Loades explores England's religious cultures during the reign of Mary Tudor. He investigates how conflicting traditions of conformity and dissent negotiated the new spiritual, political and legal landscape which followed her reintroduction of Catholicism to England.
Loades explores England's religious cultures during the reign of Mary Tudor. He investigates how conflicting traditions of conformity and dissent negotiated the new spiritual, political and legal landscape which followed her reintroduction of Catholicism to England.
Marotti analyzes some of the rhetorical and imaginative means by which the Catholic minority and the Protestant majority defined themselves and their religious and political antagonists in early modern England.
Mother of Mercy, Bane of the Jews explores a key moment in the rise of the cult of the Virgin Mary and the way the Jews became central to her story. Benedictine monks in England at the turn of the twelfth century developed many innovative ways to venerate Mary as the most powerful saintly intercessor. They sought her mercy on a weekly and daily basis with extensive liturgical practices, commemorated additional moments of her life on special feast days, and praised her above all other human beings with new doctrines that claimed her Immaculate Conception and bodily Assumption. They also collected hundreds of stories about the miracles Mary performed for her followers in what became one of the most popular devotional literary genres of the Middle Ages. In all these sources, but especially the miracle stories, the figure of the Jew appears in an important role as Mary's enemy. Drawing from theological and legendary traditions dating back to early Christianity, monks revived the idea that Jews violently opposed the virgin mother of God; the goal of the monks was to contrast the veneration they thought Mary deserved with the resistance of the Jews. Kati Ihnat argues that the imagined antagonism of the Jews toward Mary came to serve an essential purpose in encouraging Christian devotion to her as merciful mother and heavenly Queen. Through an examination of miracles, sermons, liturgy, and theology, Mother of Mercy, Bane of the Jews reveals how English monks helped to establish an enduring rivalry between Mary and the Jews, in consolidating her as the most popular saint of the Middle Ages and in making devotion to her a foundational marker of Christian identity.
Reformation England 1480-1642 provides a clear and accessible narrative account of the English Reformation, explaining how historical interpretations of its major themes have changed and developed over the past few decades, where they currently stand - and where they seem likely to go. A great deal of interesting and important new work on the English Reformation has appeared recently, such as lively debates on Queen Mary's role, work on the divisive character of Puritanism, and studies on music and its part in the Reformation. The spate of new material indicates the importance and vibrancy of the topic, and also of the continued need for students and lecturers to have some means of orientating themselves among its thickets and by-ways. This revised edition takes into account new contributions to the subject and offers the author's expert judgment on their meaning and significance.
The dissolution of the monasteries in England during the 1530s began a turbulent period of religious restructuring. Focusing on the counties of Wiltshire and Cheshire, Guinn-Chipman looks at the changing nature of religion over the next two centuries.
Transnational Catholicism in Tudor England details the relationship between transnational mobility and the development of Tudor Catholicism. Almost two hundred Catholics felt compelled to exile themselves from England rather than conform with the religious reformations inaugurated by HenryVIII and Edward VI. Frederick E. Smith explores how these emigres' physical mobility reconfigured their relationships with the men and women they left behind, and how it forced them to develop new relationships with individuals they encountered abroad. It analyses how the experiences of mobility anddisplacement catalysed a shift in their religious identities, in some ways broadening but in others narrowing their understandings of what it meant to be 'Catholic'. The author examines the role of these emigres as agents of religious exchange, circulating new doctrinal and devotional ideasthroughout western Europe and forging new connections between them. By focussing particularly upon those individuals who subsequently returned to their homeland during Mary I's Catholic counter-reformation, the study also explores the lasting legacies of these emigres' displacement and mobility,both for the emigres themselves as they grappled with the difficulties of re-integration, but also for the broader development of English Catholicism. In this way, Transnational Catholicism in Tudor England deepens our understanding of the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which exileshapes religio-political identities, but also underlines the importance of international mobility as a crucial factor in the development of English Catholicism and the wider European Catholic Church over the mid sixteenth century.
This study considers sixteenth century evangelicals' vision of a ›godly‹ commonwealth within the broader context of political, religious, social, and intellectual changes in Tudor England. Using the clergyman and bestselling author, Thomas Becon (1512–1567), as a case study, Brian L. Hanson argues that evangelical views of the commonwealth were situation-dependent rather than uniform, fluctuating from individual to individual. His study examines the ways commonwealth rhetoric was used by evangelicals and how that rhetoric developed and changed. While this study draws from English Reformation historiography by acknowledging the chronology of reform, it engages with interdisciplinary texts on poverty, gender, and the economy in order to demonstrate the intersection of commonwealth rhetoric with Renaissance humanism. Furthermore, the experience of exile and the languages of prophecy and companionship directly influenced commonwealth rhetoric and dictated the priorities, vocabulary, and political expression of the evangelicals. As sixteenth-century England vacillated in its religious direction and priorities, the evangelicals were faced with a political conundrum and the tension between obedience and ›lawful‹ disobedience. There was ultimately a fundamental disagreement on the nature and criteria of obedience. Hanson's study makes a further contribution to the emerging conversation about English commonwealth politics by examining the important issues of obedience and disobedience within the evangelical community. A correct assessment of the issues surrounding the relationship between evangelicals and the commonwealth government will lead to a rediscovery of both the complexities of evangelical commonwealth rhetoric and the tension between the biblical command to submit to civil authorities and the injunction to ›obey God rather than man‹.
The reign of Queen Mary is popularly remembered largely for her re-introduction of Catholicism into England, and especially for the persecution of Protestants, memorably described in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments. Mary's brief reign has often been treated as an aberrant interruption of England's march to triumphant Protestantism, a period of political sterility, foreign influence and religious repression rightly eclipsed by the happier reign of her more sympathetic half-sister, Elizabeth. In pursuit of a more balanced assessment of Mary's religious policies, this volume explores the theology, pastoral practice and ecclesiastical administration of the Church in England during her reign. Focusing on the neglected Catholic renaissance which she ushered in, the book traces its influences and emphases, its methods and its rationales - together the role of Philip's Spanish clergy and native English Catholics - in relation to the wider influence of the continental Counter Reformation and Mary's humanist learning. Measuring these issues against the reintroduction of papal authority into England, and the balance between persuasion and coercion used by the authorities to restore Catholic worship, the volume offers a more nuanced and balanced view of Mary's religious policies. Addressing such intriguing and under-researched matters from a variety of literary, political and theological perspectives, the essays in this volume cast new light, not only on Marian Catholicism, but also on the wider European religious picture.
The United States has long been defined by its religious diversity and recurrent public debates over the religious and political values that define it. In Accidental Pluralism, Evan Haefeli argues that America did not begin as a religiously diverse and tolerant society. It became so only because England’s religious unity collapsed just as America was being colonized. By tying the emergence of American religious toleration to global events, Haefeli creates a true transnationalist history that links developing American realities to political and social conflicts and resolutions in Europe, showing how the relationships among states, churches, and publics were contested from the beginning of the colonial era and produced a society that no one had anticipated. Accidental Pluralism is an ambitious and comprehensive new account of the origins of American religious life that compels us to refine our narratives about what came to be seen as American values and their distinct relationship to religion and politics.