Alexandra Walsham

THE REFORMATION AND ‘THE DISENCHANTMENT OF THE WORLD’ REASSESSED

This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the ongoing debate about the role of the Protestant Reformation in the process of ‘the disenchantment of the world’. It considers the development of this thesis in the work of Max Weber and subsequent scholars, its links with wider claims about the origins of modernity, and the challenges to this influential paradigm that have emerged in the last twenty-five years. Setting the literature on England within its wider European context, it explores the links between Protestantism and the transformation of assumptions about the sacred and the supernatural, and places renewed emphasis on the equivocal and ambiguous legacy left by the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Attention is also paid to the ways in which the Reformation converged with other intellectual, cultural, political, and social developments which cumulatively brought about subtle, but decisive, transformations in individual and collective mentalities. It is suggested that thinking in terms of cycles of desacralization and resacralization may help to counteract the potential distortions of a narrative that emphasizes a linear path of development.

‘FRANTICK HACKET’: PROPHECY, SORCERY, INSANITY, AND THE ELIZABETHAN PURITAN MOVEMENT

This essay reconsiders the career of the most famous of Elizabethan false prophets, William Hacket, the illiterate pseudo-messiah who, together with two gentleman disciples, plotted a civil and ecclesiastical coup, and was executed for treason in July 1591. It explores the significance of autonomous lay activity on the fringes of the mainstream puritan movement, demonstrating links between the dissident trio and key clerical figures who later prudently disowned them. Closer inspection of Hackets exploits sheds fresh light on the relationship between experimental Calvinist piety and the religious and magical culture of the unlettered rural laity – a relationship still widely presented as bitterly adversarial. Relocated in the context of contemporary attitudes to prophecy and insanity, the episode illuminates the eclecticism of early modern belief and the manner in which medical and theological explanations for bizarre behaviour comfortably coexisted and mingled. Variously labelled a witch, visionary, and raving lunatic, Hackets case reveals the extent to which such roles, diagnoses, and stereotypes are socially, culturally, and politically shaped and conditioned. In exploiting the incident to discredit Presbyterian activism within the Church of England, leading conformist polemicists anticipated the main thrust of the campaign against religious ‘enthusiasm’ mounted by Anglican elites in the Interregnum, Restoration, and early Enlightenment.

MIRACLES AND THE COUNTER-REFORMATION MISSION TO ENGLAND

A B S T R ACT. This article explores the way in which the Counter Reformation priests sent to England after 1574 cultivated and harnessed the culture of the miraculous in their efforts to reform and evangelize the populace and to defend doctrines and practices assaulted by Protestant polemicists. Drawing on the insights emerging from recent research on Catholic renewal on the Continent, it shows how the seminary clergy and especially the Jesuits fostered traditional beliefs and practices associated with saints, relics, and sacramentals and exploited the potential of exorcisms and visions for didactic and proselytizing purposes. Close examination of these strategies serves to question some existing assumptions about the nature, objectives, and impact of the English Catholic mission and to illuminate the particular challenges that persecution presented to a movement determined to purge popular piety of its ‘ superstitious ’ accretions. It underlines the tensions between ecclesiastical direction and lay initiative which characterized a context in which Catholicism was a minority Church and highlights the frictions and divisions which these attempts to utilize supernatural power stimulated within the ranks of the Counter Reformation priesthood itself.

Unclasping the book? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the vernacular Bible

In November 1589, news of a provocative act of vandalism reached the ears of the Elizabethan authorities. Robert Goldesborowe, an outspoken recusant who christened his children ‘‘in corners’’ and openly affirmed that all Protestant ministers were knaves, had maliciously defaced an English Bible in three distinct places. One of the passages he chose to mutilate apparently concerned the translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular. Goldesborowe subsequently confessed to this crime of sacrilege ‘‘under his owne hand wrytinge.’’ The details of this intriguing case are unclear, but at first glance it could be interpreted as an example of a committed Catholic layman implicitly defending the principle that the Bible should remain forever encased in the alien language of Latin. Protestant propagandists might have alighted upon it triumphantly as evidence of the extent to which the popish priesthood had brainwashed the laity into believing that there was no need for them to have direct access to God’s Word in their mother tongue. Like the case of Thomas Fugall, the Yorkshire vicar investigated for cutting a copy of the Bible with a knife during the reign of Mary I, and the ritual burning of English translations at the time of the Northern Rising in 1569, they might have seen it as symptomatic of the Church of Rome’s innate hatred of Holy Writ itself.

Cultures of Coexistence in Early Modern England: History, Literature and Religious Toleration1

Abstract This synoptic essay explores trends in historical research and literary criticism on the theme of toleration. It surveys the current state of this lively field of enquiry and demonstrates how far the subject remains coloured by assumptions and narratives of change forged in the early modern era itself. It explores how tolerance and intolerance have been approached by intellectual and social historians and the implications of the recent growth of interest in religious tolerance and intolerance in the post-Reformation period among scholars of early modern literature. It highlights the conceptual problems and interpretative challenges that surround the subject and points towards the need for heightened sensitivity to the role and agency of language and texts, rhetorics and representations, in our analysis of the cultures of coexistence that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Domesticating the Reformation: Material Culture, Memory and Confessional Identity in Early Modern England

This article explores domestic artifacts that testify to the afterlife of the European Reformation in the British Isles. Focusing especially on decorated and commemorative delftware, it investigates how the memory of the Protestant past was appropriated and altered in the English context and how it infiltrated the household in the guise of consumer goods in which taste, piety, politics, and private sentiment were intertwined. It analyzes their changing meanings as they moved in space and time, examines their role in cementing and complicating senses of confessional identity, and probes the process of selective remembering and forgetting by which the Reformation acquired the status of a momentous event.

HISTORY, MEMORY, AND THE ENGLISH REFORMATION *

This article is a revised and expanded version of my inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, delivered on 20 Oct. 2011. It explores how the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reshaped perceptions of the past, stimulated shifts in historical method, and transformed the culture of memory, before turning to the interrelated question of when and why contemporaries began to remember the English Reformation as a decisive juncture and critical turning point in history. Investigating the interaction between personal recollection and social memory, it traces the manner in which remembrance of the events of the 1530s, 1540s, and 1550s evolved and splintered between 1530 and 1700. A further theme is the role of religious and intellectual developments in the early modern period in forging prevailing models of historical periodization and teleological paradigms of interpretation.

Inventing the lollard past : The afterlife of a medieval sermon in early modern England

This essay explores the evolving significance of a famous fourteenth-century Pauls Cross sermon by Thomas Wimbledon in late medieval and early modern England and its transmission from manuscript to print. It highlights the ideological ambiguity of the text against the backdrop of the academic Wycliffite challenge and shows how it illuminates the permeability of the boundary between heterodoxy and orthodoxy in the fifteenth century. It then examines how the sermon was revived and published in the mid-Tudor period as a Lollard tract as part of an effort to supply the new Protestant religion with an historical pedigree and how it subsequently entered into the popular stock of commercial publishers. The afterlife of Wimbledons celebrated sermon sheds fresh light on the ongoing process of inventing and re-inventing the pre-Reformation past.

Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain

Contents: Preface In the Lords vineyard: Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain. Part I Conscience and Conformity: Yielding to the extremity of the time: conformity and orthodoxy Englands Nicodemites: crypto-Catholicism and religious pluralism Ordeals of conscience: casuistry and confessional identity. Part II Miracles and Missionaries: Miracles and the Counter-Reformation mission Holywell and the Welsh Catholic revival Catholic Reformation and the cult of angels. Part III Communication and Conversion: Dumb preachers: Catholicism and the culture of print Unclasping the book? The Douai-Rheims Bible This new army of Satan: the Jesuit mission and the formation of public opinion. Part IV Translation and Transmutation: Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation Beads, books and bare ruined choirs: transmutations of ritual life. Bibliography Index.

Migrations of the Holy: Explaining Religious Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

How do we conceptualize and explain religious change in medieval and early modern Europe without perpetuating distorting paradigms inherited from the very era of the past that is the subject of our study? How can we do justice to historical development over time without resorting to linear grand narratives that have their intellectual origins in the very movements that we seek to comprehend? In one way or another, this challenging question has inspired all my published work to date, which has focused on the ways in which early modern society adapted to the religious revolutions that unfolded before it. My work has explored the ambiguities, anomalies, and ironies that accompany dramatic moments of ideological and cultural rupture. It has sought to balance recognition of the decisive transformations wrought by the Protestant and Catholic Reformations with awareness of the complexities and contradictions that characterized their evolution and entrenchment in practice. It has been marked by a consuming interest in the currents of continuity that tempered, mediated, and even facilitated the upheavals of the early modern era. One consequence of this preoccupation with analyzing how and why cultures are held in tension and suspension during critical phases of transition is that I have been very much less effective in acknowledging and accounting for religious change itself. This is my Achilles’ heel as a historian, and one that I share with a number of other historians of my generation. In our strenuous efforts to avoid reproducing models of interpretation predi cated on the notion of progress toward modernity, I fear that (to mix the metaphor) we have sometimes been in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In preparing this article, I have become painfully aware of the extent to which I am both a product and a prisoner of the historiographical