Riches and Reform

Riches and Reform
Author: Bess Rhodes
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2019-08-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004347992

The Scottish Reformation is often presumed to have had little economic impact. Traditionally, scholars maintained that Scotland’s late medieval church gradually secularised its estates, and that the religious changes of 1560 barely disrupted an ongoing trend. In Riches and Reform Bess Rhodes challenges this assumption with a study of church finance in Scotland’s religious capital of St Andrews, a place once regarded as the ‘cheif and mother citie of the Realme’. Drawing on largely unpublished charters, rentals, and account books, Riches and Reform argues that in St Andrews the Reformation triggered a rapid, large-scale, and ultimately ruinous redistribution of ecclesiastical wealth. Communal assets built up over generations were suddenly dispersed through a combination of official policies, individual opportunism, and a crisis in local administration, leading the post-Reformation churches and city of St Andrews into ‘poverte and decay’.

Defining Community in Early Modern Europe

Defining Community in Early Modern Europe
Author: Michael J. Halvorson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 135194567X

Numerous historical studies use the term "community'" to express or comment on social relationships within geographic, religious, political, social, or literary settings, yet this volume is the first systematic attempt to collect together important examples of this varied work in order to draw comparisons and conclusions about the definition of community across early modern Europe. Offering a variety of historical and theoretical approaches, the sixteen original essays in this collection survey major regions of Western Europe, including France, Geneva, the German Lands, Italy and the Spanish Empire, the Netherlands, England, and Scotland. Complementing the regional diversity is a broad spectrum of religious confessions: Roman Catholic communities in France, Italy, and Germany; Reformed churches in France, Geneva, and Scotland; Lutheran communities in Germany; Mennonites in Germany and the Netherlands; English Anglicans; Jews in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands; and Muslim converts returning to Christian England. This volume illuminates the variety of ways in which communities were defined and operated across early modern Europe: as imposed by community leaders or negotiated across society; as defined by belief, behavior, and memory; as marked by rigid boundaries and conflict or by flexibility and change; as shaped by art, ritual, charity, or devotional practices; and as characterized by the contending or overlapping boundaries of family, religion, and politics. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate the complex and changeable nature of community in an era more often characterized as a time of stark certainties and inflexibility. As a result, the volume contributes a vital resource to the ongoing efforts of scholars to understand the creation and perpetuation of communities and the significance of community definition for early modern Europeans.

The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era

The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era
Author: David M. Whitford
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351891820

For hundreds of years, the biblical story of the Curse of Ham was marshalled as a justification of serfdom, slavery and human bondage. According to the myth, having seen his father Noah naked, Ham's is cursed to have his descendants be forever slaves. In this new book the Curse of Ham is explored in its Reformation context, revealing how it became the cornerstone of the Christian defence of slavery and the slave trade for the next four hundred years. It shows how broader medieval interpretations of the story became marginalized in the early modern period as writers such as Annius of Viterbo and George Best began to weave the legend of Ham into their own books, expanding and adding to the legend in ways that established a firm connection between Ham, Africa, slavery and race. For although in the original biblical text Ham himself is not cursed and race is never mentioned, these writers helped develop the story of Ham into an ideological and theological defence for African slavery, at the precise time that the Transatlantic Slave Trade began to establish itself as a major part of the European economy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Skilfully weaving together elements of theology, literature and history, this book provides a fascinating insight into the ways that issues of religion, economics and race could collide in the Reformation world. It will prove essential reading, not only for those with an interest in early modern history, but for anyone wishing to try to comprehend the origins of arguments used to justify slavery and segregation right up to the 1960s.

Medieval St Andrews

Medieval St Andrews
Author: Michael Brown
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 178327168X

First extended treatment of the city of St Andrews during the middle ages. St Andrews was of tremendous significance in medieval Scotland. Its importance remains readily apparent in the buildings which cluster the rocky promontory jutting out into the North Sea: the towers and walls of cathedral, castleand university provide reminders of the status and wealth of the city in the Middle Ages. As a centre of earthly and spiritual government, as the place of veneration for Scotland's patron saint and as an ancient seat of learning, St Andrews was the ecclesiastical capital of Scotland. This volume provides the first full study of this special and multi-faceted centre throughout its golden age. The fourteen chapters use St Andrews as a focus for the discussion of multiple aspects of medieval life in Scotland. They examine church, spirituality, urban society and learning in a specific context from the seventh to the sixteenth century, allowing for the consideration of St Andrews alongside other great religious and political centres of medieval Europe. Michael Brown is Professor of Medieval Scottish History, University of St Andrews; Katie Stevenson is Keeper of Scottish History and Archaeology, National Museums Scotland and Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval History, University of St Andrews. Contributors: Michael Brown, Ian Campbell, David Ditchburn, Elizabeth Ewan, Richard Fawcett, Derek Hall, Matthew Hammond, Julian Luxford, Roger Mason, Norman Reid, Bess Rhodes, Catherine Smith, Katie Stevenson, Simon Taylor, Tom Turpie.