The Holy Bible in England Before and After the Reformation

Interesting that History Today has presented online two stories about the Holy Bible and how it was produced in England before and after the Reformation: illumination by monks in monasteries and on the printing press after Gutenberg:

"Secrets of Scriptoria" by Kate Wiles from June of 2014 begins:

The commonly accepted idea of a medieval scriptorium is of a low dark room dedicated to the purpose of producing manuscripts, with rows of highly trained scribes hunched over desks in alcoves working in serious silence. But the reality is that, while that set-up might be true of later medieval Britain, there is little evidence to support such a picture in the Anglo-Saxon or early post-Conquest period.

Instead the term ‘scriptorium’ encompassed a variety of situations, of which no two are the same. An early medieval scriptorium could be anything from a room or building in which scribes worked, a collection of scribes with a co-ordinated, organised structure or, more loosely, a general location where manuscripts were produced. At its most basic it might amount to two scribes working together on more than one manuscript. Very often this is the most we can confidently show to have existed at any so-called scriptorium.

And later states:

A different kind of scriptorium emerges from studying a group of manuscripts from 12th-century Malmesbury, produced by up to 54 different scribes, including the historian and chronicler William of Malmesbury (1115-c.1140). These manuscripts were made as part of a drive by Malmesbury’s abbot, Godfrey of Jumièges (1090-1105), to produce a complete library containing all the most important texts the abbey should own. While William himself started many of the books and evidently co-ordinated their production, the bulk of the work was by an array of different scribes. The ability of these men varies. William had three assistants who stand out as being well-trained, but most of them had limited skills and were probably not dedicated scribes. They worked in short stints, sometimes writing a few pages, sometimes only a few lines, occasionally coming back later to do more. It seems likely that William called on whichever monks he could find who were capable of copying a section of text and willing to do so in between carrying out other duties, but few stuck at it for long.

Please read the rest there. (Image credit: Saint Matthew in a mediæval scriptorium (Book of Prayers, 15th century)

The other article, "Gutenberg’s Bible: The Real Information Revolution" by Justin Champion, discusses the issues of authority and interpretation that arose after the Latin (Vulgate) version of the Holy Bible was printed by Johannes Gutenberg in 1454:

The Catholic Church saw an opportunity in applying their textual erudition to claim that the written word of God might be fallible, without the supporting buttress of papal tradition. From the mid-16th century onwards a battle of Bibles was in full swing. The oppressed Protestants who fled the Marian persecutions produced a handbook of resistance in the form of the Geneva Bible of 1560. Replete with a full apparatus, especially an embedded marginal commentary, the godly were guided to a proper account of their duties as Christians. The Geneva Bible, itself a triumph of typological design, continued to be published into the late 17th century. James I and VI despised the ‘marginal notes that slight the text’ and encouraged the production of a ‘safe’ version, which instructed the laity to listen to their parish clergy rather than interpret revelation for themselves.

Alongside the authorised Bibles grew an increasingly sophisticated and profitable market in ancillary works: concordances, commentaries and annotations, which aided the reader’s encounter with the words of God. English Bibles came complete with instructions on how, when and why specific chapters and verses ought to be read. The printed format (the introduction of page numbers, chapter and verse divisions) enabled even the less learned to make sense of scripture. With this literary technology, readers could exchange and share their views of specific passages.

For those who could not read, domestic spirituality enabled collective understandings. Harnessing those encounters with the word of God enabled ministers, MPs and magistrates to justify their governments and rule. Oliver Cromwell ensured that his armies were sustained by a Souldier’s Pocket Bible(1642), legitimising their role in fighting ‘God’s Battles’.

The legacy of the Gutenberg Bible was a revolution in the relationship between reading and authority in the early modern period. This encompassed the practices of lowly men like Nehemiah Wallington, who experienced their world through the providential lens of the Bible, or at the other extreme, scholars such as Isaac Newton and John Locke, who owned multiple copies for forensic textual comparison and exchanged commentaries on their findings.

Please read the rest there. Image credit: (Early wooden printing press, depicted in 1568)

Next Week: The First Annual Florovsky Week

Eighth Day Institute will host its first annual Florovsky Week:

Please join us for the inaugural Florovsky Week

Honoring Fr. Georges Florovsky with a week of prayer, papers, iconography workshop, fellowship, 

a festal banquet with inaugural Florovsky Lecture & plenary dialogues on

THE PATRISTIC VIEW OF SALVATION

​Justification by Faith Alone?

Fr. Georges Florovsky, a 20th century Russian Orthodox priest, tirelessly insisted on a return to the common heritage of all Christians in the first 1000 years of the Church's history as a path to recovering a common language for progress toward overcoming the divisions of Christendom. In his honor, this week is organized to promote such a return to the sources for Christian unity.

The three main speakers, each representing a different branch of Christianity, are:

HANS BOERSMA - Protestant

J. I. Packer Professor of Theology at Regent College

Author of many books, including Violence, Hospitality and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition 

KENNETH HOWELL - Catholic

Academic Director of the Eucharist Project

President of the Pontifical Studies Foundation

BRADLEY NASSIF - Orthodox

Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at North Park University

"Leading academic expert on Evangelical-Orthodox dialogue."
~New York Times

The schedule is here. From Tuesday evening through Friday, the event will be held at Newman University. On Saturday, the presentations will be held at St. George's Orthodox Cathedral.

I'll be making a presentation the first afternoon:

3:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Group 1-Eck 124 (on the campus of Newman University)

~Malcolm Harris- Good Pope John’s (Not So) Secret Agenda to Reunite Christianity

~Stephanie Mann-Reformation and Counter-Reformation: The Catholic Mission in England and Why it Failed

~Angie Gumm-Unwitting Ecumenicalism: Annum Sacrum and Pope Leo XIII's Consecration of the World to the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Reformation and Counter-Reformation: The Catholic Mission in England and Why it Failed

After the theological ideas of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other Protestant Reformers spread on the Continent and in the British Isles, the Latin Rite Catholic Church mounted a Counter-Reformation campaign. Religious orders like the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) and the Capuchins (a Franciscan order) succeeded—as even James R. Payton, Jr, recognized in Getting the Reformation Wrong: Correcting Some Misunderstandings (IVP Academic: 2010)—in taking back some territory and bringing back some Protestant converts to the Catholic Church. In one country, however, all the efforts and sacrifices of clerical and lay martyrs seemed to have failed. I propose to discuss why Catholics, in spite of (and sometimes because of) tremendous plans, sacrifices and heroism, failed in their mission even to obtain freedom of worship in their native land throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The presentation will include stories of those martyred saints who died in that failed mission and analysis of the tangle of religion and politics during the long Reformation era.

Interview with Phillip Campbell on "Heroes & Heretics"

Available now from TAN Books, Heroes & Heretics of the Reformation tells the story of the Reformation from about 1517 to 1581 through the Martin Luther to Thomas More, Charles V to Pope St. Pius V, and many more. I interviewed the author, Phillip Campbell:

Why did you choose to tell the story of the Protestant, English, and Catholic Reformations through biographical chapters? 

The Reformation is not an easy story to tell chronologically because there were so many things happening in so many different places. In order to stop the narrative from spiraling out of control and having to backtrack continually, I thought it would be an easier read to select a series of characters who exemplify different aspects of the era and tell the story through their experiences.


How did you choose which heroes and heretics to feature? 

Well obviously there are some you simply have to include by virtue of their importance; no story about the Reformation can omit Luther or Thomas More. But for some of the other characters, I tried to select people who really were emblematic of the conflicts of the age. For example, St. Edmund Campion was certainly not one of the big movers and shakers of the Reformation; he was just a simple priest who was caught and killed. However, his life and death really exemplify the struggle thousands of Catholics wrestled with under Queen Elizabeth, so his story was an apt symbol of that phase of English history.

Isn’t there really a third category? What would you call Erasmus, Charles V, Philip II of Spain, Catherine d’Medici? Are they heroes? 

The title Heroes and Heretics is not meant to suggest everyone in the book is either a hero or a heretic. Rather, this title represents two poles on a spectrum. As you noted, there are many people caught in between, people such as Erasmus, Catherine de Medici, and probably thousands of regular Christians whose allegiance was muddled or whose devotion to one side or the other was less than total. And the reason I included some of those folks was to demonstrate that, while from the point of view of Catholic doctrine there were undoubtedly right and wrong sides, the actual experience of the Reformation as lived by the people of the 16th century could sometimes be much more complex.

Why did you choose St. Peter Canisius to begin the book? He’s not the first Reformation-era saint who comes to mind! 

I chose St. Peter to open the book because his life was contiguous with all the great events of the era. He was born the year Luther was excommunicated, was a foundational member of the Jesuits, worked through the sessions of the Council of Trent, implemented Trent throughout Europe, founded numerous universities, and died as the French Wars of Religion were coming to a close. He literally was a witness to everything the book discusses. And he is also a great example because he was able to take the disorders of the age and use them as an occasion for sanctity, which is an example all Catholics can follow.

In chapter two, “The Exhaustion of Christendom”, you speak of people becoming “weary of the intellectual precision it took to keep the medieval world in harmony” or balance. Is that what we are seeing today in our country and/or other countries? People are tired of thinking about what it means to be a free citizen when the government offers to take over all those decisions for the sake of peace and security? Or, people are tired of maintaining true freedom of speech when some speech offends them? Are we weary? 

Absolutely. Especially in places where there is a de facto two-party political system whose politics inundates the media, we slowly transform from people who merely have a two party system to binary thinkers who can only conceive of two potential points of view, both opposed to each other. Everything is either-or. People lose the ability to harmonize things. This sort of thinking is what led to the erosion of the the medieval synthesis.

I appreciated your comment in the introduction about the balance between believing the Catholic Church is the one, true Church founded by Jesus and yet being able to see the failures and successes of the members of the Church. Why did you think it important to make that distinction? 

It's another one of those syntheses the faith requires us to make. The Church has a divine constitution, but its made up of fallible human beings. We will really never really understand the Catholic Church rightly unless we can maintain this distinction.

You ended your book with the Edict of Nantes. There’s also a common view of “the Long Reformation” that lasts well into the seventeenth century. Why did you choose 1598 as your stopping point? 

Well, the short answer is that TAN only wanted a book of a certain length and no more. But, a more substantial answer would be that while obviously there is still religious conflict going into the 17th century (many point to 1648 as the "real" end of the Reformation), nevertheless by 1598 the main contours of the Reformation had already been sketched out. The major schools of thought had all been established, political alliances sorted out, and the essential religious framework that would define Europe until the modern age was more or less established.

How has the “Black Legend” of Spain influenced even Catholics’ common view of how Spain, her bishops, her monarchs, and her saints responded to the Protestant Reformation and the need for reform within the Church? 

The "Black Legend" is the idea of a villainous, evil Spain imposing Catholicism in a tyrannical and authoritarian manner. It is largely accepted in the English-speaking world because it is essentially the echo of English propaganda that has come down to us from the Elizabethan era. Obviously castigating Spain while holding Elizabethan England up as a paragon of religious tolerance is ridiculous. But it is just part and parcel of being an English-speaker that you inherit these prejudices. It is really unfortunate because Spain is a great example of how a regional Church was able to reform itself prior to the revolt of Luther. I think a lot more work needs to be done by Catholic authors and historians on Spain and Spanish Catholicism, because what people know currently is just a mixture of prejudice and myth.

According to this on-line biography:

Phillip Campbell holds a BA in European History from Ave Maria University and a certificate in Secondary Education through Madonna University. He taught history and Scripture for the St. Augustine Homeschool Enrichment Program for ten years. Mr. Campbell is the author of the popular " Story of Civilization" series by TAN Books. He recently joined the Catholic History Textbook Project. Mr. Campbell's writings have appeared in the St. Austin Review and The Distributist Review. He is also the star of the YouTube sensation History in a Minute. Mr. Campbell served as the Mayor of Howell, MI from 2011 to 2015 and has been involved in homeschooling for more than 15 years.

He also publishes books at Cruachan Hill Press.

I have submitted a review of Heroes & Heretics of the Reformation to the St. Austin Review; publication date TBA.

Professor Brad Gregory on Luther as a "Rebel in the Ranks"

The National Catholic Register asked me to interview Professor Brad S. Gregory for their "Reformation" issue, published on October 29 in print and on October 31, the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Please see the interview here on-line. The first question I asked is:

What are we really celebrating or commemorating this year? The beginning of the Protestant Reformation or Martin Luther’s posting of the “95 Theses”?

And his answer was:

By convention — and not without reason — Luther’s “95 Theses” are also considered the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. They initiated an unexpected series of events that led to Luther’s defiance of and condemnation by Pope Leo X in early 1521.

The really important “posting” of the “95 Theses,” incidentally, wasn’t Luther’s affixing them to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, an event not mentioned until decades later, and that didn’t attain iconic-moment status until the 19th century, and which might not even have happened. The important posting was that, after writing his theses, Luther sent them to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, the most powerful Churchman in Germany, who sent them on, in turn, to Rome. That started things in motion at the highest levels of the Church, and the multiple printings of the “95 Theses” by the end of 1517 were the beginning of Luther’s emergence as a public figure.

I highly recommend his book on the Catholic, Protestant, and Anabaptist martyrs of the Reformation Era, Salvation at Stake, and his controversial and intriguing The Unintended Reformation. He continues to examine the issues discussed in that book in his most recent publication: Rebel in the Ranks: Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the Conflicts That Continue to Shape Our World.

More and More Reformation Books: Another Stark Choice

Rodney Stark, whose books I've enjoyed and learned from, has written a book about the Reformation (his most recent book before this is Bearing False Witness). His contribution to the library of Reformation books coming out this fall is Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes. As the publisher, SPCK (the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge) describes the book:

What has the Reformation Ever done for us? That's the question asked by church historian and sociologist Rodney Stark, whose latest book (one of SPCK's August 2017 Releases) Reformation Myths . . . offers an alternative consideration of the way culture and church remembers the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation of the Church in the West.

Stark takes and skewers eight myths that, from his uniquely informed perspective, have tainted the way our culture has been shaped. Unafraid to engage with some of the 'sacred cows' of Reformed and other streams of thought, this little book challenges common views and wonders if there might be another way to think.

Bracketed by chapters on mythical Protestants (Who were they anyway?) and a conclusion of prejudice and persistence, Stark has penned a wide ranging and entertaining tone, that Martin Luther would no doubt have spluttered into his Weissbier were he alive today and regularly reviewing books. Some of those myths include:

The myths of full pews, pious kings, and limited monarchies
The misfortune of state churches, with forced piety and bigotry
The ongoing misfortune of nationalistic states
The enduring myth of the Protestant Ethic
The myth of the way that Protestantism and Reformed thought led to the scientific revolution

Written in an informed, authoritative, and iconoclastically engaging style, and published to provide a mirror to the celebrations around the world of the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation, this book asks the question, inviting us to consider a range of answers, and rethink what we thought we knew about Luther, Calvin, the Diet of Worms, and all that.

Remember that part of Stark's iconoclastic charm is that he is NOT a Catholic, so when you read the sample from the book that's available for free from Amazon, you may be amazed when he notes that the only way to define Protestantism is in the negative: it's Christian but not Catholic or Orthodox! And the fact that the SPCK, a publisher founded to defend the Anglican church and support Church of England missions in 1698, is just another twist in the story.

Illustration credit: a weissbier in Munich!

Reformation Era Biography Collections

On the cusp of the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther posting his 95 Theses, books and articles about the Protestant Reformation have of course been plentiful. One subset of these books are the biographical collections, represented by the examples above.

Ignatius Press has published a new edition of Hilaire Belloc's Characters of the Reformation, with prose portraits of mostly English characters of the Reformation, starting with Henry VIII, but including a few French personages, like Cardinal Richelieu. Belloc believes that the English Reformation was not only distinct from the Protestant Reformation but that the defection of the Church in England--Henry VIII's breaking away from Catholic unity--was decisive in the destruction of Christendom. From his introduction:

The early enthusiasm for change was anarchic and dispersed. It had no form. It was of a violence which was bound to burn itself out, especially as it was resisted by all the organized central authorities of Christendom: the Kings and the Emperor. All that descended directly from the ancient foundation of our culture, the Romanized, civilized core of Europe, held out — save for one province: Britain. England was captured for the Revolutionary side, not by any desire on the part of her people, but by a succession of incidents which marked each of them a step more difficult to retrace. First, on a matter in no way connected with the Faith, the King of England, the most complete autocrat of his day, happened to quarrel with the Pope. The divorce of Henry VIII from his wife Catherine of Aragon, due to his infatuation with Anne Boleyn, began the business. It was conducted by a man of far greater ability than Henry, one Thomas Cromwell, an adventurer of high talent and no scruples (the great-uncle of Oliver and founder of the vast Cromwell fortune of which Oliver was a cadet). This Thomas Cromwell advised and carried out the confiscation of the monastic lands in England; a huge loot which was to be followed by further robbery of clerical endowments of every kind, including schools and colleges as well as the wealth of Sees and Parishes and Chapters. The new fortunes arising from this flood of confiscation determined the issue. . . .

That severance of England from Europe and from Christendom was, I have said, the pivotal matter of the Protestant advance. On it the partial success of the religious revolution everywhere depended. Hence the necessity for beginning by an understanding of the English tragedy, failing which the disruption of Europe and all our modern chaos would never have appeared. 

Belloc certainly takes a "Long Reformation" approach, because he ends his collection of characters with Blaise Pascal, William of Orange, and Louis XIV.

OSV has published Joseph Pearce's Heroes of the Catholic Reformation: Saints Who Renewed the Church, which I previewed and endorsed with a blurb:

The Protestant Reformation began five hundred years ago, accompanied by an age of turmoil and secularism we can recognize even in our own time. Rather than shrinking from the crisis, the Catholic Church responded with even deeper, and more genuine, reform. We can do the same today.

This Catholic Reformation was accomplished by many defenders of the Faith whom we now know as saints. Their holiness, courageous deeds, and sacrifices during this renewal of the Catholic Faith demonstrate the true heroism of saintly action and provide models for defending the faith in the modern world.

Diverse as they are inspiring, these heroes and saints stood up to slay “the dragons of sin” while championing Church teaching. Their sacrifices left the Church — and the world — forever changed.

Bishop John Fisher, Sir Thomas More, and priests Edmund Campion and Robert Southwell refused to submit to England’s secular tyranny and chose martyrdom instead. — Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and Charles Borromeo, the reforming Archbishop of Milan, spearheaded the Catholic Reformation.

Pope Pius V brought a spirit of asceticism to the papacy and ardor to the work of reform.
Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, despite enduring terrible suffering, surrendered themselves completely to Christ’s great mission of reform within the Church.

The Heroes of the Catholic Reformation is a scholarly and cultured celebration of the saints who responded to the fierce oppositions of their time with courage and an authentic and lasting Catholic Reformation. Author Joseph Pearce invites us look to these heroes for inspiration as we seek to live the fullness of Faith in our fallen world.

Pearce--who is coming to Wichita in October AND November for presentations--takes the view that the Reformation as a whole is divided into three parts: the Protestant "Reformation"; the English "Reformation", and the Catholic Reformation. Only the latter is a true reformation; the others are rebellions and divisions: the latter worked to restore the Apostolic Teaching and Tradition as Jesus commanded; the others resulted in religious chaos.

The one book I have not read or seen is Phillip Campbell's Heroes and Heretics of the Reformation from TAN:

Not since the birth of Christ has an event shaken the foundations of the Western world like the Reformation. Now, 500 years after Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door at Wittenberg—the sound of which served as the thunder presaging the storm to come—Phillip Campbell, author of The Story of Civilization, casts fresh eyes on that tumultuous time and its most influential characters.

It was a tumultuous time, filled with heroes, heretics, and some who were a little bit of both. It was a time of destruction and rebuilding. Some sincerely sought reform while others sought merely to profit by it, and some—perhaps too few—used the events of the time to become saints.

In these pages meet as you’ve never met before:

• Martin Luther: the tortured Augustinian monk whose act at Wittenberg called forth the storm
• Thomas Müntzer: the radical who, inspired by the new way of thinking and his own apocalyptic views, sought to use the sword to usher in the reign of God; he would feel the sting of Luther’s words and the bite of the executioner’s blade.
• The queens: Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, who were at different times bastardized and delegitimized by their father Henry VIII, but who each reigned during this period of upheaval. One is known to history by a derogatory epithet, while the other, “bloodier” still, has an epoch named in her honor.
• The popes: Paul III and Pius V, each of whom sought to save what could be saved of Christendom, one through the calling of the Council of Trent, which codified an authentic Catholic Reform, and the other through the calling of a new crusade to fend off the ever-threatening Turks.
• St. Peter Canisius: who lived a life of sanctity as he tried to reconcile those who had drifted away back to the Church.

Through the lives of those above and others, dramatically unfolded in Campbell’s stirring narrative, learn how the heroes and heretics of the tumultuous sixteenth century shook the world, for better or for worse.

I'm sure that Protestant publishers have produced some of the same kind of collections and I'll try to find some for a future post.

Looking Forward to Duffy's Latest

In February 2017, Bloomsbury Continuum will publish Eamon Duffy's contribution to the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation: Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants and the Conversion of England:

Published to mark the 500th anniversary of the events of 1517, Reformation Divided explores the impact in England of the cataclysmic transformations of European Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The religious revolution initiated by Martin Luther is usually referred to as 'The Reformation', a tendentious description implying that the shattering of the medieval religious foundations of Europe was a single process, in which a defective form of Christianity was replaced by one that was unequivocally benign, 'the midwife of the modern world'. The book challenges these assumptions by tracing the ways in which the project of reforming Christendom from within, initiated by Christian 'humanists' like Erasmus and Thomas More, broke apart into conflicting and often murderous energies and ideologies, dividing not only Catholic from Protestant, but creating deep internal rifts within all the churches which emerged from Europe's religious conflicts.

The book is in three parts: In 'Thomas More and Heresy', Duffy examines how and why England's greatest humanist apparently abandoned the tolerant humanism of his youthful masterpiece Utopia, and became the bitterest opponent of the early Protestant movement. 'Counter-Reformation England' explores the ways in which post-Reformation English Catholics accommodated themselves to a complex new identity as persecuted religious dissidents within their own country, but in a European context, active participants in the global renewal of the Catholic Church. The book's final section 'The Godly and the Conversion of England' considers the ideals and difficulties of radical reformers attempting to transform the conventional Protestantism of post-Reformation England into something more ardent and committed. In addressing these subjects, Duffy shines new light on the fratricidal ideological conflicts which lasted for more than a century, and whose legacy continues to shape the modern world.

I'm sure it will be fascinating and enlightening! I'm working on getting a review copy!

Reading Half of a Book: "Conversions"

I admit immediately that I read half of this book (Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America); the half I was interested in. I had purchased this book a few years ago and was always more interested in the Reformation era conversion story than I was the modern era conversion story. So I when I picked up the book again a couple of weeks ago, I barely skimmed the modern era conversion story chapters and concentrated on the Reformation era conversion story.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

As the publisher, Yale University Press, describes the book:

This powerful and innovative work by a gifted cultural historian explores the effects of religious conversion on family relationships, showing how the challenges of the Reformation can offer insight to families facing similarly divisive situations today. Craig Harline begins with the story of young Jacob Rolandus, the son of a Dutch Reformed preacher, who converted to Catholicism in 1654 and ran away from home, causing his family to disown him. In the companion story, Michael Sunbloom, a young American, leaves his family’s religion in 1973 to convert to Mormonism, similarly upsetting his distraught parents. The modern twist to Michael’s story is his realization that he is gay, causing him to leave his new church, and upsetting his parents again—what will they do now?

Recounting these stories in short, alternating chapters, Harline underscores the parallel aspects of the two far-flung families. Despite different outcomes and forms, their situations involve nearly identical dynamics and heart-wrenching choices. Through the author’s deeply informed imagination, the experiences of a seventeenth-century European family are transformed into immediately recognizable terms.

Jacob Rolandus was in a situation comparable to that of English converts, and so I was most interested in his story. Harline describes not only the family conflict Jacob's conversion caused, but the careful response of Catholic in Calvinist Holland. Although Catholics weren't in as much danger there as they were in England, there were still restrictions on their freedom. It could be dangerous to take in a convert--he could be an agent of the government trying to find out about the Catholic underground. Rolandus had to prove not only to his parents that his mind could not be changed, but prove to the Catholics, including the Jesuits or others from whom he was seeking help and protection from his parents, that he could be trusted. 

Harline explores the moral conflict of Jacob's disobedience to his parents when he becomes a Catholic. His father wants him to come home but Jacob, who is 21, wants to make a new life for himself in the Catholic world. He is finally accepted by the Society of Jesus and studies for the priesthood, eventually becoming a missionary to Brazil.  Jacob and his sister Maria exchange letters in which he tries to convince her to become a Catholic and she tries to convince him to come back home and be reunited with the family in their Reformed faith. Harline has provided a complete translated transcript of these letters on his website.

Harline presents these two conversion stories as parallel, but they really aren't. Jacob Rolandus becomes a Catholic; he is faithful to the Catholic Church; he becomes a Jesuit and a missionary, devoting his life to the spreading of the Gospel. "Michael Sunbloom" becomes a Mormon but then decides he can't remain a Mormon because he has decided he is a homosexual, so he is not faithful to the Mormon Church. Because, as a couple of other reviewers I've read have also noted (like this one), Harline focuses the discussion of conversion, conscience and conflict all on a relational level, he doesn't see the truth claims of religious faith. In fact, he rather dismisses the whole idea of truth in religious affiliation as a case of--particularly when describing the correspondence between Jacob and Marie--something habitual and social. Then why did Jacob leave his home, hurt his parents, sacrifice his life, and become not just a Catholic, but a Jesuit and a missionary? Do we really make such great changes in our lives out of habit and social convention? Because Jacob had some Catholic friends, he became a Catholic and endured all that meant in his time? That's why I skipped so much of the "Michael Sunbloom" narrative and don't accept Harline's conclusions. But I enjoyed the story of Jacob Rolandus, SJ. He was a brave and resolute man.

Liturgy Bad; Spontaneity Good?

On the First Things blog, Peter Leithart references his review of Lori Branch's book, Rituals of Spontaneity from Baylor University Press published in the July/August 2009 issue of Touchstone:

Focusing on English literary culture and religion, Branch examines the formation of an “ideology of spontaneity” from the Reformation attacks on ritual through Puritan defenses of free prayer to the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth. She demonstrates that the anti-ritual attitude is a central theme in the formation of modern views of religion, subjectivity, morality, and literature.

The “ideology of spontaneity” is more explicitly expressed in the early part of this history. English Protestants attacked the ceremonies of the Catholic Church and the remnants of ceremony in Prayer Book liturgies, not only because they thought these ceremonies lacked biblical support but also because they believed that set liturgical forms were, in themselves, inimical to religious sincerity. This had the effect of detaching believers from communal actions. Medieval Christians were participants in rituals; after the Reformation, Christians began to see themselves as detached individual selves, desperately ginning up religious passion.

In the Touchstone review, he begins by locating the source of this attack on ritual as Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More's good friend:

We have Erasmus to thank not only for the word “ceremony” but also for the derogatory connotations attached to it. His Latin neologism, ceremonialae, has been translated as “trivial little ritual nonsenses.” Early English occurrences of “ceremony” follow the Erasmian usage. Gentility, one sixteenth-century critic wrote, is no more than a “meer flash, a ceremony, a toy, a thing of nought.”

Medieval Christians would have found these sentiments bewildering. Rituals were not toys but powerful tools that performed a kind of magic. So powerful was the ritual of the Mass that everything connected with it—the altar cloth, the chalice, the table—glowed with the radiance that, in historian Eamon Duffy’s term, “leaked” out of the consecrated host and wine.

As Leithart praised Branch's book, he identified two extremes of thought over ritual in religion: war and indifference:

For a variety of reasons, historians have not followed the story of ritual, sacrament, and ceremony beyond the Reformation. This is unfortunate, because no attitude is so characteristic of the modern Western mind as its indifference, or even hostility, to ritual. In the sixteenth century, Europeans fought wars over the meaning ofHocin the Eucharistic formula “Hoc est corpus meum” (“This is my body”). Today, differences of that sort are greeted with a quizzical yawn.

In her dense and sophisticated work, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth (Baylor University Press, 2006), Lori Branch has filled in a considerable part of the history between religious war and irreligious yawns. Focusing on English literary culture and religion, Branch examines the formation of an “ideology of spontaneity” from the Reformation attacks on ritual through Puritan defenses of free prayer to the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth. She demonstrates that the anti-ritual attitude is a central theme in the formation of modern views of religion, subjectivity, morality, and literature.

Read the rest of the First Things blog here; the rest of the Touchstone review, here.

How Should Catholics "Celebrate" the Reformation?

The Catholic Herald posts a story about Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, the papal household preacher (for Pope St. John Paul II, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis) preaching in England about the Reformation:

Speaking at Westminster Abbey, during the inauguration of the Church of England’s Tenth General Synod, Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, who has served as Preacher to the Papal Household since 1980, praised the “theological and spiritual enrichment” of the Reformation.

He said: “We need to go back to the time of the Apostles: they faced a pre-Christian world, and we are facing a largely post-Christian world. When Paul wants to summarise the essence of the Christian message in one sentence, he does not say, “I proclaim this or that doctrine to you.” He says, “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor 1:23), and “We preach . . . Jesus Christ as Lord” (2 Cor 4:5). This is the real “articulus stantis et cadentis Ecclesiae”, the article by which the Church stands or falls.

“This does not mean ignoring the great theological and spiritual enrichment that came from the Reformation or desiring to go back to the time before it. It means instead allowing all of Christianity to benefit from its achievements, once they are freed from certain distortions due to the heated atmosphere of the time and of later controversies.”

Addressing the Queen and the whole Synod, Fr Raniero Cantalamessa reflected on the preparations for the fifth centenary of the Protestant Reformation, saying, “it is vital for the whole Church that this opportunity is not wasted by people remaining prisoners of the past, trying to establish each other’s rights and wrongs.”

Read the full text of his homily here.

Father Alexander Lucie-Smith, reflecting on an experience Father Cantalamessa's homeland never experienced, had some different comments:

When I think of the Reformation, I have to admit that great theological and spiritual enrichment are not the first things that come to mind. In fact quite the opposite. In this country at least, the Reformation was marked by the reduction of the sacraments from seven to two, by iconoclasm, and by the abolition of many useful spiritual practices, such as devotion to Our Blessed Lady and pilgrimages, and the abolition of the religious life. The widespread opposition to these changes – which included three major rebellions – showed that these practices were much loved by the people of this land. Some welcomed the Reformation, but for others it was imposed at the point of a sword.

Of course there were positives, of which the greatest was the English Bible and the revival in preaching and its offshoot, religious pamphleteering. However, it has to be said that the Catholics had an English Bible too (the Douai Bible) and they certainly had their pamphlets, such as the famous Decem Rationes of Saint Edmund Campion, as well as the shorter work known as Campion’s Brag. These pamphlets were important as evidence of popular religious fervour. The government at the time was desperately keen to stop them.

Perhaps I may be seen by some as trying open old wounds by bringing this up, but it has to be said that there was great spiritual and theological enrichment in the Counter-Reformation as well as in the Protestant Reformation, and the energy of the Counter-Reformation flowed from the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, which was anything but moribund. I am reminded of what my old history teacher once taught me years ago: if Good Queen Mary had lived to be 70, instead of dying in her early forties, England would have remained Catholic. Incidentally, this is something that Professor Eamon Duffy says in his work on Marian Catholicism too.

So, just how should we mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation? Given that the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were complex phenomena, the best way to mark the anniversary is to immerse ourselves in history. A year long programme of lectures, seminars, along with some historical re-enactments for added fun, would be an enriching experience for all.

I don't think division of the Body of Christ should ever be celebrated: Jesus wanted us all to be one as He and the Father are One. He wanted us all to be united in the same community, receiving Him in the unity of Holy Communion. 

Something More and Tyndale Would Agree Upon!

As you might know, St. Thomas More and William Tyndale exchanged sometimes rather vituperative arguments and personal attacks on the relationship between the Church and the Holy Bible. More defended the consistent Catholic view that the Church preceded the Bible, teaching according to the oral tradition of Jesus Christ and the Apostles, and that the Church was therefore most qualified to interpret the Bible; after all, she wrote it, she canonized its contents, she read it and taught it. As this Christianity Today posts notes, Tyndale argued the opposite:

Sir Thomas More, who had been commissioned by the Church to refute Tyndale, had published his Dialogue Concerning Heresies in 1529. Tyndale’s Practice of Prelates includes brief rebuttals of More’s assertions in this book, and his Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, published in 1531, was a fuller response. One man was staunchly Catholic, the other staunchly Protestant and, indicative of the vicissitudes of chameleon-like Henry, both would be executed within five years for their differing views of the faith.

Their debate centered on the relation of the church, or Church, and Scripture. Tyndale argues that the gospel preceded the church, formed the church, and now provides the test for discerning the true church—made up of those people who read the Scriptures with eyes of faith. “For the whole Scripture and all believing hearts testify that we are begotten through the Word.”

Viewed from the 20th-century perspective, Tyndale’s polemics might seem harsh, full of personal attacks, occasionally illogical, and at times almost paranoid. His language is frequently rough, and he often abuses his opponents in personal-attack terms.

He calls Wolsey “Cardinal Wolfsee” because the cleric occupied more than one church office at the same time; he baits Sir Thomas More for his friendship with the Dutch scholar Erasmus (“His darling Erasmus” is Tyndale’s mocking phrase). He begs the question, assuming as true the point he is trying to prove. When the histories do not record clerical intrigue, he assumes that the writers, clergymen themselves, have covered their own tracks.

Yet this was the prevailing style of religious argumentation during the 16th century.

If you want to read Tyndale's work answering More's Dialogue, it's wonderful and ironic to note that the Catholic University of America Press is the publisher! Scepter Publishers provides a modernized version of More's Dialogue.

Unlike this balanced and scholarly analysis of the More-Tyndale debates/conflict, I have seen some posts, including comments on Wolf Hall stories about St. Thomas More, that offer the ridiculous suggestion that Thomas More, while in the Tower of London, orchestrated the arrest and trial and subsequent execution of William Tyndale. There is no evidence of this and if More had a part in Tyndale's burning at the stake in Vilvoorde, it was from beyond the grave, as Tyndale's execution took place more than a year after More was beheaded. More had resigned all authority in England, had no influence upon Henry VIII, and was not active in any search or arrest of Tyndale on the Continent: his goods and life were forfeit to the king!

All that background aside, I think St. Thomas More would be glad to hear that Tyndale Publishers, named for the reforming translator, has been granted a reprieve from the HHS contraception mandate, according to this CNA story:

A Bible publisher based in Illinois has won its lawsuit against the federal contraception mandate, with a final ruling delivered July 15 by a federal district court.

The ruling means that Tyndale House Publishers cannot be subject to the mandate, which was issued four years ago by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

“In America, citizens have always had the freedom to believe, the freedom to express those beliefs, and the freedom to operate their businesses accordingly,” said Matt Bowman, senior legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, which was representing Tyndale House in court.

“The Supreme Court upheld that principle in its Conestoga/Hobby Lobby decision last year, and the district court has rightly done the same,” Bowman said.

Tyndale House is the world’s largest privately-held Christian publisher of books, Bibles, and digital media. It gives more than 95 percent of its profits each year to religious non-profit causes across the globe.

The U.S. Supreme Court will have to defend the religious liberty of the Little Sisters of the Poor, however, since "the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals rul[ed] against the Little Sisters, saying that they must follow the demands of the contraceptive mandate or else face fines of up to $2.5 million a year, or about 40 percent of the $6 million the Sisters beg for annually to run their ministry."

Chesterton is EVERYWHERE!!

There I was, eating lunch and reading a book review in The Wall Street Journal, when I looked up the page and saw:

"Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again." -- G.K. Chesterton

But The WSJ editors did not complete this quotation from The Everlasting Man:

". . . for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”

"Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.” 

This quotation is from Part 2, Chapter Six, "The Five Deaths of the Faith". The context:

IT is not the purpose of this book to trace the subsequent history of Christianity, especially the later history of Christianity; which involves controversies of which I hope to write more fully elsewhere. It is devoted only to the suggestion that Christianity, appearing amid heathen humanity, had all the character of a unique thing and even of a supernatural thing. It was not like any of the other things; and the more we study it the less it looks like any of them. But there is a certain rather peculiar character which marked it henceforward even down to the present moment, with a note on which this book may well conclude.

I have said that Asia and the ancient world had an air of being too old to die. Christendom has had the very opposite fate. Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave. But the first extraordinary fact which marks this history is this: that Europe has been turned upside down over and over again; and that at the end of each of these revolutions the same religion has again been found on top. The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion. This truth is hidden from many by a convention that is too little noticed. Curiously enough, it is a convention of the sort which those who ignore it claim especially to detect and denounce. They are always telling us that priests and ceremonies are not religion and that religious organisation can be a hollow sham; but they hardly realise how true it is. It is so true that three or four times at least in the history of Christendom the whole soul seemed to have gone out of Christianity; and almost every man in his heart expected its end. This fact is only masked in medieval and other times by that very official religion which such critics pride themselves on seeing through. Christianity remained the official religion of a Renaissance prince or the official religion of an eighteenthcentury bishop, just as an ancient mythology remained the official religion of Julius Caesar or the Arian creed long remained the official religion of Julian the Apostate. But there was a difference between the cases of Julius and of Julian; because the Church had begun its strange career. There was no reason why men like Julius should not worship gods like Jupiter forever in public and laugh at them forever in private. But when Julian treated Christianity as dead, he found it had come to life again. He also found, incidentally, that there was not the faintest sign of Jupiter ever coming to life again. This case of Julian and the episode of Arianism is but the first of a series of examples that can only be roughly indicated here. Arianism, as has been said, had every human appearance of being the natural way in which that particular superstition of Constantine might be expected to peter out. All the ordinary stages had been passed through; the creed had become a respectable thing, had become a ritual thing, had then been modified into a rational thing; and the rationalists were ready to dissipate the last remains of it, just as they do to-day. When Christianity rose again suddenly and threw them, it was almost as unexpected as Christ rising from the dead. But there are many other examples of the same thing, even about the same time. The rush of missionaries from Ireland, for instance, has all the air of an unexpected onslaught of young men on an old world, and even on a Church that showed signs of growing old. Some of them were martyred on the coast of Cornwall; and the chief authority on Cornish antiquities told me that he did not believe for a moment that they were martyred by heathens but (as he expressed it with some humour) `by rather slack Christians.'

Mark Greengrass' new study of the Reformation era is the latest volume in the Penguin History of Europe series:

Christendom Destroyed describes Europe at a time of overwhelming crisis. At the beginning of the period most of Europe is united under the spiritual leadership of the Pope, by the end of it Europe is burned out, devastated and permanently split by religious dissent - the structure that had provided the framework under which the continent had organized itself for centuries was finished.This extraordinary book is as much about the fate of ordinary people as about the rulers who had to navigate through an exceptionally treacherous time, with all Europeans having to deal with violent, sometimes overwhelming novelty, whether social, spiritual, geographical or political.

From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Thomas Cahill Strikes Again!

Years ago I read Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization (which should probably be titled "How the Irish Saved Western Civilization") and several years ago I toted Mysteries of the Middle Ages with me on a trip to Paris--it was fun to read about Heloise and Abelard in situ, especially one day while seated in Au Sauvignon, hearing two American ex pats discussing the end of one of their love affairs. I almost wanted to tell them that love affairs can end much more badly! Cahill's animus toward St. Bernard of Clairvaux and his relentless hatred of any pope or bishop, any member of the Church's hierarchy, wore on me after awhile. As an antidote, I went to the Musee de Cluny and reveled in some of the great religious art of the medieval era. My journal for that visit includes the note that Cahill really didn't understand the Middle Ages, because he didn't understand the Church or the Catholic faith--and his hermeneutic of understanding the past by how much it conforms to current values, specifically his values, kept him from entering in to the past and trying to comprehend it.

Sounds like that's the issue with his latest book in the "Hinges of History" series, according to Michael B. Kelly in The Catholic World Report:

Since publishing the amusing How the Irish Saved Civilization in 1995, best-selling author Thomas Cahill has added five further volumes to his history of the West, the Hinges of History series. The latest volume, Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Changed Our World, contains Cahill’s take on the great European intellectual, cultural, and religious movements of the period now commonly referred to by historians as “early modern”. According to the author, this series aims to “retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West.” Such “gift-givers” left behind “a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong” than the one they had entered. . . .

But over-simplifications and reliance upon older scholarship aside, the main problem with the book is its neglect of its advertised task, i.e., explaining “How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Changed Our World.” Heretics and Heroes, at length, is essentially a search through history for characters presenting features that appear “modern” to the searcher. He then provides lively biographical vignettes that emphasize these features, and (as it were) announces—“Voila, modernity in the Renaissance (or Reformation).”

But simply identifying new trends and developments in art and religion in the early modern period is not the same as explaining how modernity came to be. Emblematic for the whole work may be Cahill’s account of the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, when it was momentously resolved that each prince in the Empire could decide his own domain’s religion (cujus regio, ejus religio)—Cahill snappily explains, “And so it became” (262). And apparently that is that. Readers wishing some sustained argument about the gestation of the modern world will be disappointed.

In the end, Heretics and Heroes is not an attempt to understand, or explain, the past from the perspective of the people of the past. It is a history of progress towards us, or, rather, towards those of us who are truly modern, in the right way. It is a peculiar kind of hagiographical enterprise—the scouring of history to find the people that are most like us. In fact, in his final chapter Cahill apologizes that, notwithstanding his good intentions, he has produced so many pages about “know-it-alls . . . prescribers and proscribers,” the “excluders” and limiters, “who want their circle—the circle of the saved—to be exclusive, as small and as (uncomfortably) intimate as possible.”

Read the rest here. Can you imagine what Cahill will do when he discusses the French Revolution? Surely the Enlightenment and the "Age of Revolution" will be the next "Hinge of History"!

From Conference to Collected Essays

In October of 2010, Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois held a conference titled "Reforming the Reformation". Augustana College is a Lutheran, liberal arts college. The conference description:

Augustana will host the conference "Reforming Reformation" on October 17-19, 2010, organized by Thomas F. Mayer (History). The object is to undertake a fundamental rethinking of all the possible meanings of the term reformation, concept and label. In order to stimulate such thought, the conferees will be divided into four vaguely "national" panels, emphasizing places that either did not have a "real" reformation or had an odd one. This will serve to put in perspective what far too many people still count as the only true reformation, the Protestant one especially in its Lutheran and Calvinist guises. Those four panels will treat Italy, England (emphasizing the Marian interlude since it has almost always been considered a bump on the way to seeing God's will done), the Empire and Spain. Needless to say, the conference will be strongly interdisciplinary, with participants from literature, art history, theology and history.

The conference will be spent mainly in discussion, rather than sitting through papers one after another. Participants will submit their talks at least a month in advance and they will then be circulated to all and sundry. They will also be posted on the Web in such a way that folk at Augustana can get access to them. Sessions will consist of ten-minute summaries followed by discussion and audience interventions. We want to involve students and members of the community as much as possible. The sessions will mix papers up geographically to see what extra comparative sparks that can strike. The conference will open with a plenary session on Sunday evening, mainly to introduce the participants and the themes. The working sessions will be spread through the day on Monday (various history faculty have generously given up their rooms and periods) before we end with one more plenary session, probably at 8:30 on Tuesday morning.

The participants have been urged to think as much as possible about big questions and broader implications. The final versions of their papers will go into a volume to be edited by Mayer and published in his series, "Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700," which will also include a ruminative essay based on the discussions.

List of participants

I. Italy
Daniel Bornstein (history), Washington University
Marcia Hall (art history), Temple University
Abigail Brundin (literature), St Catherine's College, University of Cambridge

II. England
Peter Marshall (history), University of Warwick, England
Anne Overell (history), The Open University, Leeds, England

III. The Empire
John Frymire (history), University of Missouri
Brad Gregory (history), University of Notre Dame Ronald Thiemann (theology), Harvard Divinity School

IV. Spain
LuAnn Homza (history), College of William and Mary
John Edwards (history), Queen's College, University of Oxford Jodi Bilnikoff (history), UNC­-Greensboro

Sponsored by the Office of the President, the Institute for Leadership and Service and the Center for the Study of the Christian Millennium, with the support of the Humanities Fund and the Department of History

The result of this conference was indeed a book from Ashgate, which publishes some of the most interesting books at the highest prices imaginable, especially in their Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700 series. The book has the same title as the conference, and Ashgate describes it thus:

The Reformation used to be singular: a unique event that happened within a tidily circumscribed period of time, in a tightly constrained area and largely because of a single individual. Few students of early modern Europe would now accept this view. Offering a broad overview of current scholarly thinking, this collection undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the many and varied meanings of the term concept and label 'reformation', particularly with regard to the Catholic Church.

Accepting the idea of the Reformation as a process or set of processes that cropped up just about anywhere Europeans might be found, the volume explores the consequences of this through an interdisciplinary approach, with contributions from literature, art history, theology and history. By examining a single topic from multiple interdisciplinary perspectives, the volume avoids inadvertently reinforcing disciplinary logic, a common result of the way knowledge has been institutionalized and compartmentalized in research universities over the last century.

The result of this is a much more nuanced view of Catholic Reformation, and once that extends consideration much further - both chronologically, geographically and politically - than is often accepted. As such the volume will prove essential reading to anyone interested in early modern religious history.

Ashgate provides a sample from the book, the Introduction by Thomas Mayer, and Augustana provides as least two of the presentations on-line, by Peter Marshall and by Brad S. Gregory.

Being Protestant in Reformation Britain by Alec Ryrie

That's an intriguing title because one's first thought might be: what else were people (if they weren't Catholic) in England during the Reformation? I think we might (or at least I might) be too quick to assume that there was one way of being part of the Church of England.

According to the book description from OUP:

~Offers the first comprehensive survey of the early Protestant religious experience
~Provides a distinctive perspective on the dynamism, intensity, and breadth of early British Protestant culture
~Focuses on the material reality of religious experience
~Integrates religious history with currently lively fields such as history of emotion, of childhood, and of Puritan reading and writing
~[Is] Clearly and accessibly written

The Reformation was about ideas and power, but it was also about real human lives. Alec Ryrie provides the first comprehensive account of what it actually meant to live a Protestant life in England and Scotland between c. 1530-1640, drawing on a rich mixture of contemporary devotional works, sermons, diaries, biographies, and autobiographies to uncover the lived experience of early modern Protestantism.

Beginning from the surprisingly urgent, multifaceted emotions of Protestantism, Ryrie explores practices of prayer, of family and public worship, and of reading and writing, tracking them through the life course from childhood through conversion and vocation to the deathbed. He examines what Protestant piety drew from its Catholic predecessors and contemporaries, and grounds that piety in material realities such as posture, food and tears.

This perspective shows us what it meant to be Protestant in the British Reformations: a meeting of intensity (a religion which sought authentic feeling above all, and which dreaded hypocrisy and hard-heartedness) with dynamism (a progressive religion, relentlessly pursuing sanctification and dreading idleness). That combination, for good or ill, gave the Protestant experience its particular quality of restless, creative zeal.

The Protestant devotional experience also shows us that this was a broad-based religion: for all the differences across time, between two countries, between men and women, and between puritans and conformists, this was recognisably a unified culture, in which common experiences and practices cut across supposed divides. Alec Ryrie shows us Protestantism, not as the preachers on all sides imagined it, but as it was really lived.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Part I: The Protestant Emotions
1: Cultivating the Affections
2: Despair and Salvation
3: The Meaning of Mourning
4: Desire
5: Joy

Part II: The Protestant at Prayer
6: The Meaning of Prayer
7: Answering Prayer
8: The Practice of Prayer
9: Speaking to God
10: Prayer as Struggle

Part III: The Protestant and the Word
11: Reading
12: Writing

Part IV: The Protestant in Company
13: The Experience of Worship
14: Prayer in the Household

Part V: The Protestant Life
15: The Meaning of Life
16: The Stages of Life

Conclusion
Select Bibliography

The author is Alec Ryrie, Professor of the History of Christianity, Durham University:

Alec Ryrie studied History and Theology at the universities of Cambridge, St Andrews, and Oxford. He is now Head of Theology and Religion and Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University. His previous books include The Age of Reformation (2009), The Sorcerer's Tale (2008), The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (2006) and The Gospel and Henry VIII (2003).

Archbishop Chaput on Gregory's Unintended Reformation

Writing for The Witherspoon Institute, Archbishop Charles Chaput reviews a book about the Protestant Reformation and its effects on our culture and society today:

Brad Gregory, the Notre Dame historian, seeks to show how we got this way in his recent book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. His answers are surprising, and for some readers, controversial. But his book is also important—and in its explanatory power, brilliant.

Gregory argues that today’s relativism and cult of the consumer—what he ironically calls “the goods life”—have roots that run centuries deep. He wastes no time on nostalgia for a golden age that never existed. But he does show with riveting clarity that in the sixteenth century, Protestant Reformers unintentionally set in motion certain ideas that eventually enabled today’s radical self-centeredness.

Gregory also shows that while the Reformers lit the fuse, medieval Catholics laid the dynamite. Late medieval laity were, quite often, profoundly pious. And because they were pious, they minded when their leaders weren’t. Pious laypeople had an appetite for reform precisely because of their devotion. Late medieval clergy too often preached one thing and did another. Greed, simony, nepotism, luxury, sexual license, and schism in the hierarchy created an intolerable gap between Christian preaching and practice.

Many Catholics worked for reform from within. Some had success. Franciscans, Dominicans, and Cistercians owe their origins to medieval reform. Humanists such as Erasmus and Thomas More were part of an international community of letters determined to renew Christian life from the inside. Saints such as Catherine of Siena and Bernard of Clairvaux spoke truth to ecclesiastical power.

But one key difference separated these Catholic voices from the Protestant Reformers: The Catholics believed that the Church had her teachings right. She just needed to actually live them. The Catholics believed that Christ’s presence in the Eucharist and other sacraments, in the Scriptures, in the saints, and in the Church’s historic doctrines offered an authentic, all-encompassing Christian way of life sufficient to sanctify human existence—if it was actually embraced and shorn of its abuses.

The Protestants, preaching sola scriptura, threw much of it away. The Protestants believed that the deposit and structure of Catholic faith were fundamentally flawed, that Christ no longer abided in the Roman Church, and that Scripture alone communicated God’s will. Sola scriptura changed everything for Western Christendom. The Church became the churches, and the process inadvertently, but relentlessly, fueled individual sovereignty and relativism.

Read the rest here.

The Long Reformation, redux

This might be an interesting new release: The Long European Reformation, second edition, by Peter G. Wallace, from Palgrave Macmillan:

Peter G. Wallace adeptly interweaves the influential events of the early modern religious reformation with the transformations of political institutions, socio-economic structures, gender relations, and cultural values throughout Europe. In this established study, Wallace:
* examines the European Reformation as a long-term process
* reconnects the classic sixteenth-century religious struggles with the political and religious pressures confronting late medieval Christianity
* argues that the resolutions proposed by reformers, such as Luther, were not fully realised for most Christians until the early eighteenth century.

Incorporating the latest research, the second edition of this essential text now features a new chapter on the Reformation and Islam, expanded discussion of gender issues, and a helpful glossary.

Table of Contents:

List of Maps
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Preface to the Second Edition
Introduction
PART I: THE WARP: THREADS OF REFORMATION HISTORIES, 1350-1650
The Late Medieval Crisis, 1347-1517
Resistance, Renewal, and Reform, 1414-1521
Evangelical Movements and Confessions, 1521-59
Reformation and Religious War, 1550-1650
PART II: THE WEFT: MAKING SENSE OF THE LONG EUROPEAN REFORMATION
Settlements, 1600-1750: Church Building, State Building, and Social Discipline
Rereading the Reformation through Gender Analysis
The Reformation and Islam: From Menace to Coexistence
Conclusions
Notes
Glossary
Select Bibliography
Index

I don't know if I'm that excited about "Gender Analysis" but much of the other content looks fascinating. I must admit that when I wrote Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation, I did not know about this academic theory of the "Long Reformation". As I studied the English Reformation, however, it was clear to me that England endured religious change/reformation for hundreds of years, primarily because of the monarchy's authority over the church in England--whenever there was a change in monarchy, there was some change in religion. This pattern endures through the Tudor dynasty with Henry VIII's heirs, and manifests itself in the longer Stuart dynasty: James I to Charles I, Cromwell to Charles II; James II to William and Mary; Anne to George I: every change in the authority of the monarch or protector meant a change in religious settlement. Turns out that this is an ongoing theme of research, even in the English Reformation. See this course description from Sewanee, for example:

This course examines the role of ritual and worship in the religious history of England, ca. 1530 to ca. 1700. It studies the transformation of a traditional religion based on rituals into a religious system based as much on word as on rite. The course draws connections between these religious changes and the larger political, social, and cultural contexts in which they occurred.

Palgrave Macmillan provides a sample on their website (55 pages of material!) and some other interesting resources for this volume in their European History in Perspective series.