Edwardian Reformation

8 Key excerpts on "Edwardian Reformation"

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  The Mid Tudors

  Edward VI and Mary, 1547–1558

  • Stephen J. Lee(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Probably the Edwardian Reformation was a synthesis of all forms of Protestantism grafted on to the partially Catholic variant of the previous reign. It therefore makes more sense to criticise the religious establishment not so much for introducing a religious ‘anarchy’, but rather for failing to impress the new doctrinal synthesis on the population. This, in essence, meant a failure of communication and education. J. Guy argued: ‘However, rural areas and small towns had little contact with reformed preaching: outside London, the south-east, and the universities there were few Protestant “conversions”.’ 13 Hence the underlying attitude of most of the population was still ambivalence, even confusion. This was a result less of the terror imposed upon them by Henry VIII, since much of that had now gone. Instead, it was based even more on a wait-and-see approach, except in so far as specific groups were stung into action at particular times. The Edwardian Reformation did surprisingly little to accelerate the popular trends taking place during the previous reign. Perhaps this was because the changes being introduced by the administration were being cautiously digested by the rest of the population. Some of the latter became full converts; some retained what they could of their traditional faith, while adapting where they had to; others simply did what they were told. Another approach to the debate has come from the direction of the survival of Catholicism. Not only was the majority of the population not convinced by or committed to advancing Protestantism; a substantial proportion of it actually remained loyal to Catholic traditions. According to C. Haigh, Lancashire was a case in point: ‘The fairly intensive efforts at conversion made in the reign of Edward had reaped only a meagre harvest, and Protestantism had gained very little support by 1559.’ 14 There is also a case made for the survival of positive influences from the traditional church, emphasised by E

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  Celebrating the Reformation

  Its Legacy And Continuing Relevance

  • Mark D Thompson(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Apollos

    (Publisher)

  16. THE REFORMATION: A VICTORIAN VIEW Edward Loane I was recently given an 1844 edition of the Parker Society’s Writings and Translations of Myles Coverdale. 1 This delightful work is not only a testimony to the theological prerogatives of an early English Reformer, but also an important primary source for understanding how the Reformation was perceived and contended for in Victorian Britain. The volume opens with Coverdale’s ‘The Old Faith’ (1547) which is an appropriate tract to take primary place considering the nineteenth-century polemic the Parker Society was seeking to counter. Indeed, the Victorian era was a time of major controversy relating to the Reformation and this itself has proved to be a fertile area of scholarship. In 2014 the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library dedicated an entire 382-page edition to essays by leading academics on the theme ‘Reinventing the Reformation in the Nineteenth Century: A Cultural History’. As Richard Rex states, ‘When Queen Victoria came to the throne, the Reformation was under threat.’ 2 This chapter will explore the way the Reformation was perceived in the early nineteenth century and how various ecclesiastical forces in Victoria’s reign repudiated its principles and legacy. Other forces, however, took up their cudgels in defence of the Reformation. They celebrated and commemorated significant moments and, more importantly, they preached and defended Reformed theology. The Victorian view of the Reformation became increasingly polarized, with different sides using it as a weapon to wield in contemporary polemics

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  Advanced Educational Foundations for Teachers

  The History, Philosophy, and Culture of Schooling

  • Donald K. Sharpes(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6.The Reformation, Renaissance, and Education

  Overview

  The Renaissance, and the political and religious turmoil of the Protestant revolution that paralleled it, has had a profound influence on educational ideas. The advent of the printing press in the West in 1456 and the explorations in the New World are just two events that propelled the Renaissance world into the modern era. The Renaissance is generally defined by social and religious movements. This period marked the revival of classical of Greek and Roman antiquities and the Protestant Reformation. Humanistic writers in philosophy, science, and letters and painters gave impetus to this era’s of social transformation.

  The Protestant Reformation in particular caused a major upheaval in European society and led to wars and bloodshed. Similar seeds of civil discord shook American shores as new colonies established their separate and often divisive religious faiths-we will return to this topic in Chapter 8 . Today, despite laws, judicial decisions, and a heightened social consciousness, religious intolerance still lies subtly below the surface of many American social interactions and certainly in the dynamic relationship between schooling and religious beliefs. And who benefited from education during this period? Beginning in the Reformation, more children went to schools, but more went to their own particular religious schools.

  Other revolutionary ideas that emerged between 1492 and 1700 have helped shape our intellectual history, politics, and democratic form of government as well as our modes of thinking and curriculum. Humanism, an attempt to develop independent modes of thought apart from religion, flourished and engendered literature and art.

  European adventurers traversed the globe and conquered, colonized, and settled in the New World and wherever their trade routes led. New worlds were also opened to the human spirit as philosophy, art, science, and belief expanded the realms of knowledge and diversified into new disciplines. We will study this era for its dynamism and spirit, and for the extraordinary people who influenced educational thought. Again, the multiple teaching applications, case studies, and field experiences included in this chapter will help you apply its content to your teaching.

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  The European Reformations

  • Carter Lindberg(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  In recent years, the historiography of the Reformations of England, Scotland, and Ireland has become a growth industry with a stream of revisionist and postrevisionist assessments (Collinson 1997; Shagan 2003: 1–25). The revisionists emphasize that reforms were forced on a population largely unwilling to relinquish its deeply embedded Catholic faith. Hence, in contrast to the older views of scholars such as A. G. Dickens (1991), who described the English Reformation as a rapid popular embrace of evangelical ideas, the revisionists argue it was slowly and with difficulty imposed from above and did not reach fruition until late in the reign of Elizabeth. The revisionist stress on popular resistance to the Reformation counters what some scholars such as Duffy (1992) perceive to be the anti-Catholic bias of earlier studies and posits the gradual, even accidental, course of royally imposed reform. Indeed, the recent partisanship of English Reformation studies is perceived to be as much confessional as historiographical (Marshall and Ryrie 2002: 3 n. 4, 4). Haigh (2004: 141–2, 144) argues that “in England, Reformation came in small doses, spread over 20 years and more, each dose just about bearable. … It was Reformation by installments, rather than cataclysm – so it was not obvious that it was Reformation, that there was more to come.” The revisionist historians correlate these installments to the monarchs whose deaths precipitated reformatory shifts “in the accidental Reformation.” In the words of Norman Jones (Carlson 1998: 280): “The old faith in England was not removed by a radical operation; it died the death of a thousand cuts.” Alec Ryrie (2006b: 124–5) suggests some reasons for this “wholly disproportionate amount of historical attention” that makes “the British Reformations look more important than they really are” – the assumption that since Britain was a major power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it must have also been important in the sixteenth; the contemporary dominance of the English language “has ensured a plentiful supply of anglophone historians who find learning languages tiresome and who therefore choose to work on British material”; and the “partisan religious convictions” of some of the leading historians. “[T]he historiography of the British and Irish Reformations is not only a dense thicket, but a spiky one. This is not only because too many historians are jostling for too little space, but also because the debates are, even now, more than merely scholarly. At times they have almost been choked by ulterior motives …”

  Contemporary scholarship continues to recognize the crucial role of the Tudors in revolutionizing ecclesiastical authority “by statute” (Brigdon 1992: 216), but corrects the one-sidedness of former political interpretations with social and religious studies. Sources other than state records illustrate that neither England nor Scotland was isolated from the Reformations on the European continent, and that the initiation and advance of Reformation ideas and convictions did not begin with nor completely depend on royal actions. “In essentials the early English Protestants of the 1520s and 1530s were Lutherans, led by Tyndale, Barnes and Cranmer, by the young Cambridge scholars of the early twenties, by Coverdale and the lesser bibletranslators, and by a host of other publicists and pamphleteers with strong continental affinities. … Even Thomas Cromwell, the first great executive of the state-reformation, displayed a cool but unmistakable affinity with the Lutherans” (Dickens 1991: 13, 82; Clebsch 1964). These conflicting views of the respective priority of politics and religion in the English Reformation continue to foment lively scholarly controversy, which undoubtedly will color interpretive studies for some time to come (O’Day 1986; Seaver 1982; Dickens 1987; Haigh 1993: 335–42).

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  Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447-1603

  English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule

  • Steven G. Ellis(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  cuius regio eius religio , whereby in most parts of Europe the prince eventually managed to impose his own brand of Christianity on his subjects. And Elizabeth’s long reign allowed her settlement sufficient time to put down roots, so that after 45 years of protestant services the vast majority of the queen’s subjects had grown to accept the Elizabethan church. Ireland and the Netherlands, however, constitute the two most obvious departures from the normal pattern: and arguably in both countries, the religious divisions created by the reformers’ comparative failure in Ireland and their overall success in the Low Countries were to bulk large in the events leading to the political partition of the two territories, almost immediately in the case of the Netherlands, much later in Ireland. Nevertheless it would be a mistake to conclude either that the divided state of late medieval Ireland posed insuperable obstacles to reform, or that it necessarily explains why post-Tridentine catholicism came to establish itself most strongly among the Old English merchants and gentry. In fact, as we have seen in the last chapter, the ecclesiastical state of early Tudor Ireland was not uniformly less favourable to reform than England, but contained certain mitigating influences which at least facilitated its initial reception.

  The Introduction of the Edwardian Reformation

  The introduction of a protestant religious settlement under Edward VI shed a very different light on what had hitherto appeared as the erection of individual provinces of the medieval church into a distinct national church, governed by the territorial ruler as supreme head, but still part of the universal catholic church. Conservative clergy who had accepted the royal supremacy as a means to the religious reform that was so patently necessary now discovered that it might equally be used to promote Zwinglian doctrines; and in Ireland where conservative supporters of the supremacy far outnumbered any protestants, this shift in policy was particularly serious. The administration’s difficulties were also compounded by a concurrent change in governmental strategy (see below, Ch. 11 ) which alienated much local support. Yet the new regime’s political priorities and also political unrest in Ireland obliged it to temporize on religion, with the result that change was gradual and its impact in Ireland the less disruptive.1

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  The Making of the British Isles

  The State of Britain and Ireland, 1450-1660

  • Steven G. Ellis, Christopher Maginn(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  22 Elsewhere, in the south-east, social conflict was to be a much more evident precipitant of rebellion in 1549 (discussed below, pp. 192–6) but there, intriguingly social unrest combined with Protestantism as a means of legitimating popular socio-economic grievances.

  The death of ‘the virtuous imp’, Edward VI, stopped the Reformation in its tracks. As quickly became apparent, the Edwardian reforms were chiefly the product of state power rather than of popular conviction. For this reason, the Marian regime had little difficulty in suppressing reform once the statutory instruments underpinning the settlement had been withdrawn. In autumn 1553, pending the repeal of the Acts of Uniformity, the Edwardian settlement remained officially in force, but Mary sanctioned Catholic worship alongside it, and indeed the mass had already been spontaneously restored in many parts. From December, the religious settlement reverted to that at the end of Henry VIII's reign, and finally in January 1555 the Second Statute of Repeal restored full communion with Rome.23 In Ireland, Lord Deputy St Leger was simply instructed in October 1553 that religion should be that ‘of old time used’; although a parliament eventually met in 1557 to repeal the Henrician legislation.24

  The Elizabethan settlement

  Mary's reign was to prove even shorter than that of her half-brother, however, and in 1559 the authorities moved once again to restore a national church. Queen Elizabeth apparently began by using the 1549 liturgy in the Chapel Royal, but she soon realised that this was no longer acceptable even to moderate Protestants. Probably, when parliament met to discuss religion in January 1559, she aimed at restoring the 1552 prayer book, although the evidence is unclear. At any rate, the government's reform programme was blocked, apparently by conservative opposition in the Lords. Accordingly, Elizabeth decided on an additional parliamentary session after Easter. She introduced two new bills for Supremacy and Uniformity so as to divide the opposition, and some concessions were also made to conservative opinion: as a result, Supremacy passed comfortably, Uniformity very narrowly. The Act of Supremacy now declared Elizabeth Supreme Governor (rather than Supreme Head) of the church (but with the same powers), empowering her to visit and correct the church through commissioners; it repealed the heresy laws and provided that nothing was to be adjudged heresy except on the authority of the scriptures or the first four general councils of the church; it revived ten statutes of Henry VIII, including the Act of Appeals; and it imposed an Oath of Supremacy on office holders in church and state.

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  The Debate on the English Reformation

  • Rosemary O'Day(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Work in this area has been concerned, not only to assess how speedily Protestantism took hold, but also to identify the factors which facilitated or impeded this process. Several broad interpretations have emerged. A. G. Dickens leads the school of those historians who believe that there was a rapid religious reformation, built upon the foundations laid by Lollardy and religious discontent in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Another view is that the Reformation was imposed from above and that the conversion of the people to Protestantism itself was a slow process. Again, some emphasize the importance of the work of the Elizabethan evangelists rather than the Edwardian in spreading the new religion. There are flaws in each and every one of these interpretations. Those who believe in early successes for Protestantism often overstate their case. There is a tendency to assume that the heresy cases which came to light were more representative than they were, to overemphasize the importance of the Lollard tradition and so on. But those who assert that Protestantism had to wait for any real success until the reign of Elizabeth sometimes neglect to observe that the absence of recorded heresy (given the poor survival rates of many types of record) does not prove that the population under Mary were content with the restoration of Catholicism and that the length of the Elizabethan recusancy returns is not necessarily indicative of intense loyalty to the old religion. Scholars have examined the religious history of different regions in an attempt to settle the argument once and for all. Margaret Bowker’s The Henrician Reformation: The diocese of Lincoln under John Longland, 1521–1547 (1981) is one of the more recent and important local studies. The pre-Reformation diocese of Lincoln was enormous, covering nine Midland counties. The diocese was relatively well administered

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  The Age of Reformation

  The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485-1603

  • Alec Ryrie(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is clear enough that Catholicism had been comprehensively outmanoeuvred. Despite all the widespread affection for the old ways, there was simply no realistic way of reasserting them. By 1553 English Catholicism seems to have been firmly set on a road to oblivion. It is hard to see any alternative to its slowly draining away, over a generation or two. But how strong was Protestantism? There is good evidence that many people simply withdrew in confusion and distaste from the religious controversies of the time, trying to find ways of living Christian lives which honoured their king, quieted their consciences and avoided trouble with the law. It is also obvious that the Edwardian Reformation, like the Henrician Reformation before it, was primarily a political event: a Reformation from ‘above’ rather than from ‘below’. The changes were not driven by any popular clamour for Protestantism. But we cannot quite leave it there, for the regime’s changes did not simply fall on deaf ears. The explosion of Protestant print during 1547–49 tells us something about demand as well as about supply. Although many of the printers had Protestant sympathies, they were also businessmen, who printed books in order to sell them. Likewise, plenty of preachers attracted substantial crowds. Of course, this evidence can be overread. The boom in evangelical print tells us more about London than England, and in any case, buying a scurrilous squib against the Mass does not make someone a doctrinaire Protestant. What the explosion of evangelical activity under Seymour’s Protectorship does prove is that there was widespread interest in what the Protestants had to say. There are parallels for this from other episodes in the European Reformation, in which a long period of religious repression, followed by a sudden release of pressure, produced a burst of evangelical activity and of public curiosity about the new doctrines

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