Martyrdom in Early Modern England

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shanyn Altman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Temporal Control ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Papal Authority ◽  
Papal States

At the advent of England’s Reformation, the monarch assumed sovereignty over the English Church. This created an established state church, which was designed to counter the papacy’s assertion of supremacy. In doing so, the English Church more emphatically linked itself to the monarchy’s temporal control and its attendant realpolitik than was the case with the Pope’s authority over Roman Catholic territories, barring the small Papal States. For those in England who remained faithful to Roman Catholicism, this created an environment where some Protestants took “popery” to be akin to sedition. Whereas during Mary I’s regime, where the English Church was back under papal authority and martyrs died under heresy statutes rather than treason statutes, it was held under Protestant regimes that to act against the English Church was to act against the English state. Given the wide sway of perspectives within English Protestantism from Presbyterianism to Arminianism, as well as the old faith’s continuing appeal among many, English subjects were confronted with competing notions of what it meant to be a good Christian and, consequently, conflicting views about who qualified as a Christian martyr and what precisely Christian martyrdom involved. Martyrologies and other discourses on martyrdom were powerful tools for defining true religion and influencing the behavior of religious adherents, even if the popular representation of the martyr-figure that arises from these works did not necessarily reflect all of the views on martyrdom held by Catholics and Protestants in contemporary society.

Reforming the Holy Name: The Afterlife of the IHS in Early Modern England

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-298
Author(s):  
David J. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Multiple Contexts ◽  
Multiple Meanings

Abstract This article challenges the prevailing understanding of the Holy Name of Jesus as largely a Roman Catholic representation in early modern England. Although the Holy Name was attacked intermittently by Protestant iconoclasts, the article uses both visual and literary texts to set out a more nuanced relationship between the symbol and the broader religious culture of the period. As a symbol, the IHS served as a polysemous representation in a period of religious turmoil, creating not only multiple meanings but also multiple contexts in which the symbol could be found. The article both addresses the reasons why scholars tend to see the IHS as a particularly Catholic symbol and demonstrates the continued importance of the Holy Name in Protestant devotion.

Canon Law in England: some Reflections on the Stubbs-Maitland Controversy

1966 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 48-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. W. Gray
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
Ius Commune ◽  
Historical Argument ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Papal Authority

In March 1851, both archbishops and twenty bishops of the Anglican Church issued a public statement in which they asserted the ‘undoubted identity of the English Church before and after the Reformation’—and we do not have to look far for an explanation of this manifesto; in 1850 the steady trickle of Anglican recruits to Roman Catholicism had been complemented by the so-called ‘Papal Agression’ which re-established Roman Catholic titular sees in England. Undoubtedly, historical conscience played a large part in secessions to Rome, as more and more Anglicans came to feel that the whole constitution of the medieval Ecclesia Anglicana had been fundamentally changed by the abrogation of papal authority in the sixteenth century, and in these circumstances all shades of Anglican opinion were bound to welcome any historical argument which tended to show that the pre-Reformation Church had not been unconditionally subject to Rome, and that its acceptance of the canonical ius commune and papal authority had been free, selective, and discriminating.

Naughty Printed Books

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Scott Kastan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Scholarly Discussion ◽  
The Church

TheIndex librorum prohibitorum, first issued in 1559, the Roman Catholic Church’s official effort to ban certain books, is often contrasted with John Milton’sAreopagitica, so often claimed the foundational text of a modern notion of freedom of expression. But the opposition is more a function of a modern desire than of historical fact. The two texts do not so much display this reassuring opposition as their unnerving similarity. This article examines and attempts to undo some of the oppositions that have structured most of the scholarly discussion on the subject of censorship: Catholic versus Protestant, state versus individual, repression versus freedom. All of these play their role in an undeniably appealing history of liberty and toleration, but it is not a history that has much purchase in early modern England, as may be shown by a consideration of the efforts of the Church and authorities in England to prevent the circulation of what they called “naughty printed books.”

Paternalism and Roman Catholicism: The English Catholic Elite in the Long Eighteenth Century

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 272-281
Author(s):  
Sally Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
General Acceptance ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

There is a general acceptance amongst historians of English Catholicism in the Early Modern period that Catholic landlords were paternalistic towards their tenants, that they were generally in turns charitable and controing, their behaviour invasive yet motivated by a desire for religious and social harmony within the manor. Early modern English Catholicism was certainly seigneurial, with a requirement by the landlord, as suggested by John Bossy, to pay attention to the tenants’ well-being and ‘also to their faith and morals’.’ Michael Mullett echoes these sentiments with regard to late eighteenth-century Catholics who relied ‘on the kind hearts of those who wore the coronets’. The idea of Catholic paternalism is also endorsed by several social and economic historians, such as James M. Rosenheim, who wrote with regard to Lancashire, ‘[the] Roman Catholic gentry sustained closer connections with local communities than did aristocrats elsewhere’. This paper will examine the issue of paternalism on Catholic estates and in the local community to show that the Catholic elite, like their non-Catholic counterparts, gave money to the poor and established schools and almshouses. The focus of this philanthropy, however, was on other Catholics. The Catholic elite were also able to help their tenants, who were usually Catholic, and tie them more closely to the estate by not rack-renting their property and by not hiding behind estate stewards. There were two main reasons for the Catholic elite to focus their efforts on their poorer brethren: without the help of the Catholic elite in providing chapels and relief, Catholicism in England would have floundered; the Catholic elite were also

The Lady is a Catholic: Lady Lovell's Reply to Sir Edward Hoby

2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnold Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Society Of Jesus ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Christ Church ◽  
The Church

The first decade of James I's reign saw a wave of high-profile clerical conversions to the Church of Rome. Among the best-known cases are those of James Wadsworth, who travelled to Spain with Sir Charles Cornwallis's embassy in 1605, where, as William Bedell's biographer Alexander Clogie disgustedly recalled, he was ‘cheated out of his religion by the Jesuits and turned apostate’; Theophilus Higgons, a member of Christ Church, Oxford, who converted in 1607; his friend and Oxford contemporary Humphrey Leech, who followed him in 1609 and later joined the Society of Jesus; and Benjamin Carier, a royal chaplain and prebendary of Canterbury, who converted in 1613. As the work of Michael Questier has taught us, religious conversion was by no means an uncommon phenomenon in early modern England. Yet these cases had the potential to inflict serious damage on the Jacobean church, not only because they threatened to neutralise the propaganda advantages to be gained from Roman Catholic converts to the Church of England such as Marc’ Antonio de Dominis, but also because they drew unwelcome attention to doctrinal divisions within the Church of England over such issues as anti-popery and the theology of grace.

Practical Antipapistry during the Reign of Elizabeth I

1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 371-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Questier
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The State ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Religious Struggle ◽  
Foreign Enterprises

We are so used to the “revisionist” account of the English Reformation as a story of Protestant failure and of (relative) Catholic success that it is easy to forget how late sixteenth-century English Catholicism was once viewed by scholars not as an innocent parish pastime or a culturally conservative reaction to puritan evangelical excess. In the older narratives of the religious struggle in early modern England, historians recounted a fierce battle—the papal excommunication of Queen Elizabeth, the endless plotting to promote the dynastic claim of Mary Stuart, and foreign enterprises to invade the realm and put paid to the Tudors. Here the politics of disagreement about religion engendered a fair measure of violence on the part of the state toward some of its Catholic subjects, and this confrontation has come down to us most vividly through the martyrological narratives in which leading Catholic clerics described the sufferings of the faithful. Yet these narratives were themselves deliberately depoliticized. The context of the state's proceedings was largely cut away, and the actions and opinions of the Catholic martyrs that so irritated the regime were glossed over as part of an incisive rhetorical statement that Catholics died for their religion, not for any treasonable inclinations on their part. This was a brilliant polemical reply to the official propaganda that described Roman Catholic Englishmen as not merely ungodly but a lethal threat to the security of the state. In the regime's opinion, and in the antipopish canon that developed at this time, they were a fifth column of dissent set fair to exploit and assist foreign attempts to unseat the Tudor regime. The language of antipopery rode continually on a fear of domestic plots and schemes to meddle in the settlement of religion and the succession to the throne.

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