have been extremely piecemeal and diffuse, producing a wide variety of individual eccentricities rather than anything in the nature of a coherent movement. However, the presence of these radicals and their English sympathisers has always served to confuse students of the reformation, not least by appearing to justify contemporary conservative attempts to discredit protestantism as a Tower of Babel.

scholarly journals Patronage, Performativity, and Ideas of Corpus Christi

2019 ◽  
pp. 59-80
Author(s):  
Pamela M. King
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
University Colleges ◽  
Royal Supremacy ◽  
The Way

This chapter details relations between Church and state in Richard Fox’s age. The break with Rome, the royal supremacy, and the dissolution of the monasteries irreversibly altered the way in which the early Tudor polity would be conceived. Already in the sixteenth century, accounts of this period were informed by the Reformation. Incidents such as Bishop Fox’s change of plan at Oxford—transforming a primarily monastic ‘Winchester College‘ into the secular Corpus Christi College—became overlaid with foreshadowed significance. Ultimately, Fox’s was the last great age of bishops founding university colleges, since the requisite mix of authority and wealth seldom coalesced so favourably thereafter and certainly could not during the assault on episcopal incomes later in the sixteenth century. Clerical dominance in Church and state made Corpus.

scholarly journals Die Puriteine en hulle siening van seksualiteit

1995 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. De Bruyn
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Sexual Intercourse ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Marital Relationship ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Premarital Sexual ◽  
The Way

As a result of the fact that the fundamental principles of the Reformation were not fully realised everywhere, Puritanism originated with the purpose of establishing a ‘pure church’ and a 'pure life’. Regarding sexuality, Puritanism gave rise to a rigid outlook, especially in England, North America and the Netherlands. According to the Puritans sexual intercourse was to occur frequently within the marital relationship, and it was considered as a trans­gression when this was not the case. Extramarital as well as premarital sexual intercourse was absolutely forbidden. Should it have occurred, the transgressors were severely punished - in some cases the death penalty was even pronounced! Seen as a whole, the Puritan view on sexuality within a marital relation was, however, more in line with the Scriptural view than those of the Reformers. The Puritan view on extramarital and premarital sexual intercourse was in line with that of the Reformers and with Scripture. The way, however, in which the Puritans punished transgressors was contrary to the gospel of Christ.

London Parishioners in Times of Change: St Andrew Hubbard, Eastcheap, c. 1450–1570

2002 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-63
Author(s):  
CLIVE BURGESS
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Critical Period ◽  
Reasonable Number ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Rapid Shift ◽  
The Way

If St Andrew Hubbard, Eastcheap, was a fairly typical London parish in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, its archive is unusually good. A reasonable number of its parishioners have surviving wills, which is true for the City's parishes generally; but St Andrew Hubbard is extraordinary in preserving churchwardens' accounts in a virtually unbroken run from c. 1450. It thus proves possible to gain a more than usually clear impression of parishioners' beliefs and conduct both for the period preceding the Reformation and then during subsequent upheavals. Scrutiny of testamentary practice either side of c. 1540 indicates a profound and rapid shift in the way in which individuals conceived of and exploited their parish. While, by comparison, churchwardens' accounts suggest institutional continuities, analysis of two mid sixteenth-century initiatives to keep property which had been devised to the parish sheds further welcome light on the reflexes that a community developed to safeguard its interests in this critical period.

scholarly journals The affirmation of image and maps in the modern age: cartographic secularization and Protestant Reformation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Ricci
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
Artistic Images ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe contribution aims to focus the attention on the consequences on the use of images and in particular on the cartographic ones deriving from the Protestant Reformation. Analysing the debate around images which originated during the sixteenth century from Luther’s revolution, the article tries to answer how much the Reformation contributed to change the main aspects of mapmaking in a more realistic and secularized way. Three main questions will be posed: how much did the Protestant Reformation contribute to the affirmation of the cartographic images, to the pushes towards realism and to reality? How much did the way of representing the world change, standing on the innovations promoted by the European Protestants? Did the Reformation have also consequences on the Counter-Reformation way of depicting maps? Starting from the main literature, which focused the attention on the effects of that debate about the artistic images, a parallelism with the use of new cartographic models will be proposed, wondering if the Reformation contributed to the modern way of mapmaking, overpassing the religious, metaphorical of the medieval models.

John Knox’s International Network

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 96-115
Author(s):  
Alec Ryrie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
International Network ◽  
Tourist Attractions ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The City

In the early twentieth century, the city of Geneva added to its existing tourist attractions with one of the most peculiar items of civic commemoration in Europe. The Reformation Wall is a queasy monument to Geneva’s glorious past, in which the tensions and prejudices of a very particular view of the sixteenth century are frozen into stone. As one moves towards the centre of the monument, one draws closer to the Genevan fount of Reformed Christian truth. Luther and Zwingli are commemorated, tersely, at the wall’s outermost extremes. Further in, a series of friezes celebrate the deeds of Reformed Protestants in France, the Netherlands, Scotland and England. The monument’s centre, however, is the set of four larger-than-life statues, fixing the viewer with their stern gazes. Three of the figures are obvious. John Calvin himself, of course, stands to the fore. The wall is at heart a memorial to him, to the man who wished to be buried in an unmarked grave, and it was begun on the quatercentenary of his birth. He is joined by Guillaume Farel, the Frenchman who first established the Reformed Church in Geneva and persuaded Calvin to join him in his ministry there; and by Theodore de Béze, Calvin’s successor, biographer and systematizer.

scholarly journals Huldrych Zwingli: Reformation in Conflict

Perichoresis ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 33-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Brett Eccher
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Early Death ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Way

Abstract The Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli was a pioneering and domineering voice during the early sixteenth century, especially at the genesis of the Protestant Reformation. Despite his stature, Reformation historiography has sadly relegated Zwingli to a lesser status behind reformers such as Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, and John Calvin. However, his contribution to the changing religious ethos of Reformation Europe was pivotal, yet always accompanied by controversy. In fact, this essay will argue that almost all of the Reformation gains made by Zwingli over the course of roughly twenty-five years of ministry took place through conflict. All the Protestant reformers experienced an element of conflict as a part of their work. Such was the nature of religious renewal and reform in the sixteenth century. Still, conflict not only facilitated and drove Zwingli’s Reformation, but was also a theme woven throughout his life. And in Zwingli’s case war was both figurative and literal. His battles moved well beyond those of his contemporary reformers. Beginning with his haunting experiences as a young chaplain in the Swiss army and culminating with his early death on the battlefield at Kappel, conflict shaped Zwingli’s life, ministry and theology. His was a life characterized by volatility; his Reformation was contested every step of the way. As a portrait of Zwingli emerges against the historic backdrop of war, division and strife, his lasting contributions to the convictions and practices of Protestantism, especially in Baptist and Presbyterian life, should become apparent.

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