Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation*

Walsham, Alexandra

doi:10.1111/j.1468-2281.2005.00230.x

Cited by 41 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The plenary indulgences attached to sacred objects made them particularly appealing to English Catholics, who had infrequent access to priests and could not regularly undergo sacraments such as reconciliation and absolution from sins. 40 When indulgences were attached to them, sacred objects worn and used in prayer could serve as devotional aids after missionaries had moved on. The decrees on indulgences also further complicated English Catholics' relationships with the church in Rome and the Protestant regime under which they lived: praying for the pope and the conversion of England would have been interpreted in a sinister manner by some Protestant authorities as evidence of Catholics' divided allegiances.…”

Section: Sacred Objects In the Written Records Of The English Jesuit Missionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Materiality of Catholic Resistance in Sources for the English Jesuit Mission

Muller

2021

ISJS

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The Society of Jesus played a critical role in preserving the material culture of English Catholicism, which came under assault following the Reformation of the 1530s. The relics, sacred objects, liturgical items, and other devotional materials that the Jesuits employed in the English mission helped to preserve the memory of England's place in the wider history of the Roman Catholic Church and sustain the links between the two. Contemporary records kept by members of the English mission in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries likewise testify to the spiritual as well as political significance of sacred objects in England. The surviving sacred objects and the records the Jesuits kept of them helped to craft an alternative sense of history and identity for English Catholics that challenged the Protestant establishment that took hold in England after the Reformation.As in other parts of Europe, relics and other sacred objects were criticized by religious reformers in sixteenth-century England for encouraging superstition and idolatry. 1 The relic collections and devotional materials of religious houses came under particular scrutiny after King Henry VIII (r.1509-47) broke with Rome in 1534, as part of a wider project to dissolve the monasteries from 1536 to 1540. Supposedly fraudulent relics were seized and exhibited in London, while others were burned or defaced. 2 Religious houses were physically dismantled, liturgical materials were melted down and repurposed, and the nuns and monks were turned out. Apart from the reign of Mary Tudor (r.1553-58), in which Catholicism was temporarily restored from 1553 to 1558, a succession of monarchs in England passed increasingly restrictive laws to discourage and diminish Catholic forms of devotion in the sixteenth century. 3 These culminated in the parliamentary legislation passed in 1571 and 1581, which in addition to making conversion to and 1 Birgit Meyer and Dick Houtman have suggested that Protestant influences and suspicion of materialism contributed, until recently, to a neglect of material culture in religious studies: see their introduction to their edited volume Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 1-24. Caroline Walker Bynum, however, has pointed out that pre-Reformation religious art and objects survived in abundance in German Protestant lands despite this suspicion.

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Section: Sacred Objects In the Written Records Of The English Jesuit Missionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Materiality of Catholic Resistance in Sources for the English Jesuit Mission

Muller

2021

ISJS

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“…104 Although Counter-Reformation Catholicism harboured similar attitudes towards superstitious devotional practices and profane recreations as Protestantism, it nevertheless, when necessary, harnessed festivity and popular rituals as instruments of confessionalization instead of bluntly suppressing them. 105 Even some Jesuit-friendly households, most strictly fashioned according to Tridentine values, did not completely oust holiday revelry from within their walls. Such was Dorothy Lawson's semi-monastic institution near Newcastle, which was publicly marked as a Catholic house of worship with a sacred name of Jesus (the Jesuit emblem) on its wall facing the Tyne waterside.…”

Section: Dance and The Catholic Communitymentioning

confidence: 99%

A dancer made a recusant: dance and evangelization in the Jacobean North East of England

Jakovac

2018

Br. Cathol. Hist.

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In the summer of 1615, a newly discovered Catholic conspiracy prompted William James, bishop of Durham, to vigorously correspond with the archbishop of Canterbury. On 3 August, in the midst of the crisis, the bishop incarcerated a professional dancer, Robert Hindmers (b. 1585). Together with his wife Anne, Robert was associated with the Newcastle-based secular priest William Southerne and involved in Catholic evangelising in the diocese of Durham. This article discusses the biography and career of Robert Hindmers, and speculates about the role of dancing within the Durham Catholic community. It also analyses how the activities of the Hindmers were perceived by the ecclesiastical authorities. The case of Robert Hindmers traverses and links many related issues, such as Counter-Reformation culture, traditional festivity, religious politics, and the interconnectedness of elite and popular cultures. But above all, it expands our understanding of Catholic missionary strategies in post-Reformation England by suggesting that dance instruction might have been used by Catholics to access households and assist the mission.

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“…MacCulloch’s Prothero Lecture locates the English Reformation in its wider European context in masterly fashion, emphasizing the radicalism of the Elizabethan Protestant settlement, even though the survival of cathedrals acted as the liturgical and theological starting point for the revival of the ‘Catholic’ of Anglicanism in the early seventeenth century. Walsham offers a similar survey of the history of English Catholicism, showing that the Counter‐Reformation also occurred in England at elite and popular levels, possibly even as a consequence of official intolerance.…”

Section: (Iii) 1500–1700  Henry French  University Of Exetermentioning

confidence: 99%