Belief In England Research Articles

АННА БОЛЕЙН – РЕФОРМАТОРКА ЧИ ПОЛІТИЧНА ГРАВЧИНЯ?

English society of the first half of the 16th century underwent many changes in political, cultural and, most importantly, in religious life. The reign of Henry VIII was marked by a decline in the popularity of the papacy among ordinary citizens, which led to a crisis and a break with Rome. From the moment Anne Boleyn arrived at the royal palace of Henry VIII in 1522, she began to play a key role in religious change in England. Some sources confirm her active involvement of the king in reading controversial works that would shake his attitude towards the Pope and the Catholic Church. Different researchers trace different motives for her activity, debating whether it was a religious or rather a political move. The purpose of the article is to understand and determine the level of activity of Anne Boleyn in the religious sphere of life, to trace her role and motives in the formation of a new religious belief in England. Accordingly, the following main tasks arise. Firstly, to analyze the source base of Anne’s contemporaries and scientific works, which reveal the research achievements of our time. Secondly, to investigate the dynamics of the development of the reformation movement in England, to determine the reasons and prerequisites for the church reform in order to understand the level of influence of Anne Boleyn in the decision-making by the king.

The Role of Political Attention in Moderating the Association between Political Identities and Anthropogenic Climate Change Belief in Britain

US research shows that the partisan divide among elites on climate change has been mirrored by division at the citizen level, with this division being especially prominent among more politically engaged citizens. Using British Election Study data from 2016, this article examines whether a similar phenomenon is occurring in Britain, a country that experienced an increase in climate sceptic media coverage in the aftermath of the passing of the 2008 Climate Change Act. The results show that UK Independence Party and Conservative Party partisans as well as Leavers who pay more attention to politics are less likely to believe in the existence of anthropogenic climate change in contrast to Labour Party partisans and Remainers where increased political attention is associated with greater belief. These findings point to the inherent difficulties of bringing public beliefs on climate change in line with the scientific consensus in the presence of divided elite cues.

“The Merchants of Tarshish, with all the Young Lions Thereof.” The British Empire, Scripture Prophecy, and the War of Armageddon, 1914–1918

Abstract The First World War spurred interest among the British people in the eschatological and apocalyptic portions of the Bible. The general scope of the war, as well as its particular course, provided much material to those who interpreted war-time events as heralds of the coming end of the age. Of particular interest was the subject of the British Empire’s place in the unfolding upheaval. The belief in Britain’s identity as God’s instrument of righteousness, whether as the King of the North, the Tarshish power, or the Israel of prophecy, assured many in Britain that their nation would play a paramount role in winning the war and establishing God’s rule on Earth.

Our enemy's enemy

This article focuses on representations of Britain to occupied France by the BBC French Service via its flagship programme Les Français parlent aux Français [The French speak to the French]. It first examines the establishment of the service and the formulation of a British propaganda strategy on occupied France. It then explores the service's efforts to foster French belief in Britain as France's friend and ally, and to rationalise key issues and incidents which challenged that narrative. Simultaneously, it positions French Service endeavours alongside the propaganda delivered on French national radio, known as Radio Vichy, in order to explore the exchanges about Britain between French propagandists who spoke on behalf of different Frances. In so doing, the article provides a close reading of the original French Service broadcasts which covers a larger corpus of material than has hitherto been documented in published collections, and which extends existing knowledge on the topic.

Angels and Belief in England, 1480-1700, by Laura Sangha

In 1975 John Bossy, in his magisterial The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (rev. ante, xcii [1977], 134–7), considered that ‘to view a religious tradition, as a social historian must, as a continuum of behaviour rather than of belief, is generally to renounce the facility of a ready made corpus of evidence’ (p. 109). Since Bossy’s reflection on the methodologies of the social history of religion, historians have become bolder, or perhaps just more foolhardy. Rather than considering religion as practice or behaviour, they have tried to peer inside the minds of those who lived in the past in an attempt to discern patterns of belief. The reasons for this historiographical shift are not difficult to find: the collapse of the historical canon, the linguistic turn and the rise of cultural history at the expense of an older social history. More than any other work, Stuart Clark’s Thinking with Demons (1997; rev. ante, cxiii [1998], 121–3) demonstrated the possibility of this approach by arguing that, within its own terms, early modern demonology was logical and consistent, built around oppositional ideas and expressions. As a result, the pages of recent historical works have become infested with ethereal beings, including ghosts, demons and angels, because they were ‘good to think with’ and hence provide a way into the minds and beliefs of early modern men and women. Laura Sangha’s book is the latest exploration of how early modern contemporaries thought about how one of this army of spirits moved between heaven, hell and earth as conveyors of supernatural revelation in the natural world—angels.

Sandie Byrne, The Unbearable Saki: The Work of H. H. Munro.

SANDIE BYRNE'S study of ‘Saki’ divides its attention between the work and the life, a useful approach in two respects: that, by work, she includes all his work, not just the short stories; and by life, she means simply what is intelligible by sourced evidence, without speculation to more ambiguous (but no less important) aspects such as his sexuality. The logic of this approach is understandable, and if one assesses Byrne's book on what it purports to cover, then one finds a significant and satisfying restoration of some forgotten thematic concerns. The challenge in approaching Munro/Saki is how to penetrate beneath the ‘pose of sangfroid … impeccable dress and phlegmatic poise’ (89) especially when the biographical pose seems to be duplicated in fictional characters. Byrne tackles this by drawing attention to his later role as a soldier during World War 1, and the parallel shift away from the dapper dandies of his early satiric fiction to the politics and unambiguous heroism of his 1913 novel, When William Came. Despite his cosmopolitan early life (France, Russia, the Balkans), Munro subscribed to and closely identified himself with Kiplingesque notions of England and Empire, which Byrne shrewdly traces back into his earlier satires. Reginald, Clovis, and Bertie do not deplore action or even violence in an approved cause; indeed, their comic perspective is underwritten by a sense of superiority afforded by the vantage of Empire. Munro's post-1913 renunciation of the ‘effete, degenerate aesthetes’ does not constitute a ‘radical change of heart or volte-face of personality, politics or assumed personae’ (8). Rather it is a continuation in his genuine belief in England's pre-eminence. His sense of superiority over everyone—servants, colonial subordinates, untouchables, Jews—fed his early short stories, and remained untouched by the ironies of war. An interview in The Bodleian claims ‘the personality of the man is frankly baffling’ (108) and so it is. Saki has the insight that Empire allows into itself but not beyond itself. Had he survived the war, he might have swiftly found his world-view anachronistic. The war he fought was not that of Sassoon or Graves. To write ‘The Unrest-Cure’, a comedy involving a massacre of Jews in English society, or to envision a Germany-occupied England struggling with an influx of German Jews, is both strangely perceptive and deeply blind at the same time.

Fellow British Subjects or Colonial “Others”? Race, Empire, and Ambivalence in Canadian Representations of India in the Early Twentieth Century

early twentieth century, English-Canadian schoolchildren learned to divide British Empire into the man's and the coloured man's country. According to one geography textbook, India clearly belonged in latter category. In vast peninsula of India we find [a] ... coloured man's country, densely populated by nearly one fifth of world's whole population, all of dark skin, but varying in civilization from most degraded savage to highly-cultured Hindu. Following from this division, a region's facility for self-government was explained in terms. While all white man's lands of Empire have Parliaments of their own and a citizenry free to elect members of government, in the coloured man's country natives have no such rights, for in many cases they are mere savages, and in others they could not yet be trusted with such power. (1) The imperial logic that associated absence of home-rule in India with racial character mirrored broader currents of understanding in Canada. A strong affection for Mother among Canadians of British descent, and a firm belief in Britain's divinely inspired benevolence, fueled a racialized rhetoric of empire. According to a popular imperialist narrative, Britain had brought order, enlightenment, and civilization to a formerly backward territory of globe, and Britain's imperial project in India was an inevitable outcome of march of Anglo-Saxon race. (2) These depictions reflected intellectual and political trends in Britain. Quasi-scientific theories of difference--increasingly popular in Europe and North America in latter half of nineteenth century--combined with mythology surrounding Indian Mutiny of 1857 (British heroism versus Indian barbarism), confirmed British ideas about Indian inferiority. Such sentiments, as South Asian historian Judith Brown observes, bred an elaboration of stereotypes of Indians which helped to justify imperial rule.... Indians were, for example, often described as weak and effeminate, deceitful and deficient in character, and incapable of leadership: and thus needing and benefiting from rule by Anglo-Saxons displaying opposite and desirable qualities. (3) Coupled with Britain's considerable strategic and economic interests in region, these attitudes created tremendous obstacles along India's path to self-government. The political demands of India's growing educated classes from 1860s on, and work of Indian National Congress after 1885, brought some concessions, including limited enfranchisement, election to municipal government, and opportunities to join Indian Civil Service, if only as minor officials. (4) Yet by turn of century, scant gains had been made in direction of self-government, and Britain's grip on India showed few signs of faltering. This article explores discursive production of an imagined India in work of English-Canadian educators, intellectuals, politicians, and other public commentators in first three decades of twentieth century. (5) Intellectuals such as Alfred Baker, James Morison, George Wrong, J. Castell Hopkins, and George Sidney Brett, for example, wrote enthusiastically about Britain's imperial project in India. These men, and many other commentators, identified themselves as imperialists--or, at very least, loyal British subjects. Particularly influential were Wrong's various books on history of Britain and Empire (almost always including content about India), which circulated in public schools across Ontario and, to a lesser extent, in Manitoba and British Columbia during first half of twentieth century. The ideas of these authors, moreover, were generally disseminated through organizations and publications that were imperialist in orientation (or at least imperial-friendly), such as Empire Club of Canada, Globe and Mail, and Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs. …

Emergent Scale-free Social Networks in History: Burning and the Rise of English Protestantism

Abstract There is a large and rapidly increasing literature which analyses social networks for which substantial amounts of quantitative data are available. Further, there is a growing and related literature on what is referred to by economists as ‘information cascades’ on such networks. However, there is little discussion of the specific events which lead to either the creation of a network in the first instance, or of how a network which is latent in terms of its awareness evolves into a network on which individual behaviour/beliefs are actually altered. In this paper, we describe the process of emergence and evolution of a historical cultural and social network across which the opinions and behaviour of individuals were influenced. We also illustrate how empirical networks can be reconstructed relying principally on information contained in qualitative, historical sources. The specific example we use is religious belief in England in the 1550s. We describe how the burnings of Protestant leaders by the Catholic Queen Mary (1553-1558) created a set of martyrs which was decisive in increasing support not just for Protestantism compared to Catholicism, but which led to the rapid disappearance of rival Protestant factions. The network of awareness of key religious leaders already existed prior to Mary’s accession to the throne. But her actions converted this into a network on which individual beliefs were affected, in this case decisively for English history.

RETHINKING REPUBLICANISM: VINDICIAE, CONTRA TYRANNOS IN CONTEXT

The article takes issue with current orthodoxy concerning early modern republicanism, centred on Quentin Skinner's model of classical republicanism. I argue that historians of political thought need to return to first principles in their practice in order to understand early modern republicanism, and I provide an example by using those principles to reassess one canonical text, Philippe de Plessis Mornay's Vindiciae, contra tyrannos. Reading the Vindiciae in context reveals it as a work whose radicalism lies, not in its engagement with the Roman law tradition, but in its express conviction that each and every individual is responsible for maintaining a covenanted relationship with God. My reassessment tracks the political, and specifically regicidal, consequences of commitment to that belief in England from the late sixteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries. It destabilizes the anachronistic distinction between ‘political’ and ‘religious’ modes of thought that historians of political thought too often use to characterize early modern political discourse, and it points to the common ground shared and articulated by theorists including, inter alia, John Ponet, George Buchanan, and John Milton. The conclusion considers what this investigation reveals about republicanism as a political phenomenon in Europe and America from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.

Is Religious Belief Declining in Britain?

The understanding and interpretation of the presumed secularization of Britain and other European nations is clouded by a lack of adequate information regarding the substance and timing of religious change. This paper represents the first systematic effort to collect and analyze existing survey data on religious belief in Britain from the late 1930s to the present. Overall, the results show an increase in general scepticism about the existence of God, the related erosion of dominant, traditional Christian beliefs, and the persistence of nontraditional beliefs. A theoretical perspective is needed that recognizes the often corrosive effects of modern life on the transmission of religious beliefs and the continued popularity of worldviews which presume a transcendent referent, however broadly defined.

A political minefield: southern loyalists, the Irish Grants Committee and the British government, 1922–31

All classes of the loyalist community ... [are] victims.Irish Grants Committee report, 3 Nov. 1930I‘A considerable number [of refugees] have left on a plea of compulsion without any justification whatever for that plea,’ declared the secretary to the Provisional Government in 1922, referring to the departure from the twenty-six-county area of disbanded members of the R.I.C., British ex-servicemen and civilians believed to have been loyal to the British régime in Ireland. Such a claim was greeted with scant belief in Britain in the spring of 1922 as perhaps as many as 20,000 people, some with their entire families, arrived on British shores and were given refugee status by the British government through its Irish Distress Committee, founded to aid Irish loyalist victims of the Civil War. The committee first sat in May 1922 under the chairmanship of Sir Samuel Hoare, a Conservative, and its function was to give loans of money to refugees from Ireland until they either found work in Britain or decided it was safe to return home. At first it had a budget of £10,000, which was fairly meagre, even by the standards of the early 1920s, considering that it dealt with 3,349 applicants in its first six months. Relief was available to claimants through loans and grants. Even at that early stage when the Civil War was far from over, the Irish Distress Committee realised that its work ‘only touches the fringe of the bigger question of compensation’, though perhaps it did not realise just how big that question was to be in the aftermath of Irish independence.

Education and Industry: the Malcolm Committee

In the course of a major speech on education at Ruskin College, Oxford on 18th October 1976, James Callaghan set in motion what subsequently became known as the so called 'Great Debate' [1 ]. The appellation 'great' was, perhaps, something of a misnomer for the central themes which emerged in his speech and in subsequent discussions were those most suited present straitened economic circumstances in sharp contrast increasing public expenditure on education which had characterised much of the previous decade. There was, of course, nothing new about greater attention being given the quality of educational provision in Britain when serious doubts were entertained about economic performance; indeed, this has been so since at least the early nineteenth century [2]. At various times in the past, as a remarkably tenacious belief in Britain's industrial supremacy wavered and eventually collapsed, concern about the content and direction of the public system of education had been voiced. Very often this took the form of specific criticism relating the lack of contact between education and industry, both in thought and practice. An example of this repetitive pattern of concern at locating the sources of weak industrial performance within an educational context appeared in the aftermath of the severe economic depression of 1920-21. Although there was a revival in production and output until a further downturn in 1926, unemployment remained the most openly conspicuous example of uneven growth in the British economy after the Great War. Accurate figures of unemployment amongst young people between the ages of 14 and age of entry into unemployment insurance at 16 were not available at the time and are notoriously difficult reconstruct now [3]. Nevertheless, even if the precise size of the problem was not known at government level the public and political reality of 'the all-pervading anxiety about unemployment' was inescapable[4]. will be argued here, however, that governmental response widespread concern which led the setting up of the Malcolm Committee on Education and Industry whose terms of reference were to advise upon the public system of education in England and Wales in relation the requirements of trade and industry, with particular reference the adequacy of the arrangements for enabling young persons enter into and retain suitable employment was, in fact, dictated by considerations often quite divorced from the ostensible issue which the Committee was directed. Unemployment was a problem of inter-locking components which defeated the piecemeal efforts of successive governments discover some key its resolution. was regional, socially damaging and politically embarrassing. The 'problem' of the unemployed was used by politicians of all parties as a useful instrument with which harry opponents at Westminster but more insidious was the spectre of revolution springing from the dissatisfactions of men without work. It is useless disguise the 95

Arab Nationalism and National Socialist Germany, 1933–1939: Ideologic and Strategic Incompatibility

When Winston Churchill visited Palestine in March, 1921, the debate over the future of Palestine and the recriminations over the broken promises of the past were at a fever pitch. It had become clear that British control over Palestine would be formalized by a League of Nations Mandate which would then irnplement the provisions of the Balfour Declaration. In Haifa, a delegation of Muslim and Christian Arabs met with Churchill to express their views on the intensifying conflict in Palestine. Churchill was given a prophetic warning, the accuracy of which has been of profound significance in the recent history of the Middle East:Today the Arabs belief in England is not what it was.… If England does not take up the cause of the Arabs, other powers will. From India, Mesopotamia, the Hedjaz andPalestine the cry goes up to England now. If she does not listen, then perhaps Russia will take up their call some day, or perhaps even Germany.

The Scientists' Declaration: Reflexions on Science and Belief in the Wake ofEssays and Reviews, 1864–5

During the decades following the publication of Darwin'sOrigin of speciesin 1859, religious belief in England and in particular the Church of England experienced some of the most intense criticism in its history. The early 1860s saw the appearance of Lyell'sEvidence of the antiquity of man(1863), Tylor's research on the early history of mankind (1863), Renan'sVie de Jésus(1863), Pius IX's encyclical,Quanta cura, and the accompanyingSyllabus errarum, John Henry Newman'sApologia(1864), and Swinburne's notoriousAtalanta in Calydon(1865); it was in this period also that Arthur Stanley was appointed Dean of Westminster, and that Bills were introduced in Parliament to amend or repeal the ‘Test Acts’ as they affected universities. They were the years that witnessed Lyell present the case for geology at the British Association at Bath (1864), the first meeting of the X-Club (1864), and the award of the Royal Society's Copley Medal to Charles Darwin. These were the years in which, as Owen Chadwick has put it, ‘the controversy between “science” and “religion” took fire’.