The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation


Book Description

This examination of the impact of the English Reformation at parish level provides a perceptive exploration of the role of the Catholic priesthood in the church and in the life of the community. Using a range of contemporary sources, it demonstrates the practical consequences of the Reformation.




Heretics and Believers


Book Description

A sumptuously written people’s history and a major retelling and reinterpretation of the story of the English Reformation Centuries on, what the Reformation was and what it accomplished remain deeply contentious. Peter Marshall’s sweeping new history—the first major overview for general readers in a generation—argues that sixteenth-century England was a society neither desperate for nor allergic to change, but one open to ideas of “reform” in various competing guises. King Henry VIII wanted an orderly, uniform Reformation, but his actions opened a Pandora’s Box from which pluralism and diversity flowed and rooted themselves in English life. With sensitivity to individual experience as well as masterfully synthesizing historical and institutional developments, Marshall frames the perceptions and actions of people great and small, from monarchs and bishops to ordinary families and ecclesiastics, against a backdrop of profound change that altered the meanings of “religion” itself. This engaging history reveals what was really at stake in the overthrow of Catholic culture and the reshaping of the English Church.




Royal Priesthood in the English Reformation


Book Description

Royal Priesthood in the English Reformation assesses the understandings of the Christian doctrine of royal priesthood, long considered one of the three major Reformation teachings, as held by an array of royal, clerical, and popular theologians during the English Reformation. Historians and theologians often present the doctrine according to more recent debates rather than the contextual understandings manifested by the historical figures under consideration. Beginning with a radical reevaluation of John Wyclif and an incisive survey of late medieval accounts, the book challenges the predominant presentation of the doctrine of royal priesthood as primarily individualistic and anticlerical, in the process clarifying these other concepts. It also demonstrates that the late medieval period located more religious authority within the monarchy than is typically appreciated. After the revolutionary use of the doctrine by Martin Luther in early modern Germany, it was wielded variously between and within diverse English royal, clerical, and lay factions under Henry VIII and Edward VI, yet the Old and New Testament passages behind the doctrine were definitely construed in a monarchical direction. With Thomas Cranmer, the English evangelical presentation of the universal priesthood largely received its enduring official shape, but challenges came from within the English magisterium as well as from both radical and conservative religious thinkers. Under the sacred Tudor queens, who subtly and successfully maintained their own sacred authority, the various doctrinal positions hardened into a range of early modern forms with surprising permutations.




Clerical Marriage and the English Reformation


Book Description

This volume is an examination of the debate over clerical marriage in Reformation polemic, and of its impact on the English clergy in the second half of the sixteenth century. Clerical celibacy was more than an abstract theological concept; it was a central image of mediaeval Catholicism which was shattered by the doctrinal iconoclasm of Protestant reformers. This study sets the debate over clerical marriage within the context of the key debates of the Reformation, offering insights into the nature of the reformers’ attempts to break with the Catholic past, and illustrating the relationship between English polemicists and their continental counterparts. The debate was not without practical consequences, and the author sets this study of polemical arguments alongside an analysis of the response of clergy in several English dioceses to the legalisation of clerical marriage in 1549. Conclusions are based upon the evidence of wills, visitation records, and the proceedings of the ecclesiastical courts. Despite the printed rhetoric, dogmatic certainties were often beyond the reach of the majority, and the author’s conclusions highlight the chasm which could exist between polemical ideal and practical reality during the turmoil of the Reformation.







Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England


Book Description

"This book sheds new light on the unfolding of Reformation in England by examining the ideological development of Catholicism in the formative years between the break with Rome and the consolidation of Elizabethan Protestantism. It argues that the undoubted strength of Catholicism in these years may have come less from its traditionalism, and its resistance to change, than from its ability to embrace reforming principles. The humanist elements within Henry VIII's religious policies encouraged the development of the Erasmian potential already well established in English Catholic thought. A dominant strain of Catholic ideology emerged which attempted not only to defend, but also to reform the Catholic faith, and to promote the study of Scripture, the use of the vernacular, and the refashioning of doctrine. This provided the basis for attempts to launch a Catholic Reformation under Mary I, and remained influential during the early years of Elizabeth, until reconfigured by the experience of exile and the drive for Counter-Reformation uniformity." "Dr. Wooding shows that Catholicism in this period was neither a defunct tradition, nor one merely reacting to Protestantism, but a vigorous intellectual movement responding to the reformist impulse of the age. Its development illustrates the English Reformation in microcosm: scholarly, humanist, practical, and preserving its own peculiarities distinct from European trends. It shows that reform was not a Protestant reserve, but a broad concern in which many participated. Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England makes an important contribution to the intellectual history of the Reformation."--BOOK JACKET.




The Voices of Morebath


Book Description

In the fifty years between 1530 and 1580, England moved from being one of the most lavishly Catholic countries in Europe to being a Protestant nation, a land of whitewashed churches and antipapal preaching. What was the impact of this religious change in the countryside? And how did country people feel about the revolutionary upheavals that transformed their mental and material worlds under Henry VIII and his three children? In this book a reformation historian takes us inside the mind and heart of Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep farming village on the southern edge of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebath’s conventional archives have long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all the drama of the English Reformation, Morebath’s only priest, Sir Christopher Trychay, kept the parish accounts on behalf of the churchwardens. Opinionated, eccentric, and talkative, Sir Christopher filled these vivid scripts for parish meetings with the names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes we catch a rare glimpse of the life and pre-Reformation piety of a sixteenth-century English village. The book also offers a unique window into a rural world in crisis as the Reformation progressed. Sir Christopher Trychay’s accounts provide direct evidence of the motives which drove the hitherto law-abiding West-Country communities to participate in the doomed Prayer-Book Rebellion of 1549 culminating in the siege of Exeter that ended in bloody defeat and a wave of executions. Its church bells confiscated and silenced, Morebath shared in the punishment imposed on all the towns and villages of Devon and Cornwall. Sir Christopher documents the changes in the community, reluctantly Protestant and increasingly preoccupied with the secular demands of the Elizabethan state, the equipping of armies, and the payment of taxes. Morebath’s priest, garrulous to the end of his days, describes a rural world irrevocably altered and enables us to hear the voices of his villagers after four hundred years of silence.




Evangelical Catholicism


Book Description

The Catholic Church is on the threshold of a bold new era in its two-thousand year history. As the curtain comes down on the Church defined by the 16th-century Counter-Reformation, the curtain is rising on the Evangelical Catholicism of the third millennium: a way of being Catholic that comes from over a century of Catholic reform; a mission-centered renewal honed by the Second Vatican Council and given compelling expression by Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. The Gospel-centered Evangelical Catholicism of the future will send all the people of the Church into mission territory every day -- a territory increasingly defined in the West by spiritual boredom and aggressive secularism. Confronting both these cultural challenges and the shadows cast by recent Catholic history, Evangelical Catholicism unapologetically proclaims the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the truth of the world. It also molds disciples who witness to faith, hope, and love by the quality of their lives and the nobility of their aspirations. Thus the Catholicism of the 21st century and beyond will be a culture-forming counterculture, offering all men and women of good will a deeply humane alternative to the soul-stifling self-absorption of postmodernity. Drawing on thirty years of experience throughout the Catholic world, from its humblest parishes to its highest levels of authority, George Weigel proposes a deepening of faith-based and mission-driven Catholic reform that touches every facet of Catholic life -- from the episcopate and the papacy to the priesthood and the consecrated life; from the renewal of the lay vocation in the world to the redefinition of the Church's engagement with public life; from the liturgy to the Church's intellectual life. Lay Catholics and clergy alike should welcome the challenge of this unique moment in the Church's history, Weigel urges. Mediocrity is not an option, and all Catholics, no matter what their station in life, are called to live the evangelical vocation into which they were baptized: without compromise, but with the joy, courage, and confidence that comes from living this side of the Resurrection.




The Beginnings of English Protestantism


Book Description

Table of contents