John Foxe and some Sources for Lollard History: Notes for a Critical Appraisal

1965 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 251-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. F. Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
Source Material ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Careful Scrutiny ◽  
History Of ◽  
Acts And Monuments

Of all the early but non-contemporary works which throw light on the history of Lollardy, the Acts and Monuments of John Foxe is undoubtedly the most important. Although it contains many tendentious comments, the products of an age when religious passions burned fiercely, comments which are of greater value to the historian of sixteenth-century propaganda than to the student of fifteenth-century heresy, it would be unwise to reject its source-value on these grounds. Besides Foxe’s comments, it also contains material, sometimes no longer extant in other records, which Foxe claimed to draw from the original accounts of the heresy trials, and, for the early sixteenth century, memories of observers, and it is some of this material which I wish to consider today. Because Foxe is noted as a propagandist, his reliability has sometimes been questioned, so the first task of the historian is to subject his excerpts from documents and his other source-material to a more than usually careful scrutiny. In cases where the original sources are still extant, these can be used to reach some estimate of his accuracy in general; in cases where they are not, other records can sometimes serve as a cross-check.

Through Several Glasses Darkly: Historical and Sectarian Perceptions of the Tudor Church

Tudorism ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
PATRICK COLLINSON
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
Acts And Monuments

This chapter surveys the perceptions of the Tudor Church since the sixteenth century. It argues that the history of the Tudor Church has been punctuated, bisected, fractured, and forever complicated by the Reformation, which meant different things to different people. One of the visions of the Tudor Church seen through very dark if rose-tinted glass was that enjoyed by Anglicans in the century or so following the recatholicising Oxford Movement of the 1830s and 1840s. In this perspective, what happened to the Tudors was sensible and non-revolutionary. The Anglo‐Catholic version of the Tudor Church was a reaction against the story of British Christianity which had been told between the 1560s and 1580s by John Foxe in Acts and Monuments of the Church, or its more familiar title, ‘The Book of Martyrs’.

The Catholic Recusancy of the Yorkshire Fairfaxes. Part I.

1956 ◽  
Vol 3 (02) ◽  
pp. 68-114
Author(s):  
Hugh Aveling
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Personal Choice ◽  
Family Ties ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Landed Gentry

In the middle ages the Fairfaxes ranked amongst the minor landed gentry of Yorkshire. They seem to have risen to this status in the thirteenth century, partly by buying land out of the profits of trade in York, partly by successful marriages. But they remained of little importance until the later fifteenth century. They had, by then, produced no more than a series of bailiffs of York, a treasurer of York Minster and one knight of the shire. The head of the family was not normally a knight. The family property consisted of the two manors of Walton and Acaster Malbis and house property in York. But in the later fifteenth century and onwards the fortunes of the family were in the ascendant and they began a process of quite conscious social climbing. At the same time they began to increase considerably in numbers. The three main branches, with al1 their cadet lines, were fixed by the middle of the sixteenth century – the senior branch, Fairfax of Walton and Gilling, the second branch, Fairfax of Denton, Nunappleton, Bilhorough and Newton Kyme, the third branch, Fairfax of Steeton. It is very important for any attempt to assess the strength and nature of Catholicism in Yorkshire to try to understand the strong family – almost clan – unity of these pushing, rising families. While adherence to Catholicism could be primarily a personal choice in the face of family ties and property interests, the history of the Faith in Yorkshire was conditioned greatly at every point by the strength of those ties and interests. The minute genealogy and economic history of the gentry has therefore a very direct bearing on recusant history.

The Orchard of Syon: An Introduction

Traditio ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 269-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sister Mary Denise
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Devotional Literature ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Spiritual Climate ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

By some inexplicable accident of literary history, The Orchard of Syon, in the nearly five hundred years of its existence, has not found its critical editor, nor is there any study of it available to readers. The first to rescue it from oblivion was Sir Richard Sutton, steward of Syon Monastery in the early sixteenth century, who, as Wynkyn de Worde informs us, found it ‘in a corner by it selfe’ and deemed it worthy of costly publication. Although it belongs to a body of medieval literature which has been in recent years the object of much critical research by medievalists, the work has, so far as modern readers are concerned, continued for over four centuries to lie ‘in a corner by it selfe.’ The energetic surge of vernacular devotional prose in the fourteenth century, not only in England, but in Italy, Germany, and Flanders — countries whose spiritual climate must have been especially favorable to mysticism — did not recede in the fifteenth century. Following upon the age of Chaucer, this century may seem to some present-day scholars literarily poor and unproductive, but it was a great age of English prose; an age, that is, when translations and experiments with original prose in the vernacular were building on the past, borrowing from other languages to meet the needs of the present, and shaping the prose of the future. The Orchard of Syon is an important specimen of this emerging prose, as well as of current devotional literature. Its connection with Syon Monastery, renowned in the history of England and of the Church, gives it added prestige.

The Early History of the Sultanate of Angoche

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. D. D. Newitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Early History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Set Up

The sultanate of Angoche on the Moçambique coast was founded probably towards the end of the fifteenth century by refugees from Kilwa. It became a base for Muslim traders who wanted to use the Zambezi route to the central African trading fairs and it enabled them to by-pass the Portuguese trade monopoly at Sofala. The Portuguese were not able to check this trade until they themselves set up bases on the Zambezi in the 1530s and 1540s, and from that time the sultanate began to decline. Internal dissensions among the ruling families led to the Portuguese obtaining control of the sultanate in the late sixteenth century, but this control was abandoned in the following century when the trade of the Angoche coast dwindled to insignificance. During the eighteenth century movements among the Macua peoples of the mainland and the development of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean laid the foundations for the revival of the sultanate in the nineteenth century.

The Monetary Thought of Two Sixteenth-Century Muslim Scholars

2008 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 46-60
Author(s):  
Abdul Azim Islahi
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Background Information ◽  
European Monetary ◽  
Ibn Khaldun ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Islamic Economic ◽  
Muslim Scholars

Muslim scholars of the sixteenth century continued the tradition of writing on economic issues. Their work, however, is characterized by the period’s overall feature of imitation and repetition and thus reflects hardly any advancement of monetary thought since the works of earlier Muslim scholars. This is clearly reflected in the two representative treatises on money: those of al-Suyuti (d. 1506), written at the beginning of the century, and of al-Tumurtashi (d. 1598), written at its end. The history of Islamic economic thought is a well-researched area of Islamic economics. To the best of our knowledge, however, all such research stopped at the end of the fifteenth century, the age of Ibn Khaldun and al-Maqrizi. The present paper seeks to advance this research and intends to investigate the monetary thought of Muslim scholars during the sixteenth century (corresponding to the hijr¥ years of 906 to 1009.) Beginning with an overview of earlier monetary thought in Islam to provide the necessary background information, it then goes on to note that particular century’s monetary problems in order to provide a perspective for the discussion of monetary thought among Muslim scholars. For the purpose of comparison, European monetary thought of the same period is also analyzed. Due to limitations of time and space, this paper concentrates on the relevant treatises and does not deal with the piecemeal opinions scattered throughout the voluminous corpus of Islamic literature. Thus, it focuses on al-Suyuti and al-Tumurtashi, as I could locate only their two exclusively monetary works. Hopefully this modest initiative will spur others to conduct more extensive research on the subject.

Persecution and Toleration in the English Reformation

1984 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 163-187
Author(s):  
G. R. Elton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Real ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
External Pressures ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

The century of the Reformation, in England as elsewhere, sharpened all conflicts and augmented persecution. As the unity of Christendom broke up, the rival parties acquired that sort of confidence in their own righteousness that encourages men to put one another to death for conscience sake; an era of moderation and tolerance gave way to one of ever more savage repression. To the openminded willingness which characterized the humanism of Erasmus and More as well as the Rome of Leo X there succeeded the bigotry typical of Carafa, Calvin, Knox and the English puritans; only the gradual evaporation of such passions, produced by each side’s inability to triumph totally, produced a weariness with religious strife which made the return of mutual sufferance possible. That, at least, is the received story. Historians of toleration, as for instance Jordan and Lecler, firmly described the history of persecution in this way. Jordan identified six developments which led to its decline in sixteenth-century England: a growing political strength among dissident sects, the impossibility of preventing splintering and preserving uniformity, the needs of trade which overrode religious hostility, experience of travel, the failure to suppress dissident publications, and finally a growing scepticism which denied the claims to exclusive truth advanced by this or that faction. In other words, only two things moved men, once they had fallen away from the generosity of the pre-Reformation era, to substitute an uneasy toleration for a vigorous persecution: the external pressures of experience and the decline of religious fervour. By implication, men of power called for repression and only those who could not hope to win favoured toleration, until general exhaustion set in. It is a convincing enough picture, and much evidence no doubt supports it. But it is a picture—a general and rather schematic panorama which makes little allowance for the real opinions of individuals. On this occasion I should like to test it by looking at the attitudes of two highly articulate sixteenth-century Englishmen—Thomas More, humanist and loyal son of the universal Church, and John Foxe, humanist and faithful protestant. Both, we know, were men of sensitivity and sense. How did they stand to the problem of persecution?

De broer van de koning met de dood bedreigd: een 'exemplum iustitiae' in de vijftiende- en zestiende-eeuwse Nederlandse kunst

1994 ◽  
Vol 108 (4) ◽  
pp. 157-170
Author(s):  
Hugo Van Der Velden
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Stained Glass ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
History Of ◽  
Town Halls ◽  
Written Sources

AbstractA South Netherlandish panel in the collection of the Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, painted around 1475-85, can be identified as one of the few surviving fifteenth-century justice pictures. Bruyn succeeded in tracing the painting's enigmatic iconography to a mediaeval 'exemplum', The King's Brother Threatened with Death, in which elements from The Sword of Damocles and from the story of the trumpet of death in the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat are combined into a single history. In the Gesta Romanorum, under the heading 'De timore extremi iudicii', the tale is told of a wise and righteous king who threatens to have his frivolous brother executed as a means of demonstrating his own state of mind: the thought of the Last Judgement makes it impossible for him to abandon himself to the pleasures of earthly life. In written sources this 'exemplum' is often associated with 'righteousness', becoming more closely interwoven with the practice of secular justice as time passed. In the fourteenth century, for example, it featured in a moralizing discourse on good and righteous government (the Ludus Scaccorum) and in the fifteenth century as a model of god-fearing conduct - even in a code of law (the Wetboek van Den Briel). This development corresponds closely with the literary history of other judgement scenes, such as the Judgement of Cambyses. The cited literary sources stress that judges should be filled with 'Timor Dei' as exemplified by the story of the king and his brother. The tenor of the 'exemplum' is a reminder that the secular judge will eventually have to answer for his actions to the Supreme Judge, an idea which was conveyed in town halls by representations of the Last Jugement. In view of the written tradition it is quite likely that the panel in Sarasota and two other representations of The King's Brother Threatment with Death - a drawing attributed to Lucas van Leyden and a stained-glass window - served as (designs for) a judgement picture. This interpretation is substantiated by sixteenth-century pictorial sources. In both a South German drawing and a print by Theodoor de Bry the story of the king's brother is combined with a number of familiar 'exempla iustitiae'.

The Scottish Reformation and the Theatre of Martyrdom

1993 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 259-270
Author(s):  
Jane E. A. Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Distinct Sense ◽  
Complete History ◽  
The Catholic Church ◽  
Acts And Monuments

Poor John Knox felt a distinct sense of inferiority when he sat down to write the first book of his History of the Reformation in Scotland. Unlike his English friend John Foxe, he could not draw upon the stories of hundreds of martyrs and fit them into the complete history of the persecuted Church from its beginning until the present day. To make matters worse, Foxe would duplicate Knox’s labours by incorporating the stories of most of the Scottish martyrs into his 1570 edition of the Acts and Monuments. In his ambition to be both the historian and the martyrologist of the Scottish Reformation, Knox thought he faced an immediate and apparently overwhelming problem: that of a distinct shortage of martyrs. Yet he was quickly reassured once he began assembling the details of those who had vigorously opposed the ‘manifest abuses, superstition and idolatry’, which characterized the Catholic Church in Scodand before the Reformation. Martyrs soon began to appear before his eyes, and Knox consoled himself, ‘Albeit there be no great number, yet are they more than the Collector would have looked for at the beginning.’

A Note on Meccan Women in the Fifteenth Century

Hawwa ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-250
Author(s):  
Hatoon Ajwad Al-Fassi
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Multiple Roles ◽  
The Public ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
History Of ◽  
Unexplored Area ◽  
The City ◽  
Scholarly Attention

The history of women in Arabia is a relatively new and unexplored area of research and the place of women in Mecca (Makkah), Islam’s holiest city, is particularly shrouded in darkness. From the fifteenth century, however, there has been a stream of biographical works (tabaqat) that shed much light on the women of the city. This note turns scholarly attention on such fifteenth and sixteenth century works as Taqi al-Din al-Fassi’s (d. 1429) eight volume Al-‘Iqd al-Thamin fi Tarikh al-Balad al-Amin, which dedicates a volume to women, in an effort to continue the scholarly appraisal of women’s lives in Muslim societies. Reading such important sources shows how women actively participated in the public life of the city, including its intellectual circles, contrary to Orientalist stereotypes. By exploring the multiple roles of Meccan women in the fifteenth century, the hope is to prompt further study of their significance and its historical implications.

A Polish Vernacular Eulogy of Wycliff

1957 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Schlauch
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Church Reform ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Polish Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
English Students

Though well known to specialists in the history of early Polish literature, the figure of Andreas (Andrzej) Galka of Dobczyn, an ardent admirer of John Wycliff, is probably not familiar to English students of Middle English. This fifteenth-century professor at the University of Cracow is notable for several reasons. Not only is his eulogy of Wycliff a precious monument of medieval Polish, but his Latin letters also have great interest, revealing as they do a colourful and pugnacious individual whose meteoric career is linked with some profound social changes occurring in his age and country. Both his literary activity and his personal adventures relate him to the movement for Church reform then sweeping over central and eastern Europe, as a precursor of the more decisive movement which was to occur in the early sixteenth century.

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