The Strange Death of Lutheran England

Abstract

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. I C onsider the case of two northern European kings of the first half of the sixteenth century : Gustav Vasa of Sweden, and Henry  of England. Both kings maintained a ferociously tight grip on their kingdoms, yet both were constantly aware of the weaknesses of their positions ; in particular of dynastic rivalries and of the ruinous cost of warfare. In the wake of the German Reformation, Protestant ideas seem to have made little impact in either realm on a popular level, but fairly soon these two kings realised the potential political advantages which the reformers' ideas offered to them. Over a period of a few years, they gradually took control of the Church in their respective kingdoms, eventually extinguishing all Roman jurisdiction, and seizing large quantities of ecclesiastical property, notably that of the monasteries. Parts of the evangelical programme were put in place ; in particular, both kings licensed the use of vernacular Scripture and portions of a vernacular liturgy. A minority of the urban population in both countries came to sympathise with evangelical ideas. However, Protestant doctrine as such never appealed to the kings themselves ; nor, judging by the popular rebellions which religious change sparked in both England and Sweden, did it appeal to the majority of their people." The kings halted the process " E. I. Kouri, ' The early Reformation in Sweden and Finland c. - ', in Ole        of reform, leaving many of the evangelicals' hopes unfulfilled. Both kings had appointed archbishops who were committed although moderate reformers ; but while these men were allowed to remain in office, both of them were largely isolated in the last years of their masters' reigns. In neither country was there a clearly Protestant settlement of religion until the old kings eventually died, and far more vigorously evangelical regimes under their sons finally established Protestant Churches in law -with the old archbishops in the vanguard.This striking series of parallels between the Reformations effected by Gustav Vasa and by Henry  is worth drawing attention to for its own sake, especially in the light of recent scholarship which has emphasised the differences between the Reformations in England and on the continent.# However, it also highlights a problem. If the parallels between England and Sweden were so close, why were the eventual Protestant settlements so different? The Swedish church ordinance of  was Lutheran ; while Edward ...

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

“…It underlines Alec Ryrie's point that 'the sundered Protestant family remained conscious itself' and that English, Dutch and German Protestants continued to feel a sense of affinity with the 'sister Reformations' of churches abroad, and with their brethren who suffered under the papists' whip. 126 In the context of British Isles, it is an emblem of the fact that the English Reformation was not idiosyncratic or untouched by the religious currents swirling around the Continent and that it was both coloured by and contributed actively to them. The self-congratulatory myth of Anglicanism that emerged in the course of the seventeenth century and was revived by Victorian Anglo-Catholics has served to erase both the Zwinglian and Calvinist influences that were fundamental to its early formation and its internationalism from historical memory.…”

“…Luther's writings (especially those that provided pastoral guidance for afflicted consciences) persisted in being published and he was frequently remembered as a famous doctor, learned father, worthy instrument, grand captain under Christ, a 'Noah' and a 'Hercules of Gods glory'. Later generations of English Protestants found it convenient to forget his views regarding the real presence in the Eucharist and Foxe declared that hisreaders should not be too exercised by 'one small blemish, or for a little stoupyng … in the Sacrament' 123. When his Table talk was republished by Captain Henry Bell in 1651 a note by another writer in the preface referred to Luther's as 'the first Reformation' and said that it could not 'rationally be expected that at that first dawning of the Gospel light, all Spiritual…”

(Re)defining the English Reformation

“…Alec Ryrie dates what he calls the "strange death of Lutheran England" to the latter part of Henry VIII's reign, and a Reformed, later more explicitly Calvinist, doctrinal emphasis was a leitmotif of English Protestantism from the late 1540s onward. 54 The concept of a second English Reformation has, however, had at least one significant outing. In his Stenton lecture of 1986, entitled "From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia," Patrick Collinson identified in the years around 1580 an abrupt cultural caesuraa moment when the opinion formers of English Protestantism turned their backs on a wide variety of visual, dramatic, and musical forms they, or rather their predecessors, had happily employed in the past.…”

Negotiating Heresy in Tudor England: Anne Askew and the Bishop of London

“…Prior to this, most of them had embraced a quasi-Lutheran formulation of the Real Presence-admissible under the Ten Articles-by which Christ's body and blood existed in the sacramental elements, substantially present along with, and discrete from, the material bread and wine. 12 This comparatively "moderate" rejection of transubstantiation was now, however, outlawed: a fact that paradoxically seems to have led, as Alec Ryrie has argued, to the creation in England of a significantly radicalized evangelical party, now rallying around a "reformed" (sacramentarian) rejection of the Real Presence altogether and suffering harsh, if sporadic persecution during the last years of the king's life (persecution to which their Lutheran friends were now also, technically, subject). 13 But does this mean, as Foxe suggests in the Acts and Monuments, that the 1540s witnessed a broad conservative "backlash" against the reforms of the 1530s?…”