Devotion, Discontent, and the Henrician Reformation: The Evidence of the Robin Hood Stories

2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Field
Keyword(s):  
Social Institution ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Robin Hood ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Local Parish ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Masses

The relationship between popular religious attitudes and the English Reformation has long been the subject of a fierce historical debate. The older “Whig-Protestant” view, championed most notably by A. G. Dickens, draws on evidence for clerical corruption and the spread of Lollardy to show that large numbers of English people were dissatisfied with the state of Catholicism, eager for religious change, and on the whole receptive to Protestant ideas. According to this version of events, Henry VIII and the Reformation Parliament rode a wave of popular discontent in breaking from Rome and dissolving the monasteries. If there was a split between the king and the masses, it came only later when Henry's conservative religious beliefs caused him to attempt to retain much of the substance of Catholicism in the face of popular clamor for more thoroughgoing reform. On the other hand, the “revisionist” camp, which includes such well-known names as J. J. Scarisbrick, Christopher Haigh, and Eamon Duffy, prefers to cite evidence from wills, local parish records, liturgical books, and devotional texts to show that “the Church was a lively and relevant social institution, and the Reformation was not the product of a long-term decay of medieval religion.” In this view, Henry VIII and his advisors pushed through a personally advantageous but widely disliked and resisted Reformation.An examination of the religious content of the tales men and women told about Robin Hood in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries offers a fresh perspective on this long-running dispute.

scholarly journals Why the Reformation failed in Ireland

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (158) ◽  
pp. 151-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry A. Jefferies
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Catholic Church

AbstractThe Reformation failed comprehensively and absolutely in Ireland before the end of Elizabeth’s reign: contemporaries estimated the number of Irish Protestants at between forty and 120 individuals. The debate about that failure has been long running, yet inconclusive. After a short historiographical review, this paper considers a range of factors which may have been pertinent in shaping Irish responses to the Reformation policies of Henry VIII and his Protestant children. It shows that Elizabeth’s Reformation in Ireland was stymied by the absence of indigenous support, which meant that religious change was neither propagated by local clergymen nor enforced by the local elites in Irish parishes. It points to the strength and persistence of Catholic resistance to the Reformation in different forms from the very start of Elizabeth’s reign in Ireland, contradicting the unsubstantiated notion that passive ‘church papistry’ was general. Nonetheless, it argues that it was only from the 1580s, when the Catholic church in Ireland was reorganised as a disestablished ‘people’s church’, and infused with the confidence inspired by the Counter-Reformation, can it be stated that the Reformation had failed in Ireland definitively.

Black Books and Brownies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Milbank
Keyword(s):  
Historical Change ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Black Book ◽  
James Hogg ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Future

Scottish fiction about the Reformation is concerned with the mechanics of historical change, which are rendered through a series of enchanted books and people discussed in Chapter 8. In the novel, The Monastery, describing the Dissolution and Reformation, Scott gothicizes the Bible as a magic book and the White Lady as its guardian to dramatize the mysterious nature of religious change, the dependence of the future on a Gothic past, and the need for interpretation. In Old Mortality, Scott’s protagonist escapes the frozen dualities of Covenanter and Claverhouse, revealing historical change itself as problematic in Humean terms and requiring a leap of faith. James Hogg contests this presentation of the Covenanters by re-enchanting them as supposed brownies, as mediators of history and nature, and in his Three Perils of Man reprises Scott’s wizard Michael Scott pitted against Roger Bacon and his ‘black book’ the Bible to present the Reformation as an eternal reality.

The Theory of the Cheating of the Masses in Modern Times: The Institutional Roots of Social Immorality under Capitalism and Socialism

1988 ◽  
Vol 15 (8) ◽  
pp. 3-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anghel N. Rugina
Keyword(s):  
Distant Future ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Man And Nature ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Law ◽  
The Masses

The unity of our spirit makes it impossible to work toward a certain end without thinking that this end can and must be achieved, even if only in the distant future and through the work of later generations… Objective examination in the ups and downs in the history of law cannot and must not extinguish our faith in justice as a supreme human ideal. Even in the face of events which represent a setback or a deviation, that ideal remains unshaken as a criterion of value; without it, deviation would be meaningless. Even if contradicted by empirical facts, this ideal does not lose its ethical and deontological truth. These contradictions between “is” and “ought to be” can be neither permanent nor general. Giorgio del Vecchio, Man and Nature

New Religions for Old: A Study of Culture Change

1971 ◽  
Vol os-18 (6) ◽  
pp. 241-253
Author(s):  
Eugene A. Nida
Keyword(s):  
Culture Change ◽  
Limited Resources ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Market Place ◽  
Satisfactory Model ◽  
New Religions ◽  
The Face ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
Use Of Models

Culture change is of great interest to anthropologists, but none has developed a satisfactory model to explain it. The existence of various approaches to the study of religion points to the multidimensional nature of religion. In order to account for deletion, addition, substitution, and coalescence in religious change, the author proposes the use of models from economics and linguistics (the latter will be handled in the next issue). Economics models provide useful insights through the concepts of value and cost. For experience shows that in religion as in the market place, lowering the price of a “commodity” can also lower its value and therefore its desirability. It is shown also that values are based upon the total worldview of a society. They must also be related to the felt needs of people rather than to artificially ascribed needs. Finally, the author discusses the relevance of the concepts of “unlimited desire” in the face of “limited resources”.

“How drie a Cinder this world is”: Dissociation of Sensibility Redux

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-186
Author(s):  
R. V. Young
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
General Movement ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Classic Essay ◽  
The Impact

Although T.S. Eliot's phrase “dissociation of sensibility,” applied to the changes in poetry during the seventeenth century, made a stir when he introduced it in the review essay “The Metaphysical Poets” in 1921, it draws less attention now, and seems never to have been adequately explained. Since Eliot's claims are, in part, historical, it makes sense to consider the most historically significant changes occurring during the seventeenth century. It is during this period that the Reformation culminates and its effects become permanently established. Several recent studies of the Reformation by Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory, and Carlos M.N. Eire provide clues about how the religious and social cataclysm of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may have affected the poetic imagination. James Smith's classic essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” offers a way of analyzing the figurative language of seventeenth-century poetry in order to grasp the impact of the religious change. The investigations by Taylor, Gregory, and Eire into the dynamic of the reforming tendency, beginning in the late Middle Ages, as well as the Scotist and nominalist intellectual underpinnings of the Reformation, prove to be pertinent to Eliot's insight regarding seventeenth-century poetry. The growth of individualism, personal anxiety about religious choice, and materialism portend a general movement towards secularization and influence the way poets see the world. Dissociation of sensibility can thus be understood as a result of the effect of the religious and social dislocations of the Reformation in the realm of poetry.

Thomas Cromwell: A Study in Interrogation

1973 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 116-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Carlton
Keyword(s):  
Early Morning ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Tower Of London ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Chief Minister ◽  
The Reformation

On the afternoon of Thursday, the 10th of June 1540, a squad of Yeoman of the Guard burst into the Council Chamber in Westminster Hall, and arrested Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's chief minister. They escorted him out through a postern to a boat waiting at Westminster Steps, rowed him down the Thames, and through Traitors' Gate into the Tower of London. Within this gaunt prison Cromwell was held till the early morning of July 28th, when the Yeoman marched him to Tower Hill to be executed for treason, heresy, bribery, and misuse of power. He climbed the scaffold, and addressed the crowd. He had come here to die, he confessed, and not to justify himself. He was a grievous wretch, who sought God's pardon. He had offended the King, and asked the crowd to pray that Henry VIII would forgive him. Finally, Cromwell insisted that he would die a Catholic, and that he had never waivered in a single article of the Catholic faith. Then, after a short prayer commending his soul to the Almighty, Cromwell laid his head on the block, and, as John Foxe records, “patiently suffered the stroke of the axe” swung “by a ragged and butcherly miser [who] very ungodly performed the office.”So died one of England's greatest statesmen—the architect of the Reformation and the Tudor Revolution in Government. Just as his career has been the source of much historical debate, the events of the last seven weeks of his life, from his arrest to his execution, and his scaffold address especially, have been an irritant of contradiction and confusion.

scholarly journals DYNAMICS OF MEDIA AND SOCIETY INTERACTION IN COMMUNICATIVE SPACE

2013 ◽  
pp. 234-240
Author(s):  
D. I. Chistyakov
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Mass Communication ◽  
Structural Integrity ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Communication Model ◽  
Media Impact ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Late Modern

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the social issues caused by mass-media impact on individuals and society. The author bases on reflection of sociological theories and discourses of late modern and postmodern and thus shows the transformation of media and their audience on the society’s way to the postmodernity. Postmodern media are viewed as a specific social institution of postmodernity; the author also emphasizes the basic peculiarities of its institutionalization. Structural integrity between mass-media and society is ensured through mass communication in its one-sided direction of the only communicator to the masses, often turning into an influence on recipients. The article stems from the premise that a modernday person is included in qualitatively and quantitavely other communications than in a preceding era of late modernity. Mass-media’s influence on society is thus specific. Messages, images, symbols, signs created by media not only form our perspective, but also serve as keys to the perception of reality. A subject today is involved in endless interconnected streams of information, hence a subject doesn’t consume information in discreet blocks anymore. Rather, we can imagine a subject standing knee-deep in a vast stream grabbing whatever he or she may find interesting. Under the certain conditions the very reality is being substituted by the virtual reality. The author shows and analyses the communication model of the basic information producers and recipients.

The Crisis of Free Society

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-136
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Calvo
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Free Society ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
The Face ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
Wealth Of Nations

This chapter focuses on American conservative economic thought, concentrating on George Fitzhugh, George Frederick Holmes, Thomas Skidmore, and Langton Byllesby. Material and intellectual capitalism are described as revolutionary movements that American conservatives organized against. Antebellum conservatives rejected bourgeois capitalist values, further illustrating the absence of a Smithian-inspired laissez-faire consensus. Combining these thinkers into a single chapter offers a fresh perspective on what constituted economic conservative thought in the face of capitalist revolution. Southern conservatives like Fitzhugh and Holmes reserved special animus towards Smith’s Wealth of Nations, highlighting the moral and social perils of free labor, competition, and industrialization, while celebrating the benefits of paternal slavery. In Northern industrial quarters, socialists like Skidmore and Byllesby challenged the foundational principles of bourgeois capitalism, denouncing profits, private property, the maldistribution of wealth, and the social and psychological externalities of industrialization. Skidmore and Byllesby voiced a home-grown version of socialist ideology then emerging among America’s working class.

Early Tudor Poetry: Courtliness and Print

2019 ◽  
pp. 257-284
Author(s):  
Derek Attridge
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Impact

After noting the evidence for the public performance of poetry in Continental Europe, this chapter turns to the impact of print on English poetry: from the late fifteenth century, the printers Caxton and de Worde gave readers a new way to experience poems. At the court of Henry VIII, Skelton exploited both manuscript and print. The Devonshire manuscript, which circulated around Henry’s courtiers, is discussed, as is Tottel’s 1557 Songes and Sonettes, whose cachet lay partly in its making the private poetry of the elite available to a large public. Another popular collection was A Mirror for Magistrates, in which a gathering of poets impersonating famous tragic victims of the past was staged. Although there were signs of a suppler use of metre, the 1560s and 1570s were characterized by highly regular verse. The most skilled poet of this period, Gascoigne, was also responsible for a pathbreaking treatise on poetry.

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