Mònica Colominas Aparicio, The Religious Polemics of the Muslims of Late Medieval Christian Iberia: Identity and Religious Authority in Mudejar Islam. (The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World 64.) Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018. Pp. xiv, 397; 10 color figures. $152. ISBN: 978-9-0043-4635-2.

Speculum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 534-536
Author(s):  
Ana Echevarría
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Religious Polemics

scholarly journals CONTESTED LEGITIMACY AND THE AMBIGUOUS RISE OF VESTRIES IN EARLY MODERN LONDON

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. F. MERRITT
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
State Formation ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Royal Commission ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Legal Challenges ◽  
Early Modern London

ABSTRACTStudies of the rise of London's vestries in the period to 1640 have tended to discuss them in terms of the inexorable rise of oligarchy and state formation. This article re-examines the emergence of the vestries in several ways, moving beyond this traditional focus on oligarchy, and noting how London's vestries raised much broader issues concerning law, custom, and lay religious authority. The article reveals a notable contrast between the widespread influence and activities of London vestries and the questionable legal framework in which they operated. The political and ecclesiastical authorities – and in particular Archbishop Laud – are also shown to have had very mixed attitudes towards the legitimacy and desirability of powerful vestries. The apparently smooth and relentless spread of select vestries in the pre-war period is also shown to be illusory. The granting of vestry ‘faculties’ by the authorities ceased abruptly at the end of the 1620s, amid a series of serious legal challenges, on both local and ideological grounds, to the existence of vestries. Their rise had thus been seriously contested and stymied well before the upheavals of the 1640s, although opposition to them came from multiple sources – Laudians, Henry Spelman and the royal Commission on Fees, and local parishioners – whose objectives could vary.

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