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.

Episcopal Tombs in Early Modern England

2004 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 654-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER SHERLOCK
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

The Reformation simultaneously transformed the identity and role of bishops in the Church of England, and the function of monuments to the dead. This article considers the extent to which tombs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bishops represented a set of episcopal ideals distinct from those conveyed by the monuments of earlier bishops on the one hand and contemporary laity and clergy on the other. It argues that in death bishops were increasingly undifferentiated from other groups such as the gentry in the dress, posture, location and inscriptions of their monuments. As a result of the inherent tension between tradition and reform which surrounded both bishops and tombs, episcopal monuments were unsuccessful as a means of enhancing the status or preserving the memory and teachings of their subjects in the wake of the Reformation.

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.

Rethinking Iconoclasm in Early Modern England: the Case of Cheapside Cross

2000 ◽  
Vol 4 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 379-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Budd
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Traditional Beliefs ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Complex Variety ◽  
City Of London ◽  
The City

AbstractProtestant iconoclasm has generally been understood as an assault on the beliefs and practices of traditional religion. This article challenges that understanding through a detailed study of Cheapside Cross, a large monument that was repeatedly attacked by iconoclasts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It draws on contemporary pamphlets and the manuscripts records of the City of London to reveal the complex variety of associations that Cheapside Cross acquired before and during the Reformation era. It argues that perceptions of the monument were shaped not only by its iconography but also by its involvement in ceremonies and rituals, including royal coronation processions. The iconoclastic attacks on Cheapside Cross should be interpreted not merely as a challenge to traditional beliefs but as attempts to restructure the monument's associations. The paper concludes that attacks on other images may be understood in a similar manner.

The Normalisation of Natural Philosophy: Occasional Causality and Coarse-Grained Reality

2020 ◽  
pp. 201-236
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Coarse Grained ◽  
Mutual Adaptation ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Conceptual Changes ◽  
Preliminary Application ◽  
The Way

This article investigates whether it possible to derive a new narrative about the transformation of early modern natural philosophy from the way in which natural philosophy was systematized in academic writings. It introduces the notion of ‘normalisation’—the mutual adaptation of certain ideas and existing traditions—as a way of studying and explaining conceptual changes during relatively long periods of time. The article provides the methodological underpinnings of this account of normalisation and offers a preliminary application of it by focusing on the role of ‘occasional causality’ in natural philosophy through the writings of four authors: Pierre Sylvain Régis (1632-1707), Johann Christoph Sturm (1635-1703), Petrus van Musschenbroek (1692-1761), and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who progressively normalise an account of ‘occasional causality’.

Annotating the Golden Legend in Early Modern England

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 816-862
Author(s):  
Morgan Ring
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
History Of Reading ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Golden Legend

This article discusses annotations to some eighty surviving copies of William Caxton's “Golden Legend.” It assesses reactions from male and female readers across the religious spectrum, exploring the varied ways in which early modern readers engaged with a book that quickly became—and has remained—a shorthand for medieval religion. It seeks to contribute to the history of the “Legend” itself, to historical understanding of annotation, and to the history of reading during the Reformation.

Teaching through Diagrams

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 201-230
Author(s):  
Renée Raphael
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The University ◽  
The Way

This contribution examines the role of diagrams in early modern pedagogy. It begins with an analysis of images from the 1632 Dialogo and 1638 Discorsi. I claim that Galileo often employed images in a pedagogical context, illustrating to readers through his dialogue how he may have used images in his own teaching. Building on the work of previous historians, I argue that a classification of Galileo’s images should include not only heuristic images and images used for virtual witnessing, but also pedagogical images designed to illustrate to the reader (or student) how to reach conclusions about a given question. I then turn to the way Galileo’s readers at the University of Pisa employed Galileo’s images in their own teaching. I argue that Galileo’s readers employed his images in their own works in ways which reflected their training and the genre in which they wrote and taught.


THE DEVELOPMENT OF POOR RELIEF IN LANCASHIRE, c. 1598–1680

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 551-572 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN HEALEY
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Poor

ABSTRACTThe development of the poor law has formed a key element of recent discussions of ‘state formation’ in early modern England. There are, however, still few local studies of how formal poor relief, stipulated in the great Tudor statutes, was implemented on the ground. This article offers such a study, focusing on Lancashire, an economically marginal county, far from Westminster. It argues that the poor law developed in Lancashire surprisingly quickly in the early seventeenth century, despite the fact that there is almost no evidence of implementation of statutory relief before 1598, and formal relief mechanisms were essentially in place before the Civil War even if the numbers on relief remained small. After a brief hiatus during the conflict, the poor law was quickly revived in the 1650s. The role of the magistracy is emphasized as a crucial driving force, not just in the enforcement of the statutes, but also in setting relief policy. The thousands of petitions to JPs by paupers, parishes, and townships that survive in the county archives suggests that magistrates were crucial players in the ‘politics of the parish’.

Domestic Homicide in early modern England

1981 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Sharpe
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family

One of the most striking features of recent writing on early modern social history has been the emergence of the family as a subject of central concern. As befits an historical area being subjected to new scrutiny, much of this concern has expressed itself in the form of specialized, and often narrowly-focused articles or essays.1 To these have been added a number of more general works intended to examine the broader developments in and implications of family life in the past.2 Several themes within family history have already received considerable attention: the structure of the family, for example, a topic already rendered familiar by earlier work on historical demography; the concomitant topic of sexual practices and attitudes; and the economic role of the family, especially in its capacity as a unit of production. These are, of course, important matters, and the research carried out on them has revealed much of interest and consequence to the social historian; this should not, however, obscure the existence of a number of other significant dimensions of family life in the past which await thorough investigation.

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