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Sign In or Create an Account. Sign In. Advanced Search. Article Navigation. Close mobile search navigation Article Navigation. Short Notices C. Bedford College. Oxford Academic. Google Scholar. It had begun in Although the bulk of these concentrated on astronomical, agricultural, legal, and market events, they frequently opened with brief summaries of world history to situate the year with which they dealt. A series of complications prevented the English thinking that they were participating in a movement that had started at a precise point in the sixteenth century. These confused the moment when English Protestantism had been founded, they directed attention to the Stuart, rather than the Tudor age and they reconceptualised the Reformation as something still to occur.
Ultimately these complications refashioned Reformation as an unfolding process, rather than as a discreet event and so affected what it meant to be a Protestant in late Stuart England. The first was the spread of Lutheran doctrines. These two processes had been protracted and had both suffered reverses in the reign of the Catholic Mary I, ; they had proceeded at different paces; and they had not always been dependent on each other for example, Henry VIII established an independent English church, but suppressed Lutheranism within it. All this meant there were numerous possible dates for the origins of English Protestantism, aside from Then, however, it doubled back to narrate the progress of what the author saw as the true Reformation — namely popular rejection of Roman doctrine.
For example, during the Exclusion Crisis of to , demands to bar the Catholic Duke of York from the English succession inspired a large number of anti-popish publications, many of which covered sixteenth-century history. Pamphlets celebrated the first defeat of Rome, or chronicled the wicked plots of papists to extinguish Protestantism — yet despite this common purpose, authors could not agree when the Reformation had occurred.
This was partly in response to Catholic accusations of innovation. Denying that Protestantism was something new and invented, its adherents insisted it was, in fact, a survival of true worship from the days of early Christianity — a survival that had been made possible by small numbers of godly people who had resisted popish corruption in the middle ages. Again the Exclusion Crisis provided examples. Finally, from , the meaning of the 5 November thanksgiving was altered to encompass a fresh providential — but also deeply political — deliverance from popery.
They produced a regular round of festival and solemnity which involved wide sections of the population. On fasts and thanksgivings, economic activity was supposed to cease by law, providing time for everyone to attend special religious services. All of the liturgies, and many of the sermons, for these were published, allowing reflection on the message of the day through some of the most popular print media of the Stuart period.
Some of the events, particularly the thanksgivings, also elicited less official celebration.
The lighting of bonfires, often to burn the Pope in effigy; drinking damnation to the forces of Rome; setting off fireworks; and ringing church bells were all regular parts of these festivities. But it downgraded memorialisation of the early sixteenth century.
First, as is already obvious, its political focus on monarchical history distracted attention from the arrival of the Protestant faith in England. Second, it pulled the moments that were celebrated forward into the Stuart period. As the festivities were officially sponsored even though they also took on lives of their own among a wider citizenry , they had a large propaganda dimension. They therefore marked events important for current — rather than past — regimes, and so had a bias towards more recent history. The early Stuarts promoted memory of the Gunpowder Plot in to stress God would thwart rebellion against them; the later Stuarts remembered the Restoration to the same purpose; and William III celebrated as the very origin of his government.
Judah Benjamin becomes attorney general of the Confederacy, the first Jew to hold a cabinet-level office in any American government. It has been difficult for two reasons to gain a proper understanding of the relationship between the late Middle Ages and the Reformation. Only merchants selling New Draperies took advantage of the peace of to develop export to Spain and to penetrate the eastern Mediterranean. Some of these were directed against abuses by the papacy , the clergy , and monks and nuns. Usage of the word in the period allowed a simple sense of improvement, without reference to the Protestant Reformation; and in fact many of the spokesmen for the reformation of manners campaign appeared to try to keep religious controversy out of their appeals by stressing that sin was a scandal to the faith in general.
As a result, the events marked became synedoches of the endless and so, in a sense, timeless re-iteration of divine care for the faithful, rather than emphasising a point in Tudor history. For example, in , on the first occasion 5 November memorialised the Glorious Revolution, as well as the Gunpowder Plot, Gilbert Burnet ran through a standard list of Protestant highlights as he preached to the House of Lords. He demonstrated the hand of God protecting England in the preservation of Elizabeth and her glorious reign, the defeat of the Armada, and the Restoration, as well as the occurrences of and Again the reasons for this lay in the sixteenth century itself.
A Reformation with multiple origins had not bred a united community of faith.
From the first, the nature of English Protestantism had been hotly debated. The ideal structure of church government particularly if bishops were an acceptable part of ecclesiastical governance ; the exact process of salvation; the degree of ceremony that should be used in worship; and the extent of clerical power over the laity had divided those who rejected Rome. Royal headship of the church had deepened division.
It frequently pitted the monarch against the more zealous adherents of the Reformation, and itself became a matter of contention. A civil war fed by intra-Protestant hatreds left a legacy of division after However, they were perhaps clearest in the substantial works of Reformation history that were published in the years after In many ways the story of Restoration scholarly writing on the Tudor age can be told as a series of partisan justifications of late Stuart positions in religious controversies.
As one might expect of a cleric who had been close to Archbishop William Laud in the s, Heylyn defended the style of the re-established church — a body whose government by bishops and ceremonial liturgy alienated the Dissenters, who interpreted these as unacceptable Catholic remnants — and did so by denouncing moments and movements in the sixteenth century. So vehement was his criticism of some Tudor reformers, that his work would encourage extensive rebuttal well into the eighteenth century.
The Henrician reformers, however, had never doubted that the structures and much of the ceremony of the medieval church had been sound. So, like Heylyn himself in the Stuart age, they had preached the virtues of episcopacy, and of traditional rituals that brought the worshipper nearer to God. This golden moment, however, had been short-lived. Almost as soon as the English church had corrected its errors, and emerged in purity, it had been assaulted by fanatics.
Men inspired by the more radical Reformations of Switzerland, Southern Germany, and France, had tried to push the English in the direction of those foreign movements, and had taken aim at bishops and traditional elements of liturgy. In particular, two points in English Protestant history had been disastrous. The establishment had then had to defend its achievement from wreckers. But this interpretation was obviously controversial. Other historians, from other ecclesiastical traditions, took a more positive view of the contributions of Edwardian reformers and Elizabethan puritans, and so re-dated the Reformation.
For moderate Anglican writers such as Gilbert Burnet, John Strype, and Laurence Echard — and later for Dissenting scholars such as John Oldmixon and Daniel Neal — the English church was not being led astray by foreign-influenced subversives after The contrast can be seen in assessments of individual Tudor churchmen.
For Heylyn and indeed for Henry Sacheverell in a hugely controversial rallying cry for the high church, The Perils of False Brethren Grindal had been a poisonous puritan interloper. The queen had rightly suspended this Geneva-bred viper as she realised the danger that he posed to her church. It was still unfolding in the s and beyond. Disputes about the legacies of Tudor reform whether to value its preservation of some Catholic features, or its challenges to them thus polarised views of exactly when it had happened.
This led to considerable chronological vagueness. Commentators often avoided placing the Reformation at an exact time, because they knew this might make them enemies.
The result was some very broad rhetorical formulae to describe when the deliverance from popery had come. For instance, those celebrating the Revolution provided no clear start for the Protestantism that had just been saved; almost certainly to preserve the broad alliance of Protestants that had coalesced against James II. Preaching in , he thanked his new monarchs for their role in saving a Europe-wide Protestantism, and he set this in a rich historical context by outlining a series of crises the movement had survived: in the s, the s, the s, and so on.
But there was no such detail about the Reformation itself. The early sixteenth century was handled fairly briefly in comparison to later events, and there was no mention of Luther. Appalled by the excesses of the British and Irish civil wars in the mid Stuart era — wars that were certainly fuelled by intransigent attitudes to spiritual disagreement — and concerned that Protestant disunity was aiding the increasingly worrying advance of the Counter-Reformation across Europe; many commentators began to call for a broad vision of Christianity that could relegate recent disputes to the status of minor trivia.
In particular, latitudinarians suggested that the rift between Anglicans and Dissenters could be healed if everyone recognised that the core of Christian doctrine that believers needed for salvation was basic and uncontroversial, and that it was possible to disagree about other matters. This is not to say it was ignorant of the past. For example, Simon Patrick, preaching to William III in January , just after the future king had arrived in England, and just as Patrick was helping to prepare the terms of the toleration act, told of the corruption of early Christianity.
It was good to document these, but a mistake to re-live them. It could be praised as the start of a religious renewal, but it could not be memorialised as a moment of definitive spiritual truth, because — as has been shown — choosing any definitive moment caused rancour. Too many different groups were promoting too many points in Tudor history as their ecclesiastical utopia. To avoid history causing yet further dispute, people re-orientated attention away from the sixteenth-century past, and towards the present and the future.