Inferior Office
Inferior Office

Author: Francis Young

Publisher: James Clarke & Company

Published: 2015-04-30

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 0227903722

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In spite of the centrality of the threefold orders of bishop, priest and deacon to Anglicanism, deacons have been virtually invisible in the contemporary Church of England. 'Inferior Office?' is the first complete history of this neglected portion of theclergy, tracing the church's changing theology of the diaconate from the Ordinal of 1550 to the present day. Francis Young skilfully overturns the widely held belief that before the twentieth century, the diaconate was merely a brief and nominal period of probation for priests, revealing how it became an integral part of the Elizabethan defence of conformity and exploring the diverse range of ministries assumed by lifelong deacons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Lifelong deacons often belonged to a marginalised 'lower class' of the clergy that has since been forgotten, an oversight of considerable importance to the wider social history of the clergy that is corrected in this volume. 'Inferior Office?' tells the story of persistent calls for the revival of a distinctive diaconate within the Victorian Church of England and situates the institution of deaconesses and later revival of the distinctive diaconate for women, as well as subsequent developments, within their wider historical context. Set against this backdrop, Young presents a balanced case both for and against the further development of a distinctive diaconate today, offering much to further discussion and debate amongst clergy of the Church of England and all those with an interest in the rich tapestry of its history.

Common Whores, Vertuous Women, and Loveing Wives
Common Whores, Vertuous Women, and Loveing Wives

Author: Debra A. Meyers

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2003-03-31

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9780253109743

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Religious conflicts had a pronounced effect on women and their families in early modern England, but our understanding of that impact is limited by the restrictions that prevented the open expression of religious beliefs in the post-Reformation years. More can be gleaned by shifting our focus to the New World, where gender relations and family formations were largely unhampered by the unsettling political and religious climate of England. In Maryland, English Arminian Catholics, Particular Baptists, Presbyterians, Puritans, Quakers, and Roman Catholics lived and worked together for most of the 17th century. By closely examining thousands of wills and other personal documents, as well as early Maryland's material culture, this transatlantic study depicts women's place in society and the ways religious values and social arrangements shaped their lives. Common Whores, Vertuous Women, and Loveing Wives takes a revisionist approach to the study of women and religion in colonial Maryland and adds considerably to our understanding of the social and cultural importance of religion in early America.

The Bible and the Printed Image in Early Modern England
The Bible and the Printed Image in Early Modern England

Author: Michael Gaudio

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1351545949

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The first book-length study of the fifteen surviving Little Gidding bible concordances, this book examines the visual culture of print in seventeenth-century England through the lens of one extraordinary family and their hand-made biblical manuscripts. The volumes were created by the women of the Ferrar-Collet family of Little Gidding, who selected works from the family's collection of Catholic religious prints, and then cut and pasted prints and print fragments, along with verses excised from the bible, and composed them in artful arrangements on the page in the manner of collage. Gaudio shows that by cutting, recombining, and pasting multi-scaled print fragments, the Ferrar-Collet family put into practice a remarkably flexible pictorial language. The Little Gidding concordances provide an occasion to explore how the manipulation of print could be a means of thinking through some of the most pressing religious and political questions of the pre-civil war period: the coherence of printed scripture, the nature of sovereignty, the relevance of the Mosaic law, and the protestant reform of images. By foregrounding the Ferrar-Collets' engagement with the print fragment, this book extends the scope of early modern print history beyond the printmaker's studio and expands our understanding of the ways an early modern Protestant community could productively engage with the religious image. Contrary to the long-held view that the English Reformation led to a decline in the importance of the religious image, this study demonstrates the ongoing vitality of religious prints in early modern England as instruments for thinking.