In Glorious Temples or Babylonic Whores, Anne-Françoise Morel offers an account of the intellectual and cultural history of places of worship in Stuart England. Official documents issued by the Church of England rarely addressed issues regarding the status, function, use, and design of churches; but consecration sermons turn time and again to the conditions and qualities befitting a place of worship in Post-Reformation England. Placing the church building directly in the midst of the heated discussions on the polity and ceremonies of the Church of England, this book recovers a vital lost area of architectural discourse. It demonstrates that the religious principles of church building were enhanced by, and contributed to, scientific developments in fields outside the realm of religion, such as epistemology, the theory of sense perception, aesthetics, rhetoric, antiquarianism, and architecture.
Scholarly interest in the early modern sermon has flourished in recent years, driven by belated recognition of the crucial importance of preaching to religious, cultural, and political life in early modern Britain. The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon is the first book to survey this rich new field for both students and specialists. It is divided into sections devoted to sermon composition, delivery, and reception; sermons in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; English Sermons, 1500-1660; and English Sermons, 1660-1720. The twenty-five original essays it contains represent emerging areas of interest, including research on sermons in performance, pulpit censorship, preaching and ecclesiology, women and sermons, the social, economic, and literary history of sermons in manuscript and print, and non-elite preaching. The Handbook also responds to the recently recognised need to extend thinking about the 'early modern' across the watershed of the civil wars and interregnum, on both sides of which sermons and preaching remained a potent instrument of religious politics and a literary form of central importance to British culture. Complete with appendices of original documents of sermon theory, reception, and regulation, and generously illustrated, this is a comprehensive guide to the rhetorical, ecclesiastical, and historical precepts essential to the study of the early modern sermon in Britain.
Why were so many religious images and objects broken and damaged in the course of the Reformation? Margaret Aston's magisterial new book charts the conflicting imperatives of destruction and rebuilding throughout the English Reformation from the desecration of images, rails and screens to bells, organs and stained glass windows. She explores the motivations of those who smashed images of the crucifixion in stained glass windows and who pulled down crosses and defaced symbols of the Trinity. She shows that destruction was part of a methodology of religious revolution designed to change people as well as places and to forge in the long term new generations of new believers. Beyond blanked walls and whited windows were beliefs and minds impregnated by new modes of religious learning. Idol-breaking with its emphasis on the treacheries of images fundamentally transformed not only Anglican ways of worship but also of seeing, hearing and remembering.
A much neglected field of study has been opened by the research of the author into the history of the Christian church from its apostolic origins to the close of the eighteenth century. Taking as his thesis the prominence given to the Church in the Wilderness in Bible prophecy, and the fact that “‘the Church in the Wilderness,’ and not the proud hierarchy enthroned in the world’s great capital, was the true church of Christ,” he has spent years developing this subject. In its present form, Truth Triumphant represents much arduous research in the libraries of Europe as well as in America. Excellent ancient sources are most difficult to obtain, but the author has been successful in gaining access to many of them. To crystallize the subject matter and make the historical facts live in modem times, the author also made extensive travels throughout Europe and Asia. The doctrines of the primitive Christian church spread to Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. As grains of a mustard seed they lodged in the hearts of many Godly souls in southern France and northern Italy — people known as the Albigenses and the Waldenses. The faith of Jesus was valiantly upheld by the Church of the East. This term, as used by the author, not only includes the Syrian and Assyrian Churches, but is also the term applied to the development of apostolic Christianity throughout the lands of the East. The spirit of Christ, burning in the hearts of loyal men who would not compromise with paganism, sent them forth as missionaries to lands afar. Patrick, Columbanus, Marcos, and a host of others were missionaries to distant lands. They braved the ignorance of the barbarian, the intolerance of the apostate church leaders, and the persecution of the state in order that they might win souls to God. To unfold the dangers that were ever present in the conflict of the true church against error, to reveal the sinister working of evil and the divine strength by which men of God made truth triumphant, to challenge the Remnant Church today in its final controversy against the powers of evil, and to show the holy, unchanging message of the Bible as it has been preserved for t hose who will “fear God, and keep His commandments” — these are the sincere aims of the author as he presents this book to those who know the truth. MERLIN L. NEFF.
"A new edition of Gregory Dix's masterpiece, still essential reading for students and scholars and in print constantly for fifty years. Dom Gregory Dix's classic account of the development of the Eucharist rite continues to be the definitive and authoritative work on the subject. He presents his massive scholarship in lively and non technical language for all who wish to understand their worship in terms of the framework from which it has evolved. He demonstrates the creative force of Christianity over the centuries through liturgy and the societies it has moulded. His great work has for nearly fifty years regularly been quoted for its devotional as well as its historical value, and has regularly attracted new readers. In this book for the first time, critical studies in the learned periodicals of many countries have been carefully sifted and the results arranged to give a clear picture of the development of the Eucharistic rite."--