Church Government Research Articles

The institutional shaping of management: In the tracks of English individualism

Globalization raises important questions about the shaping of economic action by cultural factors.This article explores the formation of what is seen by some as a prime influence on the formation of British management: individualism. Drawing on a range of historical sources, it argues for a comparative approach. In this case, the primary comparison drawn is between England and Scotland. The contention is that there is a systemic approach to authority in Scotland that can be contrasted to a personal approach in England. An examination of the careers of a number of Scottish pioneers of management suggests the roots of this systemic approach in practices of church governance. Ultimately this systemic approach was to take a secondary role to the personal approach engendered by institutions like the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, but it found more success in the different institutional context of the USA.The complexities of dealing with historical evidence are stressed, as is the value of taking a comparative approach. In this case this indicates a need to take religious practice as seriously as religious belief as a source of transferable practice. The article suggests that management should not be seen as a simple response to economic imperatives, but as shaped by the social and cultural context from which it emerges.

Feminist Christians in Flanders 1979-1990: A New Feminisation?

Influenced by feminist theology, feminist Christians in Flanders aimed at a feminisation of Christian religion. Compared with the feminisation of religion in the 19th century, there are differences as well as similarities in content. Nevertheless, the context in which the gender construction of feminist Christians is placed, has changed radically. In the 19th century, women were still associated with the private sphere, while in the 1960s and 1970s, the “second feminist wave” refused the connection of male and public on the one hand, and women and private on the other hand. Consequently, the feminisation of Christian religion of feminist Christians was also applied to more “public” aspects of Christian faith, such as theology, church government and church history. It’s also remarkable that the way of believing of feminist Christians was clearly influenced by the dechristianised society in which they lived. Consequently, the phenomenon of feminist Christians doesn’t contradict Calum Browns thesis that women, rejecting Christian discourse as a cornerstone of their identity, caused secularisation in the 1960s.

ANN HUGHES, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution. Pp. xii+482. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 60.00 (ISBN 0 19 925192 4).

THE dust-jacket of Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution describes Thomas Edward's Gangraena, an account of the rise of heresy and sectarianism in Civil War England published in three parts in 1646, as a ‘distasteful but compelling book’. Gangraena is ‘distasteful’ presumably because Edwards stridently opposes the principles of freedom of speech and religious toleration that are the foundation of Western liberal democracies. Indeed in the third part of Gangraena Edwards cites the democratic arguments of the Levellers as a terrible manifestation of the unrestrained growth of heretical belief. For Edwards, the political, social, and moral disorder that he records is caused by religious diversity and, specifically, the failure to impose a strict Presbyterian church government upon the nation. The free circulation of books had spread heresy like an infection that would eventually destroy the English body politic. Edwards calls for the immediate persecution of heretics and the public burning of their books.

Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal (review)

Kranidas, Thomas. 2005. Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. $58.00 hc. xvi + 255 pp.The English Wars of Truth were intoxicated with language. The exhilaration of print, with its capacities for a larger and more varied audience; the opportunities it offered for anonymity, for sustained display, for self-aggrandizement; the sharp edges of the contrasting positions it admitted to its colloquy; the almost infinite possibilities of intermediation; and, most powerfully, the sheer importance of the debates it made possible: all these contributed to a of astounding variety, and often of raging intensity. . .. Some of it is dreadful; some of it is historically fascinating; a little of it is noble. In evaluating that discourse-specifically, in confronting John Milton's polemical prose-one can no longer assume the standards of a Western tradition long committed to clarity, perspicuity, and decorum-the last term still an unstable one. (Thomas Kranidas, Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal 1-2)A mere forty years after publication of his influential and still serviceable Fierce Equation: A Study of Milton's Decorum (1965), Thomas Kranidas has returned to Milton's prose-specifically, Milton's antiprelatical tracts-completing his previous study of decorum by means of its theological mirroropposite, the so-called rhetoric of zeal.The antiprelatical tracts-which include Of Reformation (1641), Of Prelatical Episcopacy (1641), Animadversions (1641), and The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty (1641-42)-attack the residually-Catholic ceremonialism and episcopal hierarchy of the Stuart church under Archbishop Laud. They deserve scholarly attention: Often shrill, often redundant, sometimes coarse, these pamphlets are, as Kranidas asserts, proclamations of the English Reformation. They are complex, inventive, witty, and often beautiful pieces by a major writer of English prose (Milton 48) . Yet their occasional beauty remains, for many readers, marred by scurrility and name-calling. William Riley Parker, a pioneering scholar of the prose, has noted Milton's genuine talent (God-given, he sincerely believed) for the vigorous, vituperative give-and-take of controversy:His bad manners in debate were, of course, not unique; they were his heritage as a child of his age; but he took his heritage, unsheathed it, sharpened it, and wielded it so enthusiastically that his own contemporaries found his language unusual, and today his more squeamish admirers avert their eyes from the unpleasant spectacle. (Parker 1940, 61)Indeed, like the language of his fellow activists, Milton's language defies moderation and praises surrender to anger under the aegis of (Kranidas, 2005, 2). Before turning to Kranidas's latest work, though, we might detour briefly through the Reformation controversy and Kranidas's earlier publication, as both offer necessary contexts for his Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal.Whereas Anglican moderates proffered the Pauline injunction, Let all things be done decently and in order (1 Corinthians 14: 40) in defence of church ritual and episcopal governance, their Puritan opponents countered with Revelation 3:16,So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth, among other passages (Matthew 12:30, Luke 11:23) arguing for zeal and against in such matters. As noted in Fierce Equation, Decency is a conception of elegant moderation to Bishop Hall, of nauseating lukewarmness to Milton. Zeal is the foundation of religious attitude and language for Milton, for Archbishop Laud it is the enemy of church-government (Kranidas 1965a, 64-65). Milton's contemporaries, thus, found themselves caught between two theological-rhetorical styles, both radically opposed yet sanctioned by Scripture: the one anchored in modesty and moderation, tradition and formal ceremony, the other fueled by righteous anger and indignation, scornful of tradition and formally iconoclastic. …

Ruling Eldership in Civil War England, the Scottish Kirk, and Early New England: A Comparative Study of Secular and Spiritual Aspects

Within early modern Christianity the idea of church government always entailed a basic contradiction. How could a spiritual body, devoted to Christ's teachings of love and forgiveness, exercise coercive authority? Given the widely accepted need of any sixteenth- or seventeenth-century government to enforce religiously based codes of behavior, churches and church officials were inevitably involved with the secular authorities in detecting and judging offenders. Inasmuch as such judgment had to include the threat of punishment, church officials of any kind were open to the charge of violating their Christian mission, which by nature was to be persuasive and educative rather than punitive, and also their Christian character, which, even among more radical Protestant sects, was to be more otherworldly than that of the laity.

Common Calling: The Laity and Governance of the Catholic Church. Edited by Stephen J. Pope. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004. 272 pages. $26.95.

Common Calling: The Laity and Governance of the Catholic Church. Edited by Stephen J. Pope. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004. 272 pages. $26.95.

Book Review: Common Calling: The Laity and Governance of the Catholic Church

Book Review: Common Calling: The Laity and Governance of the Catholic Church

Opening Scripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England by Lisa M. Gordis (review)

MLRy 100.2, 2005 481 The three essays in Part 11investigate the relationship of Jonson's plays to those of a number of his seventeenth-century successors: Nathan Field and Richard Brome, 'The Play writing Sons of Ben' (p. 69), according to the title of Cave's essay, Aphra Behn, 'an honorary Son [sie] of Ben' (p. 93), in the words of Carolyn D. Williams; and a number ofother Restoration'Daughters of Ben' (p. 107)?Elizabeth Polwhele, Mar? garet Cavendish, Mary Pix, and Susanna Centlivre?as explored by Alison Findlay. Part iii 'explores the relationship of Jonson's theatre to twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury traditions of performance' (p. 6) by juxtaposing Jonson and a number of modern playwrights: John Arden, Joe Orton, Peter Barnes, Caryl Churchill, and Alan Ayckbourn. Some of the resulting 'collisions' (p. 8) are not devoid of interest (e.g. pp. 125-26), but on other occasions the parallels constructed between Jonson and whatever is treated as 'Jonsonian' in other playwrights seem too loose to be mean? ingful (e.g. pp. 145, 161, 181, 187, 189, 192, 199, 205-06). Finally, rather too many typographical errors have slipped into the text, and entire words are missing on pages 101 and 171. University of Geneva Lukas Erne Opening Seripture: Bible Reading and Interpretive Authority in Puritan New England. By Lisa M. Gordis. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2003. xi +309 pp. $39. ISBN 0-226-30412-4. Of course the New England Puritans read the Bible and regarded it as authoritative. But how, exactly? And how did their preachers, lay people, and politicians mediate that authority? Lisa Gordis approaches these questions with subtlety and scholarship. A lot of this material is familiar and much discussed?John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, Thomas Hooker, and Roger Williams each get a chapter, along with a chapter on lay reading of the Bible, and a finalsection on the Antinomian controversy. The authority of Perry Miller's analysis is duly quoted, and everyone's guide to Puritan preaching, William Perkins's Art of Prophecying, is analysed once more. But if anything has happened since Miller, Bercovitch, and Ziff laid down the (grand) ideological and theological narrative of New England, it is a suspicion of such narratives, and a re? cognition that 'authority' is an elusive, widely distributed entity. What Gordis does in this book is not so much replace this narrative as complicate it. Rather than track the book chapter by chapter, I propose to pick out some of the main themes. The firstis transparency, the desire of Puritan preachers to allow the Scriptures to speak directly to people through their preaching; and the parallel belief that the Scriptures themselves are clear, so that the ordinary reader can understand the process of salvation by themselves. Now, modern theories of reading prettymuch dismiss the idea that any text can be transparent, and Gordis is aware of this; but she understands the desire, and the ambition, in preachers such as John Cotton and Thomas Hooker before exposing the tangles they get into. She is particularly acute on how they decided when to depart from a literal reading of a particular passage. The second theme, which this shades into, is dissent. If the text is clear, and the readers or preachers avowedly spiritual, how can disagreement be managed? The best chapters to explore this are those on Roger Williams and on the Antinomian contro? versy. The paradox ofWilliams is that he was, on the one hand, an advocate ofreligious toleration, but was a divisive and disruptive figurein the New England community. He did not readily seek consensus, on doctrine, church government, or the interpretation of Scripture. Gordis neatly undermines our tendency to paint him as a liberal, on the basis of The Bloudy Tenent: 'He had neither affectionnor even patience forthe wicked; he simply found the problem of their presence intractable' (p. 131). Gordis's approach 482 Reviews to the Antinomian controversy, much explored recently from the perspectives of gen? der and politics, refocuses attention on questions of reading and interpretation that lie at the heart ofthe dispute. It also allows her to develop a third theme thatdistinguishes her study, which is the difference between...

Accountability and control in a cat's cradle

PurposeTo examine control and accountability in an expressive organisation.Design/methodology/approachThe paper was based upon a longitudinal case study of events in the Church of England from 1994 to 2001 and was based on documents, debates in the governing body, conversations and interviews and participants' observation.FindingsAs a response to a financial crisis a group of financiers from within the Evangelical theological tradition (which places stress on headship and control) proposed the creation of a new church governance body (a national council) with strongly integrated central control and severely diminished conciliar participation. This group described the complex church organisations and structures (disparagingly) as “a cats cradle of autonomous and semi autonomous organizations”. This conflicted with the values of the other covenant traditions (Anglo‐Catholic and Liberal). The new body was created, but the proposed centralised control was unraveled, the existing constitution and governance was maintained, the “cats cradle” was enriched within the ground metaphor of autonomy. The case shows how the loosely coupled nature of this expressive institution with its multiple theological (value and belief) stances and multiple organisations, relationships and accountabilities was almost impervious to the attempt to shift them into an ordered and controlled hierarchy.Research limitations/implicationsThe great complexity of an ancient Church constrains the researcher to a limited account.Practical implicationsChange in expressive organisations happens by emergent negotiation and cannot be directed because the various value positions infuse everything.Originality/valueThe conception of control and accountability as being constructed and reconstructed in the interplay of the constructs of covenant, constitution and contract. This theorising may have a wider application both to expressive, public institutions and private organisations.

Leadership Role Expectations and Relationships of Principals and Pastors in Catholic Parochial Elementary Schools: Part I

Parish Elementary schools in the United States have a governance structure that often precipitates conflict. The principal is the designated leader of the school, the educational administrator, and the supervisor of the faculty and students. By canon law, however, the pastor of the parish remains ultimately responsible for the spiritual and temporal welfare of the entire parish.This review addresses the relationship of pastors and principals in parish schools. After a brief review of general governance in the Catholic Church, the review analyzes the roles of pastor and principal respectively, and concludes with some preliminary advice about role expectations.

Reforming French Protestantism: the development of Huguenot ecclesiastical institutions, 1557-1572

Theology encounters history and culture in sixteenth-century France in this examination of French Protestantism. The analysis reveals how Calvinism's growing influence led to the unification of French Protestant churches despite the opposition of the royalty. The interaction between newly adopted Calvinist theology and French society led to the development of the Presbyterian polity of the church government, a concept that quickly spread through western Europe.

Baffling the Blatant Beast: Robert Persons' Anti-Appellant Rhetoric, 1601-1602

In Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, BookVI (published in 1596), Sir Calidore, the patron knight of courtesy, is commissioned to baffle the Blatant Beast of slander and repair the damage he has caused. In an ecclesiastical context, it appears that Spenser primarily identifies the Blatant Beast with iconoclasm: Through all estates he found that he had past, In which he many massacres had left, And to the Clergy now come at last; In which such spoile, such hauocke, and such theft He wrought, that thence all goodnesse he bereft, That endlesse were to tell. The Elfin Knight, Who now no place besides vnsought had left, At length into a Monastere did light, Where he him found despoyling all with maine and might.1 There is an allusion here to the despoiling of the monasteries by Henry VIII, in which slander-a cynical expose, as his critics maintained, of monkish corruption-played a central role. But Spenser, writing at much the same time as Richard Hooker's defense of tradition against the Puritans Walter Travers and Thomas Cartwright, is also concerned about a mean spirit of detraction, a ruthless determination to leave nothing standing of the old order.2 And behind this he detects something even more comprehensively threatening. Book VI of The Faerie Queene takes Spenser's meditation on the nature and conditions of moral virtue into new territory. It is not enough, he seems to be arguing, for a person to be righteous, for temperance to go beyond mediating between extremes; it is not enough to harness natural energies and respond to the beauty deep down things, to unite with the like-minded and resist public and private evil. Such virtues are explored with great subtlety in the first five books of the poem. Book Six implies that they are limited in their power unless recognition is super-added. The beauty of holiness needs to be respected, treated with courtesy, or it will not be able to radiate out and transform the world. That is why envy, slander, detraction, the spirit of carping and faultfinding, are so destructive. Spenser is at pains to register the fragility of his vision of goodness. Not even Calidore, approaching the dance of the Graces, is sensitive enough to prevent them vanishing. Colin Clout, the figure of the poet himself, breaks his pipe in frustration.3 Robert Persons the Jesuit not, one would think, a kindred spirit with the convinced Protestant Edmund Spenser, but he shared the horror of slander as a form of iconoclasm, the destruction of an image. Unlike Spenser, he himself a prime target of a smear campaign, so his strictures on detraction were even less disinterested,4 but his selfvindication in the fierce appellant controversy of 1598-1602 makes for a fascinating case study of engaging with the Blatant Beast. In March, 1598, the Cardinal Protector of England, Enrico Caetani, proposed that the persecuted Church of Rome in England should be placed under the authority of an archpriest. George Blackwell appointed, and the Jesuit superior, Henry Garnet, reported that there was general acceptance among the clergy. Perhaps. But a relatively small but determined group of secular priests-just how representative they were of a wider feeling it is hard to establish-protested against the imposition, as they saw it, of an unwanted and unfamiliar form of church government.5 Fundamentally, they were disaffected with the Jesuits, whom they believed to be behind the move and would stand to gain from it. That disaffection, in turn, stemmed from perceived Jesuit domination of the English seminaries, Jesuit promotion of Spanish political interest (incurring the wrath of the English authorities on all Catholics), and Jesuit involvement in the notorious Wisbech Stirs. Father William Weston, Garnet's predecessor as Jesuit superior, had entered the community of jailed Catholic clerics at Wisbech Castle in 1588; in December, 1594, he withdrew to his room in disgust over the lax behavior of some of his fellow inmates, and the community split. …

Law and Memory. The Many Aspects of the Legal Inquisition in the Medieval Crown of Aragon

This article discusses the importance of the legal inquisition in the medieval Crown of Aragon. The form is reviewed from its Roman origins through the influence of Visigothic law and that of the various law codes of eastern Spain during the Middle Ages. The use of the legal inquisition by the crown, the church, the nobility and town governments clearly demonstrates how adaptable it could be. The form's manipulation of both written evidence and witness testimony is crucial for the understanding of how Iberian law perceived and shaped the memory of past events.

New Taxonomies of the Westminster Assembly (1643-52): The Creedal Controversy as Case Study

Historians have almost always viewed the Westminster Assembly (1643-52) principally from the perspective of church government and the players in the story are labelled Presbyterians, Independents, and Erastians. This ecclesiological reading of events is not exclusive to the Assembly; indeed, almost the entire godly community of the 1640s has consistently been understood in terms of ecclesiological compartments.This article assumes that ecclesiological classifications are essential for understanding the Westminster Assembly but it questions why the Assembly bifurcated into ‘the familiar party division of Presbyterians and Independents.’ While being alert to the gathering's social and political contexts, I ask if there may be theological or hermeneutical reasons for divisions in the Assembly.Second, this article asks if there are other possible taxonomies of the Assembly that can take into account some of the many debates in the Assembly that have little or nothing to do with ecclesiology. Previous histories have placed ecclesiology on centre stage; this study asks if ecclesiology should not be given a more modest role in the drama of the Assembly. To answer these questions, this paper discusses the Assembly's debate over the ecumenical creeds.

The Search for Seventeenth Century Authority during the Hicksite Reformation

The Search for Seventeenth Century Authority during the Hicksite Reformation H. Larry Ingle In matters of religious faith and conviction, the question of authority is always central—how is the faith defined? Historically within the western Christian tradition, there have been three approaches to solving this central question. The first evolved within the Roman Catholic Church and is characterized by granting final authority to the church, represented by the central figure within the organization, the Bishop of Rome, the pope. As all know, Roman Catholics aver that the pope is infallible and cannot err when speaking formally on matters of faith and morals. Secondly, the Protestant tradition begins and ends with the scriptures, the Bible, even though Martin Luther, who set the Protestant movement going, insisted that "the just shall live by faith alone (Romans 1:17)." Of course, this solution only begs the question because someone must have the authority to affirm which interpretation, among the many that are possible, is the correct one. Quakers draw from an approach more mystical and individualistic, but like other Protestants they have still not escaped the problem of who determines among the myriad and idiosyncratic possible interpretations which one is correct. Moreover, as in the other traditions, there are different emphases at different times, meaning that over time there is a lack of consistency. (Here I might add that this evolution in the Quaker message demands that those seeking to understand it can hardly avoid a historical approach, lest they distort their findings.1 What George Fox thought in, say, 1654, was likely a bit different from his views thirty years later; certainly external events influenced his thought at any given time.) Such changes also make the tradition a rich one, supplying in day-to-day solutions to the fundamental problem ofauthority precedents that adherents in the future may use for their purposes, both political and personal. In this sense, the conflict between the so-called "Hicksites" and the so-called "Orthodox" after 1819 was a disagreement over which side interpreted their common heritage correctly. What they actually did, as we shall see, was to draw on different emphases in the historical record they possessed, so that each side legitimately claimed to be correct. Thus we must first turn to examine the broad outlines ofthe seventeenthcentury Quaker convictions that later Friends mined for their partisan purposes. (I add, again parenthetically, that most people who explore the past—present company excepted of course!—go to it with a preconceived approach that they want to vindicate and support. Few are unbiased, objective observers; this was certainly true ofthe Hicksites and the Orthodox .) Seventeenth-century Quaker thought and practice fall easily into two The Search for Seventeenth Century Authority69 periods for our purposes: the first, and in my opinion the more innovative and creative ofthe two, included the years up to the Stuart Restoration of 1 660; the second occurred after 1 660 and reached its high point in 1 666 with the Testimony of the Brethren, which in a typically conservative fashion sought a way to consolidate earlier gains while preserving the institutions of the faith. Those who worked during the first period were creating a movement that some ofthem liked to refer to a bit grandly as the "Lamb's War."2 Those who offered leadership during the second period, including George Fox, sought to distance themselves from what they now regarded as the excesses ofthe earlier period and created an organizational structure that would hem in those who might, as Fox phrased it, "run out" and follow individual leadings. The conflict with James Nayler, which was Fox's first major internal challenge in the mid- 1650s, offered the First Friend more than a hint of what was to come, and he began to institute a system of church government that would subordinate any potential dissidents to the larger body of Friends. But that effort would turn out to be a will-o'-the wisp in comparison to the heady hopes ofFox and his fellow believers that they had a real chance of becoming England's dominant religious group during the Cromwell Interregnum. After Nayler's humiliation, the lack ofan immediate continuing need...

НЕСТОР: Ежеквартальный журнал истории и культуры России и Восточной Европы. 2000. № 1: Православная церковь в России и СССР. Источники, исследования, историография ред. по И. В. Лукоянов, С. Л. Фирсов (review)

НЕСТОР: Ежеквартальный журнал истории и культуры России и Восточной Европы. 2000. № 1: Православная церковь в России и СССР. Источники, исследования, историография ред. по И. В. Лукоянов, С. Л. Фирсов (review)

Millennial Thought in America: Historical and Intellectual Contexts, 1630-1860 (review)

Reviewed by: Millennial Thought in America: Historical and Intellectual Contexts, 1630–1860 Matthew P. Brown (bio) Millennial Thought in America: Historical and Intellectual Contexts, 1630–1860. Edited by Bernd Engler, Joerg O. Fichte, and Oliver Scheiding. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (WVT), 2002. 394 pp. One way to cast the current humanist's historicism might be as follows: it combines a recovery of specific texts and contexts from the past, a hermeneutical self-awareness about such recovery, and a concern for the effects of reading this recovery across the temporal axes of past, present, and future. So understood, the academy's historicist moment makes millennialism—with its resurrection of sacred discourses and its convergent interests in interpretation and action-in-time—ripe for inquiry. The essays in Millennial Thought in America invite such consideration, and a number of them advance our understanding of both millennialism and historicism. [End Page 170] These contributions avail themselves of the insights of historiography, social theory, and post-structuralism that have driven recent historicist scholarship; a few others, however, do not, seeming to replay ideas carefully presented by early Americanists of the 1970s and 1980s. Organized chronologically, the volume features at the start strong essays on early New England. Joerg Fichte examines John Cotton's sermons on Revelation from 1639 to 1642 as both an extension of his concerns about church governance in The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven and as a contextual response to questions of state power emerging from Laudian and post-Laudian rule. Instead of privileging the New England Way, Cotton is, for Fichte, "cautiously millennial" and "territorially unlimited" (57). Cotton uses Revelation to promote a theocratic, congregational authority—an authority in the 1640s seemingly closer to hand in post-1642 England than in unstable New England—as evidence for and prelude to Christ's thousand-year reign. Reiner Smolinski revisits the Cotton-Williams debate over church and state through an agile understanding of each figure's millennialism. His claim is that the debate "was spurred more by their disparate interpretations of millenarian prophecies than by their different conceptions of ecclesiastical polity," and he draws on both the "bloody tenent" texts and Cotton's reading of Canticles and Revelations for the argument (93). After noting post-Enlightenment misreadings of the debate and then restaging the charges against Williams in 1635, Smolinski shows that the two "parted company on whether typological precedent from the Old Testament was still prescriptive for the Christian Church," with Cotton's literalist application of the types differing from Williams's allegorizing belief in the abrogation of Judaic law (67). So, too, the pair differ in their readings of church history. Cotton defends an apostolic continuity from the first century to the Church of England, while Williams sees contemporary institutions as part of the antichristian end days. By way of these eschatological concerns, Smolinski concludes the essay with a careful analysis of each thinker's exegesis, sorting out the late Reformation's diverse "millenarian taxonomies" in order to specify the antagonists' views of the millennium's new earth, church, and heaven (80). While intellectual history informs Smolinski's discussion, Michael Clark employs linguistic analysis to comprehend the millennialist vision in writings of seventeenth-century New England. The transformation of space and time augured by millennialism is portrayed "as a fundamental [End Page 171] shift in the semiotic relation between the visible world of human experience and the invisible world of the spirit" (97). Language itself becomes the measure for this "semiotic relation," and Clark ranges from Edward Taylor's figures—which function as symbolic "crevices," glimpses of hope temporally suspended between the Incarnation and the Last Days—to John Eliot's missionary discourse on the presumed Hebraic antecedents of Amerindians—wherein the colonization of New England points to the realization of a human community "scattered in time and space" after Babel but symbolically restored through the " 'pure Language' of divinity" (111, 112). Clark offers a distinctive reading of Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World. Focusing on eschatology rather than politics, he finds the text structured by Mather's reading of signs within the witchcraft crisis. In a "deliberate effort to turn the discourse of millennialism inside out...

Hobbes and independency

The affinity which the English Leviathan evinces for Independency is the focus of Johann Sommerville's article. Among the links the author traces is a concern to stress that clergymen have no independent jurisdiction over the laity, in contrast to positions shared by Catholics, Presbyterians and Anglicans. But, Hobbes has no doubt that the Independents themselves were fanatics, prescribing religious duties that might conflict with those of the lawful sovereign. Independents also taught resistance to the sovereign, while it is a key aspect of Hobbes's political theory to teach submission to political authority. To summarize, while Leviathan agrees with the Independents in rejecting divine right theories of church government, it cannot be read as a defense of Independent thinking in general.

Estudiantes de condición nobiliaria en la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (siglos XVII y XVIII): aproximación a su perfil sociológico

The lecture halls of the University of Santiago de Compostela were in part filled with the scions of noble families during the Early Modern period. Their academic education was financed in the hope of subsequently gaining an office in the Church or civil government. What this article tries to address in the following pages is the sociology of this privileged sector in relation to the larger student body. The fact that they were numerically limited among university students —although more numerous among students in the schools— is balanced by their close relations with classmates from upwardly mobile families. This-gives weight to the hypothesis that noble ideology prevailed within the elites of Galicia during the Ancien Regime.

Sir Simonds D’Ewes and “the Poitovin Cholick”: Persecution, Toleration, and the Mind of a Puritan Member of the Long Parliament

In 1637, Sir Simonds D’Ewes, MP, wrote a short treatise entitled The Primitive Practise For Preserving Truth. In it he argued that religious persecution was antichristian and that “tender consciences” should be protected and accommodated rather than forced. Knowing that the licensing authorities would reject it, D’Ewes did not publish his work until 1645. He chose to print it at precisely the moment when the Scots and their allies in the Westminster Assembly and the Long Parliament were pushing hard to instill a Presbyterian church government in England. Although D’Ewes has been called a Presbyterian, his position in this treatise is more in line with the Independents. Speaking in the House of Commons on April 24, 1645, he heatedly opposed a proposal to settle control of admission to the Eucharist in local presbyteries. Besides its importance for the debate on toleration, the historical and theological argument in The Primitive Practise is also valuable for the insights it provides into D’Ewes’s political outlook and his behavior as a Parliamentarian.