Post-Reformation England Research Articles

Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England by Kimberly Johnson

Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England by Kimberly Johnson

Johnson, Kimberly. Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 237 pp. $49.95 (cloth).

Johnson, Kimberly. <i>Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England</i>. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 237 pp. $49.95 (cloth).

From Anne to Hannah: Religious Views of Infertility in Post-Reformation England

In post-Reformation England, women who suffered from fertility problems could no longer apply to saints to intercede on their behalf. Instead, the new Protestant theology stressed the idea of divine providence and encouraged infertile women to pray to God directly while also accepting His will should He choose not to grant them a child. These views were promoted by authors of prescriptive literature for women, but also in sermons intended for a general audience that utilized stories of biblical infertility in order to teach lessons on faith and prayer. This article examines religious responses toward infertility in the period following the Reformation, and argues that the Protestant religion offered infertile women an avenue for comfort and aid in their difficulties when they could no longer appeal to saintly intercession.

Purses and the Charitable Gift

The history of voluntary charity in early modern England has been characterized by teleological narratives of the gradual demise of spontaneous alms in light of increasing formal taxation. Steve Hindle has identified the Poor Laws of 1601 as a watershed in the history of charity marking a distinct move away from the interpersonal gift economy. More recently Brad Gregory has postulated a teleological explanation of morality in The Unintended Reformation which identifies a decrease in charity with a Protestant zeal finding in post Reformation England little impetus for the charitable gift. Coupled with an attack on micro historical analysis and the history of everyday life there appears little room within this framework for the discussion of the continuation and changing significance of localized spontaneous charity in the early seventeenth century. Presenting a material culture analysis of three purses from c.1630 bearing the axiom “REMEMBER THE POORE” it is argued here that the face-to-face charitable donation was far from moribund in the seventeenth century. The composition and biography of the purses all point to a shared cultural identity amongst the elite in which charity and the interpersonal exchange remained integral to displays of power and paternalism indicative of a continued culture of giving which, although with changing boundaries and emphasis, persisted despite the introduction of formal institutional relief.

The Laudians and the Elizabethan Church: Conformity and Religious Identity in Post-Reformation England, by Calvin Lane

This is an exhaustive investigation of how Laudian clergy in the 1630s and beyond used their particular rendering of the past to define the nature of their Church, thus laying down markers for the Restoration and the creation of ‘Anglicanism’. It operates in the ‘history of ideas’ genre, for the publications of divines form the key evidence throughout. To set up his argument, Calvin Lane starts with Peter Smart, the Durham prebendary whose experiences fed debates in parliament and led to his incarceration for eleven years before his release in 1640. Smart is presented as the epitome of ‘old-style conformity’, who was obviously horrified to find himself witnessing ‘superstitious innovations’ at Durham after 1617, and notably the arrival of Bishop Neile. Smart’s sermon of 1628 drew attention to the ceremonial changes that had been occurring at Durham Cathedral under Neile, Dean Hunt and John Cosin: the reappearance of a stone altar, excessive use of candles, bowing, a new organ, choral singing and use of lavish vestments.

Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England by Michael Martin (review)

Reviewed by: Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England by Michael Martin Rajiv Thind Martin, Michael, Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England, Farnham, Ashgate, 2014; hardback; pp. 230; 4 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781472432667. Michael Martin’s compelling study gives us phenomenological profiles of selected individuals who made attempts to ‘reach’ and encounter God in post-Reformation England. The book’s five chapters discuss the religious lives and writings of John Dee, John Donne, Sir Kenelm Digby, Henry and Thomas Vaughan, and Jane Lead, who all subscribed to fluid religiosities that defied distinct labels. In the post-Reformation seventeenth century, independent religious quests gave rise to new religious groups such as Ranters, Fifth Monarchists, Philadelphians, and many other antinomian groups. Such groups were not particularly concerned with understanding God through traditional theological studies, but rather with knowing God through personal and intuitive explorations. The first chapter introduces us to the religious life of John Dee (1527–1609). Dee had a serious interest in medieval mysticism, but he stayed away from the doctrinal and theological debates of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Dee’s theology ‘attained a surprising mutability between Protestant and Catholic, orthodox and heterodox modes of religious inquiry’, yet it would be misleading to compare it to the newly conceived Anglican via media (p. 27). In Chapter 2, on John Donne (1572–1631), Martin argues that Donne’s ‘religious aesthetic is grounded in humility’ (p. 48). Donne also stressed the communal aspect of religion and the significance of the Established Church. Yet his writings on religious ecstasies drew heavily on Catholic mysticism and vocabulary. Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–65) is the subject of Chapter 3. Martin describes his religious methodology as ‘the technological and the Catholic’ (p. 87). Digby was profoundly affected by his wife’s death and devoted his life [End Page 391] to the science of palingenesis, which was always intermixed with the idea of resurrection. The fourth chapter covers the Rosicrucian mysticism of Henry and Thomas Vaughan. Such mysticism proposed ‘that God can be discerned in nature’ via scientific study of the natural world ‘informed by scripture’ (p. 109). The last chapter focuses on Jane Lead (1624–1704) who led the evangelical Philadelphian Society. Lead’s writings were focused intensely on the Bible, especially ‘the Book of Revelation’s eschatological intensity’ (p. 155). Again, like the other figures studied in this book, Lead’s religious beliefs exhibit cross-confessional syncretism as evident by her support for the heretical (for Protestants) idea of Purgatory. The heterogeneous religiosities of these subjects owe much to their individual characteristics and lives, but, as Martin concludes, they were also ‘informed by their cultural and historical moments’ (p. 185). Rajiv Thind The University of Queensland Copyright © 2015 Rajiv Thind

Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England. Michael Martin. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2014. viii + 222 pp. $109.95.

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Shakespeare’s Unreformed Fictions by Gillian Woods (review)

Gillian Woods. Unreformed Fictions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 239. $110.00. The title of Gillian Woods's impressive new book, Unreformed Fictions, contains its central argument compressed form. Woods uses the word to describe the seemingly phrases, motifs, Latin tags, story lines, objects, and visual images that percolate through both early modern English culture and plays. This apparently Catholic material--the first example Woods gives is the ubiquitous phrase th'mass--could, and indeed often did, function an unreformed manner, without denoting straightforwardly theology (4). interest the unreformed, Woods argues, is primarily artistic and literary rather than theological--hence the word fiction her title. Taking seriously that Shakespeare's works ... are primarily stories rather than polemics (20), Woods traces manipulation of unreformed material along the chains of created by deeply concerned with the ethical and aesthetic ramifications of playing. As it reconnect[s] historical understanding of post-Reformation culture to the aesthetic and theatrical experience of the plays (21), the book provides rich, nuanced cultural analysis, and welcome intervention recent studies religion post-Reformation England. In each chapter Woods identifies (22) raised by encounter with unreformed material. The first chapter argues that 1 Henry IV asks how history play remembers the pre-Reformation past (23), demonstrating that although the play projects the Reformation binary of and Protestant backwards onto the figures of Joan of Arc and Talbot, it also suggests that such oppositional thinking is ultimately unsustainable (55). Here Woods links the theatrical re-presenting of history to sixteenth-century Eucharistic theology: the body of the actor playing is highlighting the absence of the 'real presence' of Talbot and so associating the phenomenological effects of theater with Protestant Eucharist that was a divinely instituted memorial, not repeated sacrifice (48). Though this first chapter is suggestive, the potential of Woods's approach is more fully realized the book's second chapter, on Love's Labour's Lost. Here Woods associates the topical constellation of (60) that refer to politico-religious controversies 1590s France with the slipperiness of created by the punning, wordplay, vow making and breaking, poetry writing, and witty repartee that is this play's most obvious feature. As critics have long noted, the name Navarre is reference to Henri IV of France--an association strengthened, in case we miss the point (59), by Berowne, Longaville, Dumaine, and Boyet, all names of men who were followers of the historical Navarre. Woods argues that Navarre, the heroic Protestant leader who notoriously converted to Catholicism 1593, represented person who had changed and person who was change itself (71); play, the conversion of converts name to comic role sets up (paradoxically) chain of dislocations (69), so that sectarian conflict and changeability are identified with linguistic slipperiness and generic incongruity. Shakespeare--playfully yet also seriously--puts fractured and ironic representation of the ... convert play where language and signs constantly mislead (71). The unreformed onomastics serve to enlarge the dramas broader linguistic concerns about the slipperiness of meaning (75). Whereas chapter 2 the unreformed material is topical, chapter 3, on Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well, it is explicitly theatrical. The representational problem considered here is the seeming of the Catholic-costumed characters these plays: the Duke his Friars cloak, Isabella dressed (possibly) as novitiate, Helen her pilgrim's robes. …

The Laudians and the Elizabethan Church. History, conformity and religious identity in post-Reformation England. By Calvin Lane. (Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World.) Pp. xiv+236. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013. £90. 978 1 84893 351 4

The Laudians and the Elizabethan Church. History, conformity and religious identity in post-Reformation England. By Calvin Lane. (Religious Cultures in the Early Modern World.) Pp. xiv+236. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013. £90. 978 1 84893 351 4

Intimate Devotion: Recusant Martyrs and the Making of Relics in Post-Reformation England

As much recent work on recusancy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England has shown us, the Protestant Reformation did not instantaneously wipe out the remnants of Catholic belief. This essay takes up sixteenth- and seventeenth-century recusant prose and verse accounts of the executions of four priests: Edmund Campion and Alexander Brian in 1581, Edmund Geninges in 1591, and Robert Southwell in 1595. In the narratives of these deaths, we can see how English Reformations not only occasioned new relic-making by English Catholics, but also, paradoxically, resulted in relic cults that were more accessible and intimate than those of the medieval Catholic past. In contrast to the relic cults of late medieval England, martyrs were exemplary models to follow, confessors, friends, and confidantes; and supplicants could be like the saint in that they too might be persecuted, might suffer bodily torments for the faith, and might work miracles by virtue of their suffering.

Sidney Montagu and the Sacramental Sign: Memorial and Sacred Objects in Post-Reformation England

Following three-year-old Henry Montagu’s death in 1625, his father installed a memorial comprised of three objects in Barnwell All Saints Church. In addition to an alabaster monument, Sidney Montagu incorporated into his memorial program a thirteenth-century piscina (a basin for washing liturgical vessels), and a painted wooden box containing a manuscript sheet, “Upon the Birth and death of his deere sonne.” Montagu’s commemorative program invests memorial artifacts with the qualities attributed to sacred objects and develops and defends a private idolatry in which secular objects acquire the aura of the sacred. While the Barnwell monument engages with a high church view of the sacraments as signs of remembrance, the manuscript box reveals Montagu turning from the sacramental to the superstitious. This object displays how religious faith and personal belief bleed into each other when sacred objects, images, and practices move into secular spheres.

Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England: Discourses, Sites and Identities, by Jonathan Willis

Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England: Discourses, Sites and Identities, by Jonathan Willis

The Protestant Reception of Catholic Devotional Literature in England to 1700

Discussion of the dispersal of Catholic literature in post-Reformation England tends to focus on the tenacity of recusants and ‘church papists’ in perpetuating allegiance to Rome. Relatively little attention has been paid to the extent to which Catholic texts, either in their original form or modified for a Protestant readership, formed a part of the mainstream culture of the reformed Church. This paper attempts to demonstrate the significance of Catholic literature in the Protestant context by showing the range of Protestant adaptations, the extent of Protestant readership and the influences of Catholic literature on Protestant writers.

Calvin Lane. The Laudians and the Elizabethan Church: History, Conformity and Religious Identity in Post-Reformation England.

Calvin Lane. The Laudians and the Elizabethan Church: History, Conformity and Religious Identity in Post-Reformation England.

Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain. Edited by Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Surrey, U.K.: Ashgate, 2012. xi + 285 pp. $134.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain . Edited by Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie . St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Surrey, U.K. : Ashgate , 2012. xi + 285 pp. $134.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThis collection of essays is second produced by an interdisciplinary research network that Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie, along with Judith Maltby and Natalie Mears, have assembled for purpose of examining the whole question of worship and devotion in early modern (3). The first, Worship and Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (Surrey, U.K: Ashgate, 2008), centered on devotion in public sphere. This one addresses spiritual habits of individuals, families, and small group gatherings. Martin and Ryrie refer to early modern period as and in their introduction (3), and indeed, a theme running through these twelve articles is shifting and fluid quality of private and domestic devotion in Britain following Reformation. Leaders of every major confession and persuasion sought to influence religious habits of faithful at home, as with public worship. Catholics were forced to adapt traditional practices to constraints of a new status quo, while Protestants sought a thoroughgoing reformation of early modern household, breaking new and uncertain ground in process.Accessing private devotional experiences of past ages is a formidable research task, editors acknowledge. This explains why there have been relatively few attempts, and why a volume like this one is needed. While majority of contributors are scholars of English--only four of history--literary criticism plays a minor role in articles presented. Most are historical surveys of primary written material: godly living manuals, prayer collections, religious poetry, sermons, diaries, commonplace books, and biographies. The authors make an effort to compare what was taught formally with what was actually received and appropriated, as indicated in biographies and personal writings left behind. One methodological exception is Tara Hamling's essay (Old Robert's Girdle: Visual and Material Props for Protestant Piety in Post-Reformation England), which explains how Protestants used various images and objects for devotional purposes in private and domestic settings, despite their iconoclastic approach to public worship spaces.In first two chapters, Ian Green and Jane Dawson present a bird's-eye view of topic, describing various early modern attempts at reformed devotion in England and Scotland, respectively. While manuals such as Richard Rogers's Seven Treatises and Daniel Featley's Ancilla Pietatis held considerable sway in shaping private and domestic spirituality in Scotland's course is notable for authoritative role its Kirk played in reforming both public and private worship--something Dawson says became one of distinctive aspects of Scottish Presbyterianism to end of eighteenth century (34). Both of these well-organized essays affirm importance of clerical initiative, but also highlight fervent piety many lay men and women demonstrated in their homes and prayer closets. Sometimes they were deemed too fervent: In a later chapter, Kate Narveson discusses Clerical Anxieties about Lay Scripture Reading in Early Modern England, pointing out dilemma of ministers who sought to promote diligent Bible reading in home without also cultivating what they considered a dangerous sense of lay independence. …

English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829 by Francis Young (review)

Reviewed by: English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829 by Francis Young Michael C. Questier English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829. By Francis Young. [Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2013. Pp. xii, 308. $134.95. ISBN 978-1-4094-5565-3.) The author has a very valid premise for this volume, which is that it is odd how little is written on Catholic attitudes to witchcraft and related phenomena in the period of the long post-Reformation. The question, then, is this: once one has reassembled all the evidence as to how far Catholics in England were implicated in contemporary beliefs about the supernatural, what does that tell us about them? There is no formal conclusion to this volume. But what we might take as its principal [End Page 321] finding is that there is embedded in the modern historiography of the topic an assumption that the style of Catholic religion in post-Reformation England was essentially a popular one. Also, it was likely that it would diverge from the rest of the national Church after the power of the Tudor State had been used to reform religion. In other words, these sensibilities would express themselves through popular forms, and those forms would resist the attempts of Protestant Reformers and of Catholic Counter-Reformers to change them. The claim has been that the new/Counter-Reformation clergy, imbued with the ideals of the Council of Trent, met with resistance to their way of understanding the Church and the world and were forced in the end to compromise with popular sensibilities and beliefs. This is compatible, of course, with the line in Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971)—that is, that the Reformation purported to take away the means that the Church provided to deal with unwelcome and apparently supernatural phenomena and contributed temporarily to the rise of magical forms. The point that comes across here quite strongly is that there is a rather wide spectrum of Catholic opinions on these questions, as much skepticism and simple endorsement of, for example, how far demonic possession is actually possible. The author brings out well enough how the politics of debate about these issues generated skepticism as well as assent. The other line pursued here is that Catholic attitudes to these issues were not all that important in wider society and also Catholics’ opinions about these things were essentially the same as everyone else’s (pp. 121, 162). Historiographically this is of some significance and is demonstrably true as far as, for example, witchcraft beliefs are concerned. It is true also that Catholic attempts at spiritual healing were undertaken partly in competition with Protestant—or rather, Puritan—exorcists. On the other hand, from time to time, it was precisely these questions about supernatural power and how far the Church could exercise authority over the supernatural that led to overtly confessional disputes, something that came out into the open with the conduct of exorcisms, as the book’s sixth chapter shows very clearly. The signs are here, as John Bossy argued as long ago as 1975, that all this was somewhere near the center of post-Reformation Catholicism and certainly figures in the ministry of Catholic seminary clergy. This comes out in, for example, cases such as the “Boy of Bilson” in 1620. Here we have evidence of how a Catholic attempt to seize the moment created by (as it turned out) a fraudulent demoniac caused a series of ruptures in local society in which the presence of separatist Catholicism was very much an issue. In instances such as these—so seldom recorded but, one suspects, actually rather frequent—we have real evidence of how the continuities of Catholicism in and after the Protestant Reformation could have an impact despite the claims made by so many historians of the period that Counter-Reformation Catholicism retreated to the safety and relative invisibility of the interiors of gentry households. [End Page 322] Michael C. Questier Queen Mary, University of London Copyright © 2014 The Catholic University of America Press

Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation ed. by Peter Marshall, Geoffrey Scott (review)

Reviewed by: Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation ed. by Peter Marshall, Geoffrey Scott Caroline Hibbard Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation. Edited by Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott. [Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2009. Pp. xvii, 282. $134.95. ISBN 978-0-7546-6432-1.) This work is an extended case study of a Catholic family that remained politically active and socially influential throughout this period—lay Catholic elites in a changing world. A solid but not aristocratic family based in Worcestershire and Warwickshire, the Throckmortons are distinguished especially by the fine archives that have permitted eight authors to range widely and deeply through four centuries of family life and place the family in its wider social, religious, and political context. The editors’ introduction is an accomplished survey of recent work on Catholicism in the “political classes,” alluding to the long importance of “occasional conformity” (aka church popery, p. 2) and the phenomenon of ideologically divided families, both illustrated by the Throckmortons. John Bossy, in his magisterial work The English Catholic Community (London, 1975), launched the modern study of post-Reformation Catholicism, although his chosen chronology had the community beginning with the Jesuit mission and the abandonment, as he saw it, of pre-Reformation forms so as to enable the emergence of Catholicism as one of the “varieties of nonconformity.” There are only two references in Bossy’s index to the Throckmorton family. Bossy was largely uninterested in “church popery” and pays no attention to the “Cisalpine” views of Joseph Berington. Nor does he devote much place in that work to the international dimension of English Catholicism. The emphases of this book are very different. John Courtenay Throckmorton, 5th baronet, would assert in 1806 “we are not sectaries” (p. 24), and the family’s sustained contacts with the Continent (especially Paris) shaped its political as well as religious outlook. A devout family before the Reformation, the family maintained throughout its history a close relationship with Benedictines as chaplains [End Page 348] and tutors, reminding readers of the sometimes neglected influence of monks as “missionary priests” in post-Reformation England. A number of women in the family became Benedictine nuns on the Continent; indeed, one theme this book shares with Bossy’s is its emphasis on the role of women in sustaining the faith. All the scrupulously researched essays cannot be examined in this space, but particular mention may be made of Geoffrey Scott’s essay on the eighteenth century. The family’s position was secured through tenacious marriage strategies that preserved Catholicism, enlarged the family wealth, and extended its social capital within the English elite. At the same time, the Throckmortons’ very Catholicism pulled them into the wider European world, where they viewed sympathetically the modernizing movements of the Enlightenment era. Thus, by the eighteenth century, the Throckmortons were patrons of Berington and members of a Cisalpine family marked more by political loyalism than by separatism. A sort of Catholic Whiggery emerged that assisted the family in its work for Catholic political emancipation; and Robert George Throckmorton, 8th baronet, would become in 1831 the first English Catholic MP after Emancipation. Ironically the next decades would see the restoration of the hierarchy, which ended the long lay hegemony over the English Catholic Church. This triumph of clericalism, part of what John O’Malley has called the “long nineteenth century” of Catholicism, was epitomized on its most negative side by Bishop William Bernard Ullathorne of Birmingham’s famous retort to Blessed John Henry Newman, “Who are the laity?” As the Church moves toward reconsidering some of the issues of clericalism, the lay role in the Church, and the relation of center to periphery, the story of the Throckmortons acquires a relevance that would not have been visible when Bossy wrote in 1975. That this is happening under the aegis of the first Jesuit pope reminds us that the path to renewal sometimes “works in mysterious ways,” to borrow the words of the Throckmortons’ friend, poet William Cowper. Caroline Hibbard University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Copyright © 2014 The Catholic University of America Press

Living with the Bible in post-Reformation England: the Materiality of Text, Image and Object in Domestic Life

What did it mean to live with the Bible in post-Reformation England? The increased availability from 1560 of printed vernacular Bibles to own and keep in the home marked a profound change in where and how people experienced Scripture. Most authors have concentrated on the impact of this cultural shift on the textual practices of household religion, especially Bible reading or study in the context of daily prayers and associated instruction. More recent research has examined interactions with the Bible as object, especially the common practice of annotating specific passages, recording information or otherwise marking the pages. A turn in humanities disciplines over the past decade towards visual and material culture has emphasized the connotative role of Bibles as signifiers, with important studies of their display function within female piety, as part of the conventional vocabulary of provincial portraits or as staged properties in Renaissance drama. Yet despite these contributions there is still an overwhelming focus in the existing literature on the use of religious books in relation to the textual and oral practices of domestic devotion - on readers and reading practices – and a good deal of generalization about the locations for such practices, derived from a particular conceptual model of the country house with clearly defined internal arrangements and designated room functions.

:The Laudians and the Elizabethan Church: History, Conformity and Religious Identity in Post-Reformation England

:<i>The Laudians and the Elizabethan Church: History, Conformity and Religious Identity in Post-Reformation England</i>

License to Kill: Assassination and the Politics of Murder in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England

If we understand “assassinations” to be the targeted killing of public figures by people who believe themselves to be acting in the public interest, then the history of modern assassination begins in late sixteenth-century Europe. Prompted by the observation that the word itself was new to late sixteenth-century English, this article examines the altered scope and significance of political killings in post-Reformation England. Individuals from a broad range of backgrounds came to think themselves authorized to shape their polity by killing their leaders. Their efforts, along with authorities’ responses to such plots, speak to an increasingly participatory political culture. Murder had long been a political tool; but as politics changed, this article argues, so too did the nature and meanings of political killings.