The Senses and the English Reformation

The Senses and the English Reformation
Author: Matthew Milner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2016-03-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 131701636X

It is a commonly held belief that medieval Catholics were focussed on the 'bells and whistles' of religious practices, the smoke, images, sights and sounds that dazzled pre-modern churchgoers. Protestantism, in contrast, has been cast as Catholicism's austere, intellective and less sensual rival sibling. With iis white-washed walls, lack of incense (and often music) Protestantism worship emphasised preaching and scripture, making the new religion a drab and disengaged sensual experience. In order to challenge such entrenched assumptions, this book examines Tudor views on the senses to create a new lens through which to explore the English Reformation. Divided into two sections, the book begins with an examination of pre-Reformation beliefs and practices, establishing intellectual views on the senses in fifteenth-century England, and situating them within their contemporary philosophical and cultural tensions. Having established the parameters for the role of sense before the Reformation, the second half of the book mirrors these concerns in the post-1520 world, looking at how, and to what degree, the relationship between religious practices and sensation changed as a result of the Reformation. By taking this long-term, binary approach, the study is able to tackle fundamental questions regarding the role of the senses in late-medieval and early modern English Christianity. By looking at what English men and women thought about sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, the stereotype that Protestantism was not sensual, and that Catholicism was overly sensualised is wholly undermined. Through this examination of how worship was transformed in its textual and liturgical forms, the book illustrates how English religion sought to reflect changing ideas surrounding the senses and their place in religious life. Worship had to be 'sensible', and following how reformers and their opponents built liturgy around experience of the sacred through the physical allows us to tease out the tensions and pressures which shaped religious reform.

Memory and the English Reformation

Memory and the English Reformation
Author: Alexandra Walsham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2020-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108829996

Recasts the Reformation as a battleground over memory, in which new identities were formed through acts of commemoration, invention and repression.

Broken Idols of the English Reformation

Broken Idols of the English Reformation
Author: Margaret Aston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1994
Release: 2015-11-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316060470

Why were so many religious images and objects broken and damaged in the course of the Reformation? Margaret Aston's magisterial new book charts the conflicting imperatives of destruction and rebuilding throughout the English Reformation from the desecration of images, rails and screens to bells, organs and stained glass windows. She explores the motivations of those who smashed images of the crucifixion in stained glass windows and who pulled down crosses and defaced symbols of the Trinity. She shows that destruction was part of a methodology of religious revolution designed to change people as well as places and to forge in the long term new generations of new believers. Beyond blanked walls and whited windows were beliefs and minds impregnated by new modes of religious learning. Idol-breaking with its emphasis on the treacheries of images fundamentally transformed not only Anglican ways of worship but also of seeing, hearing and remembering.

Devotional Experience and Erotic Knowledge in the Literary Culture of the English Reformation

Devotional Experience and Erotic Knowledge in the Literary Culture of the English Reformation
Author: Rhema Hokama
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2023-02-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192886568

This study explores the way Calvinist experientialism provided both a theology and an epistemology in the poetry of five early modern English poets: William Shakespeare, Robert Herrick, John Donne, Fulke Greville, and John Milton. In both official church ecclesiology and informal devotional practice, the Reformation introduced the idea that an individual's experience of devotion did not only entail feeling, but also thought. For early modern English people, bodily experience offered a means of corroborating and verifying devotional truth, making the invisible visible and knowable. This volume maintains that these religious developments gave early modern thinkers and poets a new epistemological framework for imagining and interpreting devotional intention and access. These Reformed models for devotion not only shaped how people experienced their encounters with God; the changing religious landscape of post-Reformation England also held profound implications for how English poets described sexual longing and access to earthly beloveds in the literary production of the period. In placing the works of English poets in conversation with devotional writers such as William Perkins, Samuel Hieron, Joseph Hall, and William Gouge, this book demonstrates how the English Calvinist tradition attributed epistemological potential to a wide range of ordinary experience, including sexual experience.

The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church

The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church
Author: Marcia B. Hall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2013-07-22
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107013232

This book examines the promotion of the sensuous as part of religious experience in the Roman Catholic Church of the early modern period. During the Counter-Reformation, every aspect of religious and devotional practice was reviewed, including the role of art and architecture, and the invocation of the five senses to incite devotion became a hotly contested topic. The Protestants condemned the material cult of veneration of relics and images, rejecting the importance of emotion and the senses and instead promoting the power of reason in receiving the Word of God. After much debate, the Church concluded that the senses are necessary to appreciate the sublime, and that they derive from the Holy Spirit. As part of its attempt to win back the faithful, the Church embraced the sensuous and promoted the use of images, relics, liturgy, processions, music, and theater as important parts of religious experience.

Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe

Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe
Author: Wietse de Boer
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 521
Release: 2012-11-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004236341

This interdisciplinary volume examines the role of sensation in the religious transformations of early modern Europe. Sensation was both central to the doctrinal disputes of the Reformation and critical in shaping new or reformed devotional practices.

The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England

The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England
Author: Annette Kern-Stähler
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2016-05-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004315497

The essays collected in The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England examine the interrelationships between sense perception and secular and Christian cultures in England from the medieval into the early modern periods. They address canonical texts and writers in the fields of poetry, drama, homiletics, martyrology and early scientific writing, and they espouse methods associated with the fields of corpus linguistics, disability studies, translation studies, art history and archaeology, as well as approaches derived from traditional literary studies. Together, these papers constitute a major contribution to the growing field of sensorial research that will be of interest to historians of perception and cognition as well as to historians with more generalist interests in medieval and early modern England. Contributors include: Dieter Bitterli, Beatrix Busse, Rory Critten, Javier Díaz-Vera, Tobias Gabel, Jens Martin Gurr, Katherine Hindley, Farah Karim-Cooper, Annette Kern-Stähler, Richard Newhauser, Sean Otto, Virginia Richter, Elizabeth Robertson, and Kathrin Scheuchzer

Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England

Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England
Author: Elizabeth L. Swann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2020-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108487653

Pioneering investigation into relationship between physical sense of taste, and taste as a term denoting judgement, in early modern England.