Anabaptism: Abortive Counter-Revolt Within the Reformation

1957 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 211-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lowell H. Zuck
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation

Within the past thirty years a painstaking literature has been produced by the descendants of the sixteenth century Anabaptists, mostly Mennonites, in an effort to replace the traditional European interpretation of Anabaptism as fanaticism beginning with the revolutionary mystic, Thomas Muentzer, and ending with the revolutionary polygamous debacle at Muenster in Westphalia ten years later. Thus were the Anabaptists discredited for centuries by Lutheran and Reformed theologians within the majority churches of Europe, the American Anabaptist historians say.

The English Reformation Revisited

1996 ◽  
Vol 4 (18) ◽  
pp. 446-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity Heal
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Marked Change ◽  
Historical Thinking ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

I was asked by the Society to provide an introduction to current historical thinking about the English Reformation in the first talk to the 1995 Conference. The ensuing lecture was deliberately intended to provide guidance through the minefield of controversy about the success of Reformation for those with only limited knowledge of sixteenth-century history. Debates about the Reformation have always been of obvious importance to both theologians and historians: they have usually in the past been profoundly influenced by confessional ideologies. In the last thirty years the nature of the questions asked about Reformation has undergone marked change: specifically the issue of popular religious belief and practice has assumed a centrality it never before possessed. But new questions have not brought closer agreement on the nature of religious change, and in recent years fierce debate has continued to rage on such issues as the vitality of late medieval Catholicism, the popularity of the early reformers and the motives of Henry VIII and his successors. Some, at least, of these controversies are still bound up with Protestant, Catholic and Anglican identities in the late twentieth century. Since the continuities between past and present were the theme of last year's Conference, I have touched on these identities, but have left it to others, especially Dr Rowell and Dr Rex to make these connections more explicit.

The English Reformation: Obedience, Destruction and Cultural Adaptation

2005 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-115
Author(s):  
RONALD H. FRITZE
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
English Culture

Religious life and English culture in the Reformation. By Marjo Kaartinen. Pp. vii+210. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. £45. ISBN 0 333 96924 3Preaching during the English Reformation. By Susan Wabuda. Pp. xx+203 incl. 15 figs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. £40. ISBN 0 521 45395 XAuthority and consent in Tudor England. Essays presented to C. S. L. Davies. Edited by G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn. Pp. x+301. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2002. £47.50. ISBN 0 7546 0665 1Keywords and concepts provide important organising principles when historians attempt to make sense of the past. Some keywords are virtual constants of historical discourse, such as ‘continuity’ and ‘change’, although the relative emphasis that historians place on them can fluctuate with circumstances and fashion. Other terms come and go. The study of the English Reformation is no exception to the ebb and flow of historical keywords. For much of the 1960s, 1970s and the early 1980s, ‘popular reformation’ was a central concept of interpretation and research. But no more. Thanks to the historical fashion which has been styled ‘revisionism’, ‘popular reformation’ in early sixteenth-century England at least is widely considered to be an oxymoron. Consequent on the work of A. G. Dickens, ‘official’ or ‘state-sponsored reformation’ went into an eclipse but with the advent of revisionism it has been both revived as well as revised.

Medieval Thought

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Luscombe
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Past Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Reformation

This chapter examines contributions made by Fellows of the British Academy in the past century to the study of medieval thought. It explains that medieval thought is a lost term used to refer to the period between Late Antiquity and the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and a range of intellectual endeavour that embraces the arts of the trivium and the quadrivium, as well as the other branches of philosophy. It suggests that the British academic contribution to the study of medieval thought has been substantial but not very distinctive.

Unity and Diversity in the Church of the Fourth Century

1996 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Andrew Louth
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Look Back ◽  
The Church

To look back to the early Church as a theologian and historian, and ask questions about her unity, is to enter on a long tradition, which goes back at least to the Reformation, if not to the Great Schism of 1054 itself. Once the Church had split, the various separated Christians looked back to justify their position in that tragedy. They scoured the early sources for evidence for and against episcopacy, papacy, authority confided to tradition or to Scripture alone: they questioned the form in which these early sources have come down to us - the sixteenth century saw reserves of scholarly genius poured into the problem, for instance, of the genuineness of the Ignatian correspondence, and what fired all that, apart from scholarly curiosity, was the burning question of the authenticity of episcopal authority on which Ignatius speaks so decisively. Out of that the critical discipline of patristics emerged. It was, in fact, rather later that the fourth century became the focus of the debate about the unity, authority, and identity of the Church - Newman obviously springs to mind and his Arians of the Fourth Century (London, 1833) and his Essay on the Development of Doctrine (London, 1845). Later on, the fourth century attracted the attention of scholars such as Professor H. M. Gwatkin and his Studies in Arianism (Cambridge, 1882), and Professor S. L. Greenslade and his Schism in the Early Church (London, 1953), and in quite modern times Arianism, in particular, has remained a mirror in which scholars have seen reflected the problems of the modern Church (a good example is the third part of Rowan Williams’s Arius: Heresy and Tradition [London, 1987], though there are plenty of others). Continental scholars such as Adolf von Harnack also studied the past, informed by theological perspectives derived from the present; in a different and striking way Erik Peterson turned to the fourth century to find the roots of an ideology of unity that was fuelling the murderous policies of Nazism. In all these cases the fourth century seemed to be a test case ‒ for questions of modern ecclesiology: Rome defended by development in the case of Newman, the justification for the ecumenical movement in the case of Greenslade.

The Age of Uncertainty: Britain in the Early-Nineteenth Century

1998 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 91-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Eastwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Age Of Exploration ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Ideological Assumptions

One does not have to be a card-carrying postmodernist to understand that historical periods do not possess inherent characteristics. ‘Eras of Reform’, ‘Ages of Revolution’, ‘Triumphs of Reform’, and ‘Centuries of Reformation’ exist only in, and as, texts. They represent, in the simplest of forms, readings of the past. The nomenclatures we employ to demarcate and characterise particular historical moments embody fundamental ideological assumptions, encapsulating an idée fixe, and exposing the crux of the creative—or, if you prefer, the scholarly—process. Traditionalists might already be crying foul, insisting that our titles, or period characterisations, reflect rather than impute salience. History, as Geoffrey Elton might have instructed us, reports rather than constructs the past. The writing of history, Elton suggested in 1967, ‘amounts to a dialogue between the historian and his materials. He supplies the intelligence and the organising ability, but he can interpret and organise only within the limits set by his materials. And those are the limits created by a true and independent past.’ Revealingly, though, our book titles generally describe or construct processes, rather than recall events; and processes are abstractions whose full meaning, as Vico told us long ago, is apparent only in retrospect. Of course the Reformation happened, but not in the same way as the Battle of Trafalgar happened. Thus describing the sixteenth century as ‘The Age of Reformation’ orders the experience of the European West in a very particular way. It was also, and some might say equally, an age of exploration, of empire, of inflation, of hunger, and of the explosion of print culture.

Medieval Heresies in the Reformation

1963 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 392-414
Author(s):  
Claus-Peter Clasen
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
New Age ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation

The problem of a possible continuity of late medieval heresies and sixteenth century sects in Switzerland and Germany has not been thoroughly investigated yet. Of course some historians have touched upon the problem. Thus in 1886 Ludwig Keller advanced the thesis that Anabaptism was closely connected with the Waldensian tradition. Recently a Marxist historian, Gerhard Zschäbitz, pointed out that certain ideas of the Hussite tradition had infiltrated Anabaptism in Thuringia. On the whole, however, it is assumed that medieval heresies did not survive the fifteenth century. The sixteenth century German sects are considered a product of the Reformation. This is implying that the Reformation constituted a complete break with the past and opened an altogether new age. It hardly needs pointing out that this is a hazardous assumption. It is rather hard to believe that heresies, which had secretly lived on in certain towns and villages for one or two hundred years should suddenly have died out by 1500.

Menno Simons—Sixteenth Century Reformer

1962 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-399
Author(s):  
Hans J. Hillerbrand
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation

Historical anniversaries, like birthdays, must come at the appropriate time in order to be properly appreciated. The quadricentennial of the death of Menno Simons, in 1961, coming as it did at a period of marked and indeed exuberant vitality of Left Wing studies, fulfilled happily enough, this requirement.1 For Menno this was especially important, since he has been, during the past four hundred years, a man with a “bad press”—criticized not only by all of his foes outside his tradition, but also by many of his friends within.2 An appraisal of his place in the Reformation of the sixteenth century appears necessary and—in light of the state of Left Wing studies— also possible, though this must not lead to an undue postulate of profundity or relevance.

History and Memory

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation

This chapter explores the challenges presented for marking the anniversary of the Reformation as a historical event. It considers the role of memory and commemoration in contemporary accounts of the Reformation, particularly the efforts to create public narratives. History and memory, so central to the ways in which the Reformation is understood as a seminal moment in Western culture, were also integral to the movement itself. The chapter examines the ways in which the Reformers of the sixteenth century sought to establish their claim on history in order to justify and make sense of the present. The Reformers believed that change was part of continuity with the past.

scholarly journals Reforma Protestante: uma caminhada de 500 anos

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudir Burmann
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Situational Factors ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation

Resumo: A Reforma Protestante impactou o Cristianismo ocidental com umadivisão, cuja repercussão tem perpassado diversos âmbitos ao longo dos últimos500 anos. Como seria o Cristianismo se a Reforma Protestante não tivesseocorrido? Evidentemente, não há como responder. Certo é que a Reforma Protestantefoi, de alguma maneira, favorecida por fatores conjunturais do séculoXVI, que ampliaram sua repercussão. Tais fatores fizeram com que o protestoinicial de Martim Lutero através de 95 teses acerca da venda de indulgênciastivesse um alcance não imaginado. A partir dali, foi-se consolidando um novomodo de compreender o agir de Deus. Ao mesmo tempo, uma nova forma decompreender o próprio ser humano se afirmou. Embora ao longo de quatroséculos tenha havido controvérsias, embates e combates mútuos, atualmentebusca-se uma nova caminhada entre as Igrejas Luteranas e a Igreja CatólicaRomana. A celebração dos 500 anos da Reforma tem-se revelado como oportunidadeúnica para a promoção da unidade cristã.Palavras-chave: Martim Lutero. 95 teses. Reforma Protestante.Abstract: The Protestant Reformation impacted Western Christianity with a division,whose repercussion has permeated various fields over the past 500 years.But how would Christianity be if the Protestant Reformation had not occurred? Ofcourse, there is no answer to this. It is true that the Protestant Reformation wassomehow favored by situational factors of the sixteenth century, that amplified itsimpact. These factors have caused the initial protest of Martin Luther through 95theses about the sale of indulgences to have had an unimaginable range. Fromthen, it has consolidated a new way of understanding the action of God. At the sametime, a new way of understanding the human being was asserted. Although duringover four centuries there have been disputes, conflicts and mutual fighting, nowone seeks for a new walk between Lutheran Churches and the Roman CatholicChurch. The celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation has beenrevealed as an unique opportunity for the promotion of Christian unity.Keywords: Martin Luther. 95 theses. Protestant Reformation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document