Protestant Authorities Research Articles

Phantoms in and of the Archive: Mary Cudmore’s Encounters with a Ghost in Cork in 1688 and 1689

AbstractIn October 1688, and again in May 1689, Mary Cudmore claimed to have encountered a ‘spectre’ in her employers’ house in Cork city. The great interest the story aroused among the townspeople is indicated in letters from prominent inhabitants and an examination of Mary by the bishop of Cork and Ross. They allow us access into the homes and heads of the people of Cork at a point when significant challenges were being mounted to the Protestant authorities’ dominance of the city, as the War of the Two Kings loomed, and as memories of other conflicts stirred. As observers weighed questions of scruple and certainty, and balanced concerns about imposture and creditworthiness, we also glimpse shifts in supernatural belief and contemporary debates about the construction of proof and truth. That anything of Mary’s experiences has survived is remarkable, given the loss of most of the contents of the Dublin Public Record Office in 1922. In the context of ongoing deliberate and negligent destruction of archives, this article thus also argues for consideration of and consideration to partial and phantom histories.

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World

Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World

Power in vulnerability: widows and priest holes in the early modern English Catholic community

Catholics in post-Reformation England faced new challenges in their resolution to remain faithful to Rome following the passage of anti-Catholic laws in the 1580s. These legislative attempts to root out Catholicism resulted in the creation of a clandestine community where private households became essential sites for the survival of Catholic worship. This article extends prior studies of the role of women in the English Catholic community by considering how marital status affected an individual’s ability to protect the ‘old faith’. By merging the study of widowhood with spatial analyses of Catholic households, I argue that early modern patriarchal structures provided specific opportunities inherent in widowhood that were unavailable to other men and women, whether married or single. While widowhood, in history and historiography, is frequently considered a weak, liminal, or potentially threatening status for women, in the harsh realities of a clandestine religious minority community, these weaknesses became catalysts for successful subversion of Protestant authority. Assisted by their legal autonomy, economic independence, and the manipulation of gendered cultural stereotypes, many Catholic widows used their households to harbour priests and outmanoeuvre searchers. This argument maintains that a broader interpretation of the role of women and marital status is essential to understanding the gendered nature of post-Reformation England.

Singing as English Protestants: <em>The Whole Booke of Psalmes’</em> Theology of Music

The Whole Booke of Psalmes, first published in 1562, became the most visible symbol of English Protestant music-making through its immense popularity and its perceived Protestant authority and monarchical authorization, and the psalter was directly responsible for the formation of the Church of England’s musical culture. Through close reading of the hymnal’s words about music—the versified texts of the psalms themselves, particularly the paraphrases of those psalms that speak directly about music, singing, worship, and instruments, and also other material including the versified hymns and prefatory matter—I argue that the WBP promoted a particular theology of music in Reformation England. Examining how questions of participation, accessibility, text selection, aesthetics, and instrumentation are presented in the psalter, I expand scholars’ understanding of the varied Protestant theologies of music to include study of the metrical psalter that functioned as propaganda, educational material, and a devotional tool for the Church of England. The WBP reflected the importance of communal liturgical musical practice for Protestants and presented a consistent portrait of the desirable theological aesthetic of congregational church music, one that drew upon aspects of both Lutheran and Calvinist theologies. According to the WBP, singing like a Protestant in Elizabeth’s England meant singing monophonic congregational hymnody using metricized texts from Scripture and the Book of Common Prayer, and especially from the Book of Psalms. The WBP also falls on the pro-organ side of the English debate, taking a definitive stand in support of the use of instruments in church, and the psalter places strong emphasis on the attitude of the individual even as it advocates for singing in community.

Spinoza's Landlady

Spinoza's Landlady Robert Cochran (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Detail from Excommunicated Spinoza, Hirszenberg, 1907 [End Page 20] Total grandeur of a total edifice, Chosen by an inquisitor of structures For himself. —Wallace Stevens, "To an Old Philosopher in Rome" For so gentle and cautious a man, he provoked strong responses from the beginning. At twenty-three he was kicked out of Amsterdam's Jewish community with impressive ceremony. An incensed Most High, he was assured by official proclamation in 1656, would "blot out his name from under heaven." His neighbors, including his younger brother and business partner, Gabriel, were ordered to avoid all contact. He did little better with Catholic and Protestant authorities. Files in Madrid revealed the Spanish Inquisition's interest—two informants had reported the heretical views of the ex-Jew. In Protestant Holland synods denounced the 1670 publication of the Tractatus Logico-Politicus and urged civic authorities to suppress its printing. In Leiden the sheriff removed copies from the shelves of offending booksellers. His ideas, of course, caused all the trouble, though he was slow to publish them and circumspect almost to the point of duplicity in their expression. His best biographer calls him "one of history's most radical thinkers," and in his own day he was the great scourge of ecclesiastical and political authority. A study devoted to Spinoza's influence upon Gottfried Leibniz notes that fear and hostility toward him were so widespread that in the months following his death, the canals of Amsterdam might well have carried "the proverbial boat with a rabbi, a Protestant minister, and a Catholic priest," all eagerly in search of his unpublished manuscripts in order to destroy them. [End Page 21] These efforts failed: Spinoza's unpublished manuscripts, with the Ethics at their core, appeared in Latin and Dutch editions less than a year after the author's death in 1677, with his name abbreviated to initials and the publisher's omitted. The dangerous man, it turned out, had brave and devoted friends who at considerable risk took it upon themselves to outwit the zealous clerics and their civic allies. Names are available for only the inner circle—bookseller and publisher Jan Rieuwertsz, translator Jan Hendrik Glazemaker, physicians Lodewijk Meyer and Johannes Bouwmeester, fruit merchant Jarig Jelles, mathematician Petrus van Gent, and would-be alchemist Georg Hermann Schuller—but the efforts and discretion of a host of copyists, typesetters, printers, and couriers also contributed to the successful defeat of the ecclesiastical hit squad. It's a great saga—its closest examiner greatly understates the case as a "remarkable achievement." But what did these wonderful friends in fact save by their clandestine labors? What in Spinoza's thinking was so compelling that the project of its preservation and wider distribution engaged them in such risks? What was, by their efforts, transmitted to the ages? The first impression is of daunting difficulty. Steven Nadler, for example, introducing a guide to the Ethics, stresses at the outset that it is "an extraordinarily difficult book." He then follows this up with additional apology: "I am sorry to report that … it only gets harder on each subsequent reading." In part, this opacity is a matter of presentational style. The Ethics is printed in what Spinoza called the "geometrical method" (mors geometricus) for which the great model was Euclid's Elements. Mathematics, then as now, presented itself as the gold standard for certain knowledge, and Spinoza manages to suggest at once the highest levels of rigor, universal applicability, and transparent clarity by the formal device of presenting his thoughts as an interlocking system of definitions, axioms, and propositions. The Ethics in the second place presents itself as a wholly accomplished work, a gleaming monolith. No doubts are expressed, few assertions qualified. Even argument, seemingly a central task of philosophy, is for the most part restricted to very confident explanations and discussions (Spinoza calls them "proofs" and "scholia") of the serene and wholly impersonal claims at the center. He exhibits little sense of philosophy as an ongoing project, of useful predecessors or thinking yet unfinished to follow upon his own. The Ethics bristles with citations, but almost all are to...

John Milton as a protestant authority in Alice Milligan’s The Daughter of Donagh

John Milton as a protestant authority in Alice Milligan’s The Daughter of Donagh

Mischievous Information: Apostasy, Rituals of Telling, and the Sixteenth-Century Family of Love

The Family of Love met with considerable controversy in Elizabethan England. This article examines a series of confessions given by members and ex-members of the group before Protestant authorities. Such testimonies are less straightforward than they seem. Specifically, Familists and their opponents used confessions as an opportunity to refine their religious identities. Both sides fought to establish themselves as simple, transparent Christians even as they indulged in the twists and turns of sixteenth-century polemics. Rather than dismissing such sources as distortions, this article explores the ideological diversity that results from the attempt to derive meaning from hostile attention.

Benjamin J. Kaplan.Cunegonde’s Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment.

Like many of the best works of history, Cunegonde’s Kidnapping: A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment had its origins in a remarkable archival discovery. In true twenty-first-century fashion, the discovery was the result of a keyword search. While searching the catalogs of the Dutch National Archives, Benjamin J. Kaplan came across a misfiled dossier detailing an attempted kidnapping of an infant over two centuries before. The kidnapper was a young woman named Cunegonde; the child was her nephew, Mathias. The child’s parents, who belonged to different faiths, had disagreed over whether the baby should be baptized in the father’s Catholic or the mother’s Reformed church. Hendrick, the father, under pressure from his wife’s wealthy relations, vacillated, and the child was taken to the Calvinist church. Cunegonde, Hendrick’s sister, went in haste to the church, interrupted the baptism in progress, and attempted to snatch the baby from the font. She was wrestled away and taken into custody by the Protestant authorities.

On a Mission: Priests, Jesuits, “Jesuitresses,” and Catholic Missionary Efforts in Tudor-Stuart England

Beginning in 1609, English Catholic women in Mary Ward’s Institute of English Ladies returned to England to advance the mission of reclaiming England for Rome. The English Ladies typically avoided detection by Protestant authorities as they struggled to meet the religious needs of neglected populations. As women, they often could go where men could not, and their labors allowed those already involved in the mission to reach more Catholics and potential converts. This essay seeks to provide a more nuanced understanding of the English Mission’s delivery of pastoral care as well as the role of Ward and the English Ladies.

The Pleasure of the Text

This article presents two previously unrecognized Augsburg sources for the transmission of the radical Eckhartian ‘Sister Catherine‘ treatise. A comparison with the earliest known version of the treatise in Munich BSB cgm 133 is used to demonstrate how individual statements in a codex should not be assessed for their interest or radicality independent of context. Rather, the manuscript as a whole should be linked to the spiritual endeavours from which it emerged. One of the two Augsburg codices in particular is situated in the context of the copyist‘s, Agnes Bühlerin’s, attempt to preserve a particular model of spiritual life in the face of external interference by the new Protestant authorities in the diocese of Augsburg post-1539.

The Lancashire witches: a chronicle of sorcery and death on Pendle Hill

In the febrile religious and political climate of late sixteenth-century England, when the grip of the Reformation was as yet fragile and insecure, and underground papism still perceived to be rife, Lancashire was felt by the Protestant authorities to be a sinister corner of superstition, lawlessness and popery. And it was around Pendle Hill, a sombre ridge that looms over the intersecting pastures, meadows and moorland of the Ribble Valley, that their suspicions took infamous shape. The arraignment of the Lancashire witches in the assizes of Lancaster during 1612 is England's most notorious witch-trial. The women who lived in the vicinity of Pendle, who were accused alongside the so-called Samlesbury Witches, then convicted and hanged, were more than just wicked sorcerers whose malign incantations caused others harm. They were reputed to be part of a dense network of devilry and mischief that revealed itself as much in hidden celebration of the Mass as in malevolent magic. They had to be eliminated to set an example to others. In this remarkable and authoritative treatment, published to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the case of the Lancashire witches, Philip C Almond evokes all the fear, drama and paranoia of those volatile times: the bleak story of the storm over Pendle

Protestantisches Einungswesen und kaiserliche Macht. Die konfessionelle Pluralität des frühneuzeitlichen Reiches (16. bis 18. Jahrhundert)

<bold>Protestant Federalism and Imperial Power. Confessional Plurality in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (16th to 18th Centuries)</bold> The article deals with the phenomenon of Protestant federalism (Schmalkaldic League, Union, Corpus Evangelicorum) in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. It takes as a starting point an observation made by the Counsellor Peter Anton von Frank in 1814, who represented Emperor Franz I of Austria in the “German committee” of the Vienna Congress. Frank argued that the decomposition of the Empire and its dissolution in 1806 were closely linked to the opposition of the Protestant authorities to the Emperor's authority since the age of reformation. The article aims to show that Frank was correct on the one hand, but that his statement neglected the fundamental changes in the Empire's multiconfessional structure and accordingly its political implications on the other hand. Therefore it examines systematically, in a diachronic perspective, those aspects which are important in order to understand the increasing significance of the confessional plurality for the political order of the Empire in the Early Modern Period: The first part deals with the participants and the emergence of the protestant associations as well as with their concepts of governance (I). The substance of these associations, and how they realized their common goals, is discussed in the second part (II). The way their basis for legitimacy changed is examined in part three (III). The final summarizing paragraph argues that the knowledge of this topic is essential for understanding why and how the former members of the Holy Roman Empire decided in Vienna in 1814/15 to organize themselves in the German Confederation as a “federative Nation” (“föderative Nation”) (IV).

Il pubblico femminile a teatro in età moderna

At the dawn of the modern era, aristocratic women, whether at court or in the academy, shed a noble aura on the new classic theatre and were often the privileged recipients of dedicated plays and poetry essays. They were totally different from the theatre-going women that bought tickets in 16th- and 17th-century Europe. Women in the theatre, whether on the stage or in the audience, were a problem and a source of scandal for Catholic and Protestant authorities, who wanted to ban them from attendance. However, their presence kept growing and finally established itself in the 18th century, when women became the main heralds of good taste and sentiment. This essay discusses the two aspects of this story.

Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust (review)

Reviewed by: Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust Zev Garber Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust, edited by Kevin P. Spicer. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007. 329 pp. $29. 95. Shortly after his election as Reichkanzler in 1933, Hitler spoke to a group of Methodist women meeting in Obersalzburg about his admiration for Frederick the Great, Otto von Bismarck, and Martin Luther. When asked, “Where do you get the courage to undertake the great changes in the whole Reich?,” Hitler responded, with Luther’s New Testament commentary in hand, “From God’s word” (cited from Joseph B. Tyson, “Anti-Judaism and Biblical Authority: The Case of Luke-Acts,” unpublished paper, no date). Whether or not Hitler’s mandate for the drittes Reich (politically, “Third Empire” but theologically, “Third Kingdom”) is rooted in German Trinitarian pietism, it cannot be denied that centuries of Church teachings of alienation from and contempt for the Jewish people contributed to the Führer’s policy of lethal antisemitism. Why, how, and who in the Christian support of the Nazi demonizing of the Jews, and what we can learn about Christian culpability (Catholic, Evangelical, Lutheran, Orthodox) in the near total destruction of European Jewry, are the focus of this anthology. The twelve essays in this volume were originally presented at a workshop on the Holocaust and antisemitism in Christian Europe sponsored by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States (summer 2004). The goal was to evaluate the contributing factors in scriptural Christianity and historical Christendom that impeded the ability of European Christian clergy and laity in 1920s–1940s to proclaim and to condemn National Socialism as evil. Following the Introduction (“Love Thy Neighbor?”), by John T Pawlikowsky and Kevin P. Spicer (pp. xiii– xxi), which acknowledges that “Nazism was not a Christian phenomenon” (p. xx, cited from the text of Dabru Emet, Hebrew, “Speak the Truth,” a statement on Christians and Christianity signed by more than 170 rabbis and scholars, September 7, 2000) but strongly objects to depicting as equal antisemitism and anti-Christianity in Nazi ideology, the book is parsed into four sections. Section One, “Theological Antisemitism,” discusses the legacy of Christian anti-Judaism and establishes its link to [End Page 149] modern racial antisemitism within Europe’s Catholic and Lutheran churches. The essays are “Belated Heroism: the Danish Lutheran Church and the Jews,” by Thorston Wagner (pp. 3–25); “Rabbinic Judaism in the Writings of Polish Catholic Theologians, 1918–1939,” by Anna Lysiak (pp. 26– 49); “German Catholic Views on Jesus and Judaism 1918–1945,” by Robert A. Krieg (pp. 50–75); and “Catholic Theology and the Challenge of Nazism,” by Donald J. Dietrich (pp. 76–101). Section Two, “Christian Clergy and the Extreme Right Wing,” demonstrates the embrace of antisemitism in the pastoral activity and ecclesiastical outlook by some of the clergy from Roman Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran, and Romanian Orthodox churches. The essays are “Working for the Führer: Father Dr. Philip Haeuser and the Third Reich,” by Kevin P. Spicer (pp. 105–120); “The Impact of the Spanish Civil War upon Roman Catholic Clergy in Nazi Germany,” by Beth A. Griech-Polelle (pp. 121–135); and “Faith, Murder, Resurrection: The Iron Guard and the Romanian Orthodox Church,” by Paul A. Shapiro (pp. 136–170). Section Three, “Postwar Jewish-Christian Encounters,” assesses the detrimental impact of Hitlerian Judeocide on the “Body of Christ” and the transformational steps taken by post-Shoah Catholic and Protestant authorities to reconsider traditional negative teachings about the Jews and Judaism in Christian Heilsgeschichte (e.g., deicide, misanthropy, conversion, etc.) in order to reconcile with the Jewish People. The essays are “The German Protestant Church and its Judenmission, 1945–1950,” by Matthew D. Hockenos (pp. 173–200); and “Shock, Renewal, Crisis: Catholic Reflections on the Shoah,” by Elias H. Füllenbach (pp. 201–234). Finally, Section Four, “Viewing Each Other,” underscores the dynamics of Synagogue and Church scriptural and theological traditions and language bias, which have polarized acceptance and recognition between two monotheistic Abrahamic faiths, sometimes despite the best intention of bearing witness and reconciliation. The essays are “Wartime Jewish Orthodoxy’s Encounter with Holocaust Christianity,” by Gershon Greenberg (pp. 237–269); “Confronting Antisemitism...

L’exil et les Catholiques élisabéthains chez Robert Parsons

The word “exile” connotes the excruciating uprooting from one’s motherland and history testifies to the fact that Elizabethan Catholics were familiar with it. The aim of this paper is to investigate the phenomenon of exile among Catholics under Elizabeth I. Of course, exile was one of the weapons used by Protestant authorities against Catholics, but a closer analysis of the phenomenon tends to show that the latter also succeeded in turning it into one of their most powerful assets. Robert Parsons examplifies how some Catholics made the most of their exile to serve the Catholic cause. This article also focuses on Parsons’ treatment of the notion of exile in his works. He manages to turn the whole picture upside down and implicitly advises his readers not to be mislead by appearances. Indeed, it is not so much English Catholic expatriates that are in exile as England itself. Because of its heretic queen and her wicked counsellors, England has drifted away from the only true faith, becoming a land of mission for zealous English priests.

Charity, Community and Reformation Propaganda

This article argues that an examination of the ideals of charity and community in sixteenth-century England shows there were many similarities between ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ modes of evangelism, whatever the differences in the ways in which they tried to follow the imperatives of charitable behaviour. We often conceptualize the Reformation in terms of confessional distinctions and divisions, but the need to root faith in communities suggests that people were more aware of common ground between faiths than we recognize today. Every regime in sixteenth-century England placed great emphasis on the need for charity to accompany faith, and we should examine religious change in terms of its impact on the local parish community, not simply in terms of doctrine. Both Catholic and Protestant authorities attacked their religious rivals in terms of the other's failure to support the crucial ideal of charity and social justice.

Preaching During the English Reformation

Preaching During the English Reformation

'The Cat Got Your Tongue': Pseudo-Translation, Conversion, and Control in William Baldwin's Beware the Cat

William Baldwin's clever little fable Beware the Cat a piece of prose fiction written in 1553, published in 1570, and christened by its recent editors 'The First English Novel' records what is undoubtedly the most astonishing feat of translation of the sixteenth century.1 In it a priest called Gregory Streamer reveals to a select group of admirers the results of his experiments in translating the languages of the animals, a feat which he claims to have accomplished with the aid of mind-altering drugs and a fortunate conjunction of planetary influences. The original aim of his researches, he explains, was to shed new light on the sophisticated culture of the common household cat, a topic to which his attention was first drawn through the unreliable but perennially attractive agencies of unsubstantiated rumour and second-hand gossip. Like many better-documented research projects, his investigation was cut short by lack of funds. But before its abrupt termination, Streamer's exercise in bestial eavesdropping succeeds in unveiling the bewildering diversity of little-known languages which divide one community from another in mid-Tudor England. Within these cohabiting linguistic communities, we learn, a number of secret and illegal acts of translation are going on under the noses of the Protestant authorities. And the existence of these illegal acts of translation poses a serious threat to the good work of Protestant translators like Baldwin himself, who are labouring to convert the English to the true religion by converting biblical, classical, and humanist texts into their native tongue. For all its formal and stylistic playfulness, then, Beware the Cat marks itself out as the product of a period of high anxiety among Protestants and Catholics alike: a period when the English nation was about to be translated from male to female rule, from one religion to another, perhaps even from independent nationhood to political and economic subservience beneath the yoke of a foreign power. The witty games