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M1426 - COULTER TEXT.qxp:GRAHAM Q7 17/7/08 08:01 Page 135 7 Religious change and persistence Claire Mitchell Northern Ireland is still a distinctly religious society. Whether one comes from the city or the country, is a Catholic or a Protestant, lives in a housing estate or a tree-lined suburban avenue, religious symbols and messages are all around. Churches, shrines, gospel halls, statues, religious posters, signs pinned to trees and religiously themed murals pepper the public landscape. Public buildings and institutions such as schools and village halls
6 Seminary colleges, converts and religious change in post-Reformation England, 1568–1688 Michael Questier The English college network on the continent, like its Irish, Scots and Dutch counterparts, had its origins in the sixteenth century. Under the leadership of William Allen, Oxford Catholic exiles set up a seminary for English clergy in Douai in 1568.1 It quickly attracted Scots and Irish students as well. In 1579, after much bickering between English and Welsh clergy, an English seminary under Jesuit government was set up in Rome.2 It replaced an English
This book examines lay religious culture in Scottish towns between the Black Death and the Protestant Reformation. Part I looks at what the living did to influence the dead and at how the dead were believed to influence the living in turn. It shows that the living and the dead shared a reciprocal relationship of obligation and assistance, and that the bonds between the two groups were especially strong when they involved blood or guild kinship. Part II considers the overlapping communities in Scottish towns where people could personalize religious expression in a meaningful social context. Part III focuses on the period between 1350 and 1560 as one of disruption and development. It assesses weaknesses in the Scottish ecclesiastical structure and instances of religious dissent, and then it considers the Scottish Church’s response to these challenges. Two main arguments run through the book. The first is that most laypeople in Scottish towns continued to participate in orthodox Catholic practices right through to the mid-sixteenth century. The second major argument is that Catholic religious practices in Scottish towns underwent a significant shift between 1350 and 1560. This shift, which is most easily perceived when Scotland is considered within the broader European transition from the medieval to the early modern period, brought with it a kind of pre-Reformation reformation in religious practice.
This book offers a critical survey of religious change and its causes in eighteenth-century Europe, and constitutes a challenge to the accepted views in traditional Enlightenment studies. Focusing on Enlightenment Italy, France and England, it illustrates how the canonical view of eighteenth-century religious change has in reality been constructed upon scant evidence and assumption, in particular the idea that the thought of the enlightened led to modernity. For, despite a lack of evidence, one of the fundamental assumptions of Enlightenment studies has been the assertion that there was a vibrant Deist movement which formed the “intellectual solvent” of the eighteenth century. The central claim of this book is that the immense ideological appeal of the traditional birth-of-modernity myth has meant that the actual lack of Deists has been glossed over, and a quite misleading historical view has become entrenched.
The book knits together two of the most significant themes in the social and cultural history of modern Ireland - mass emigration and religious change - and aims to provide fresh insight into both. It addresses the churches' responses to emigration, both in theory and in practice. The book also assesses how emigration impacted on the churches both in relation to their status in Ireland, and in terms of their ability to spread their influence abroad. It first deals with the theoretical positions of the clergy of each denomination in relation to emigration and how they changed over the course of the nineteenth century, as the character of emigration itself altered. It then explores the extent of practical clerical involvement in the temporal aspects of emigration. This includes attempts to prevent or limit it, a variety of facilitation services informally offered by parish clergymen, church-backed moves to safeguard emigrant welfare, clerical advice-giving and clerically planned schemes of migration. Irish monks between the fifth and eighth centuries had spread Christianity all over Europe, and should act as an inspiration to the modern cleric. Tied in with this reading of the past, of course, was a very particular view of the present: the perception that emigration represented the enactment of a providential mission to spread the faith.
their present to the past, forging intellectual time-lines and traditions where none really existed. The following series of discussions represents an attempt to review some of the causes and contexts of religious change in Enlightenment Italy, France and England. Although to a degree different from each other in content and objective, the aim of the case studies is to illustrate how the notion that the Enlightenment founded ‘modernity’ has led to significant distortions in our understanding of religious and intellectual change. I wish to assert the fundamental role
This book has explored ecclesiastical reform as a religious idea and a movement against the backdrop of social and religious change in later tenth- and eleventh-century Europe. In so doing, it has sought, on the one hand, to place the relationship between reform and the papacy in the context of the debate about ‘transformation’ in its many and varied forms. At the same time, although recognizing that the reform movement had its origins as much in individuals and events far away from Rome and royal courts, it has looked to act as something of a corrective to the
followed the death of Henry VIII. The reigns of Edward VI and Queen Mary saw an end to the uneasy adjustments made under Henry, with more direct and far-reaching religious change imposed by the Crown. The close proximity of the Westminster parishes to the Abbey and Whitehall Palace meant that the radical changes of these years would inevitably have a profound impact upon them. Nevertheless, as we shall see, the experiences of parishioners in St Margaret’s and St Martin’s could differ significantly as prominent inhabitants and office-holders sought various ways of coming
historiographical dynamics and contemporary resonances of early Tudor confessional conflicts.9 It deserves closer examination than it has hitherto received for the provocative way that it historicizes the origins of English Protestantism, and the canniness with which it makes this story present to Jacobean audiences. Post-Reformation England struggled with what it meant to live in a world fragmented by religious change. Rosamund Oates has claimed that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Church ‘histories were powerful tools in confessional debates because they were
experiences and controversial actions under Henry and Edward by using images of sleep, exile and dreams. His Advent sermon of 1554 is exemplary in this regard.5 In this text Gardiner used the trope of sleep to suggest that the religious changes of the 1530s and 1540s took place without his conscious knowledge, as though he had been in a dream, a nightmare, for the last fifteen years and was only now waking from it.6 He told his audience: It is time for us … to wake – not the Queen, nor the King, nor my lord cardinal, who have never fallen asleep – but for us, us – I do not