Protestant Government Research Articles

A Spectral Spectacle

After Amsterdam’s late medieval Catholic monasteries were surrendered to the Protestant government in 1578, four of these properties were converted into an orphanage, mental asylum, and gender-specific reformatories respectively before the turn of the century. Portals with Dutch Mannerist expressions were installed at the principal entrances as a publicly visible feature of modernisation for the repurposed complexes. This essay is a study of these architectural objects and their socio-political value for the city’s philanthropic campaign that affirmed middle-class power. It argues that the portals, completed with narrative relief panels and didactic inscriptions, were a means for Amsterdam’s authorities to redefine the spectacle of social marginality. Once a concrete sight of panhandlers and vagrants occupying the urban landscape, to the general population underclass visibility became an abstract image of civic discipline. Such an image enabled sequestered and disappeared lives to reappear, with a spectral quality integral to Foucault’s analysis of modern society’s compulsion to stow away indigent bodies. Considering the seventeenth-century Dutch moral geography of moderating wealth through philanthropy, such a ‘spectral spectacle’ paralleled the Baroque theatricality of Counter-Reformation Rome as a spatial experience that advanced a more secular mode of devotion to the community.

The Theologian and the Torturer

Abstract Craig Pearce’s TNT series Will (2017) incorporates many of the same historical facts used by biographers to argue that Shakespeare was a Catholic, but he employs them to criticize the excesses of fundamentalist religions, past and present. Pearce depicts the Jesuit priest Southwell as both an ardent defender of his faith and an ambitious zealot who is indifferent to the suffering of his supporters, who are tortured and executed as a result of their connection to him. Concurrently, Pearce portrays Richard Topcliffe, Queen Elizabeth’s torturer, as a Puritan who enjoys sadistically tormenting recusant Catholics on behalf of England’s Protestant government. Pearce links these characterizations to contemporary religious fundamentalists, specifically supporters of enhanced interrogations among the Religious Right and Muslim extremists who perform public executions. The religious partisanism that Pearce condemns in Will should also be avoided in biographical studies of Shakespeare.

Dublin: The Making of a Capital City by David Dickson

Dublin: The Making of a Capital City, by David Dickson. Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. xviii, 718 pp. $35.00 US (doth). Pity the historian of a metropolis like Dublin, pondering whether or not to include its commuting hinterlands as well as how to distinguish the city's from the nation's story. Dublin includes landmarks of nationalism. But Dublin was also the centre of Anglicization. Dublin's story can be told as one of glittering success or framed by immense poverty. David Dickson tackles these contradictions, acknowledging the boom and bust of our most recent decade influenced his own decisions on what to emphasize. And he successfully makes compelling Dublin's changing portrait, providing telling detail from recent research. Rarely does prosopographical detail of aldermen or architects threaten to obscure the narrative arc of its making. Dickson, a doyen of early modern studies, is strongest on the two centuries before the Act of Union. The lively prologue covers over half a millennium up to the half-hearted Reformation. Two chapters trace the narrative through the seventeenth century, three the eighteenth, two and a half for the nineteenth, and four more for the twentieth century. Numerous well-chosen colour and black-and-white plates enhance the narrative. The maps are fewer but illuminating, especially those of aristocratic estates in eighteenth-century Dublin. This encyclopaedic work includes ninety pages of notes and a thoughtful Bibliographical Note. Settlement along the River Liffey dates from several centuries before the tenth century when it became a continuously developing community. Early Dublin was Norse. The settlement enriched itself through the overseas slave trade of prisoners. From Norse to Anglo-Norman: Dublin's first charter dates from 1171-72 and Henry II of England. By the fourteenth century Dublin can be termed a city, ethnically and legally closer to Chester or Bristol than to the rest of the isle. Dublin embraced Protestantism hesitantly, although one monument to the reforming impetus was Trinity College incorporated in 1592. Customs revenue grew rapidly in the early seventeenth century, but the horrors of civil war and refugees descended upon the city by 1642. Ironically, abject surrender to the Puritans ensured Dublin's future as the centre of the Protestant Ascendancy. By 1662, however, royalists were back in charge of a city dominated by aristocratic culture. Dublin's politics and tastes remained interwoven with those of Westminster and London. After a brief period of Jacobite rule, Dublin's ancient Protestant government (108) was restored by 1692 and it became outwardly more Williamite than any English city. Dublin's Huguenot population grew, as did the number of vagrants or strangers. The city's many partisan printers and booksellers propagated further the struggles that marked the Anglophone eighteenth-century world--landed versus monied, and Tory versus Whig. By 1750, Dickson notes, Dublin was the only one of Europe's largest cities that was not the capital of a sovereign state. The townhouses of Ireland's rentier aristocrats accounted for much of this anomalous importance, but so too did the law courts, Parliament, and the university. Fashionable society further shaped the city, from public gardens to philanthropic institutions. Dickson exhaustively covers the interaction between the aristocrats, surveyors, and architects who developed the great urban estates. The narrative reasserts itself documenting occasional riots and crises. The 1760s, the height of Dublin's craft manufacturing according to Dickson, also saw Wilkite ideas spread. Volunteer Dublin during the War of American Independence turned to protecting Ireland from enemy privateers (197) -probably Dublin smugglers. Patriot Volunteers wore only Irish cloth. …

The East India Company and Religion, 1698-1858 by Penelope Carson

"The East India Company and Religion, 1698-1858 by Penelope Carson." Canadian Journal of History, 48(2), pp. 386–387

Irish Jansenists, 1600–70: Religion and Politics in Flanders, France, Ireland and Rome (review)

Reviewed by: Irish Jansenists, 1600–70: Religion and Politics in Flanders, France, Ireland and Rome Laurence Brockliss Irish Jansenists, 1600–70: Religion and Politics in Flanders, France, Ireland and Rome. By Thomas O’Connor. [Irish in Europe Monograph Series.] (Dublin: Four Courts Press. Distrib. in the United States by ISBS, Portland, OR. 2008. Pp. 415. $75.00. ISBN 978-1-851-82992-7.) It is well known that toward the end of the English Civil War, the Irish Catholic Confederacy that had been involved in a separate struggle with the Dublin Protestant government divided into two camps. Broadly speaking, the [End Page 574] Old English were willing to treat with King Charles I and accept limited religious gains, while the Gaels who followed the advice of the nuncio wanted to press on and completely re-Catholicize Ireland under a foreign ruler. What is scarcely known and now for the first time the subject of a detailed and careful study is that the two positions mirrored closely divisions in the Irish Catholic Church that had been developing since the end of Elizabeth’s reign. As O’Connor convincingly shows, priests trained on the continent for the Irish mission in the first half of the seventeenth century fell into two groups. Those educated in colleges in Flanders and at the universities of Leuven and Paris tended to come under the influence of the hard-line Augustinian ideas of the Flemish theologians, Michael Baius and Cornelius Jansen, and the Gallican ecclesiology of the French Church. They stressed the powerlessness of the human will and a rigorous ethics, distrusted the regular clergy, and taught that Catholics should be loyal to legitimate Protestant monarchs. Priests educated, on the other hand, at Rome and in colleges and universities in Spain and Portugal tended to be supporters of the much more liberal anthropology preached by the Jesuits, accepted the role of regulars as parish clergy, and were much less ready to seek accommodation with Dublin Castle. In the debate over tactics in the late 1640s, the Jansenists usually sided with the Old English, the Molinists with the Gaels, all the more that the majority of Flemish-trained priests came from Leinster. Admittedly, the fit was not perfect: the Jesuits on the mission paradoxically countenanced coming to terms, while many priests trained in the Low Countries and France were carried away by the thought of total victory and backed the nuncio. It is impossible in a few words to do justice to the breadth of O’Connor’s scholarly account of the mission to Ireland in the first two-thirds of the seventeenth century. Its aim is twofold. On the one hand, it seeks to demonstrate the importance of Jansenism and Gallicanism for understanding the development of the Irish Church under the early Stuarts. On the other, it aims to show the significant role played by individual Irish theologians on the continent, notably Peter Lombard, archbishop of Armagh, in the articulation of Jansenist ideas. In other words, as the title implies, this is a study of the Irish contribution to a great European debate. It is also the study of a lost cause. By 1670, Jansenism had been pushed to the margins everywhere. Outlawed by the papacy in a number of bulls beginning with De eminenti in 1643 and too closely associated in the eyes of King Louis XIV with the Fronde, its supporters either toed the new establishment line or were ostracized. In Ireland the movement lost all credibility. The events of the Interregnum and the Restoration demonstrated that accommodation with the Protestant state brought few benefits: a strict Roman allegiance became and stayed the order of the day. In the final analysis this is a book about the Irish Catholic Church’s mixed response to the problem of a Protestant monarch in an age when religious allegiance was still fluid, the permanence of the confessional divide was unclear, and the clergy depended on the bounty of Catholic landowners. The events of the 1650s that destroyed the landed power of the Catholic Old [End Page 575] English as well as the Gaels and placed the Protestant ascendancy firmly in the saddle made the Jansenist position appear pass...

Great Britain and the Holy See: The Diplomatic Relations Question, 1846-1852 (review)

This is a delightful treatment, excellently researched, into a most interesting phase of the relations between the see of Rome and the Protestant government of Britain. It sheds new light on the leading statesmen, like Lord John Russell and Clarendon and Palmerston, none of whom was likely to be able to understand any inner qualities about Catholicism. It allows us the inner tensions andon occasion the tortuousness underlying those on the Vatican side who wished to persuade the successive Popes and sometimes wished to cajole a Pope to do what he was most unlikely to wish to do. The author used the necessary archives, from the Vatican and Propaganda as the two most importantinRome, to the Public Record Office and the private papers of various statesmen.

Custom, Authority, and Tolerance in Irish Political Thought: David Rothe's Analecta Sacra et Mira (1616)

Irish Catholic Political Thought in the seventeenth century found a masterly expression in the writings of Kilkenny-born David Rothe. The theoretico-practical dilemma he faced arose from the need to reconcile the, as yet theoretical, notion of an Irish Nation with a de facto Protestant government of totalitarian tendencies in a predominantly Catholic Ireland, His solution to the question of Church-State relations involved a self-critical interpretation of Irish history, a powerful protest against blatant injustice, and a modification of the model of toleration recently granted to the Huguenots in France.

Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy by Richard Andrews

Reviews533 tions of its audience. But if all I keep hearing is how wicked the theater has been, what I think of is Plato, Tertullian, Stephen Gosson, and Jeremy Collier, and my reaction is, "It can't be that bad." Or the Puritans that right. WILLIAM GRUBER Emory University ' Franco Moretti, "? Huge Eclipse': Tragic Form and the Deconsecration of Sovereignty," Genre. 15 (1982), 7-8. Richard Andrews. Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xiii + 298. $59.95. Previous scholars, and in particular Douglas Radcliff-Umstead in 1969 and Marzia Pieri in 1989, have already viewed sixteenth-century Italy as the place where modern theater was born. In seeking to bring together Italian scripted and improvised comedy of the sixteenth century , Professor Andrews provides not only a new description of such a birth, but also a thorough introduction to, and history of the two most successful dramatic genres ofthat period, the commedia erudita and the commedia dell' arte. The author begins his study with a backward glance into the fifteenth century to review the political context and the intellectual assumptions that led to the first performances of revived and original Latin comedies in cities such as Florence, Ferrara, Rome, and Mantua. He then rightly adopts a chronological approach and, stepping directly into the sixteenth century, explores the first "regular" comedies in Italian. Throughout the volume, the analysis of theatrical developments is preceded by brief but informative summaries of the historical context in which such developments were set. The Sack of Rome or the Congress of Bologna, for example, are thus seen as watershed events for theater as well as politics. And the Catholic Reformation is never far from the footlights. While a discussion of scripted learned comedy (commedia erudita) could easily be limited to plays composed in the first half of the century, the treatment of improvised professional comedy (commedia dell'arte) breaks past the mid-century mark and enters fully into the drastically different world of post-Tridentine Italy. The author argues that, in spite of the major cultural and political changes now affecting Italian theater, comedy continued to hold the stage by way of the constant dialogue between the two genres. The scenarios of the professional actors are clearly indebted to the scripts of their learned amateur predecessors. And the learned comedy which was written in the second half of the century was, in turn, indebted to the heightened sense of 534Comparative Drama theater displayed by the commedia dell' arte troupes. At this point the author casts a distant passing glance at Shakespeare and Molière, but only to tantalize his readers. The volume ends with one of the epitomes of Renaissance Italian theater, the Medici wedding of 1589, an event that really does deserve a book all to itself. The volume is thus both an excellent introduction to sixteenthcentury Italian theater and an innovative approach to the development from amateur learned comedy to professional comic theater. The emphasis it places on the texts as works to be performed rather than as literature to be analyzed is a welcome change and a solid contribution to the history of Italian theater in the Renaissance. And in its synthetic, chronological approach it is so highly suitable for class adoptions that one hopes the publisher will soon offer it in a paperback version. KONRAD EISENBICHLER Victoria College, University of Toronto Paul Whitfield White. Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage , and Plaxing in Tudor England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press," 1993. Pp. xvii + 268. $59.95. In this wide-ranging survey of about fifty years of theater history Professor White has dealt with many aspects of Tudor theater concentrating primarily on the publication of the plays and their production in relation to Protestant government propaganda. He has looked particularly at the plays of John Bale, Lewis and William Wager, and a number of other writers of interludes. He attempts to broaden the base of knowledge concerning the performance and the popularity of the polemical plays, and engages with the somewhat divided Protestant attitude to the writing and acting of plays. This last is a fruitful area for investigation, and White has assembled an interesting body...

Continental Students and the Protestant Reformation in England in the Sixteenth Century

Recent studies have demonstrated the insularity of Oxford and, by inference, Cambridge in the later middle ages; far from the two universities being regarded as centres of international scholarship the presence there of students from the continent seems to have been something of a rarity. In the sixteenth century a series of only loosely connected events, Henry VIII’s break with the papacy, and, somewhat later, the explicitly protestant government of Edward VI which happened to coincide with the victory of the imperial forces in Germany brought about a major change in the university world: continental protestant theologians now looked at England with new eyes, seeing it not only, as is well known, as a haven for persecuted protestant leaders, but also as a suitable centre of education for their young men. The first English exiles who went abroad for the sake of their religion in the reign of Henry VIII reinforced by the far greater number who fled from the Marian persecution made no secret of their belief in the vast superiority for the advancement of protestantism of the continental schools, especially those of Strassburg, Zurich and Geneva, but a group of contemporary Swiss, German, and French students adopted a rather different attitude. To them the English universities offered opportunities they did not have at home. One or two aspired to even higher realms and nourished ambitions of influencing thecourseof the religious settlement in England. A fresh account of their experiences in England from the later years of Henry VIII to the death of Elizabeth I may reveal new information on a rather less familiar aspect of the relationship between the great continental reformers and the English reformation.

Government Suppression of Elizabethan Catholic Books: The Case of "Leicester's Commonwealth"

The Protestant government of Elizabethan England had at its command a large number of means to prevent the production and circulation of Catholic books. To meet the challenge posed by the scurrilous tract known as "Leicester's Commonwealth" (1584), the officials employed all of those normal means and invented some extraordinary ones for the occasion. From the evidence of the book's circulation and its later effects, however, the government's attempts at suppression must be said largely to have failed.