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Early Modern England: English Reformation
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Early modern England was a country experiencing the religious upheaval brought about by Reformation ideas and the inconsistency of toleration and adherence during the reign of the Tudor’s. The development of personal religion among the common people emphasised differing belief systems in which opposing sides were established, Protestant or Catholic, and Christianity or witchcraft and black magic.# The Protestant Reformation provided a reference to witchcraft taken from God’s book, and therefore subject to literal interpretation; Exodus 22:18 stated that ‘thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’# Both Luther and Calvin believed in the power of magic, and their views were widely disseminated among both the popular and elitist culture; to be a follower of the new gospel was to hold a belief in witchcraft. Afterall, Martin Luther had asked, “who hath bewitched you, that you should not believe the truth?”# Luther had ... suggested that all heretical biblical interpretation was witchcraft,# confirming the belief that all those who were non-conformist were agents of the Devil. In addition, the gospel identified the Devil as the source of a witch’s abilities and this probably intensified popular fear and awareness of the Devil’s powers. By condemning the power of magic, Reformation dogma perhaps inadvertently (or deliberately) induced a more frightening level of witchcraft belief among the pious laity. Christian theology had speculated upon the ‘diabolic pact’ in an attempt to make sense of witchcraft, however, such theory was not founded in contemporary popular tradition.# Nevertheless, the methods used to extract confessions of diabolism produced ‘evidence’ from which it has been suggested actually “created witchcraft, or at least created diabolical witchcraft.”# Popular belief in the diabolical activities of a witch could be deduced from the information read out at the time of the executions,# and therefore, it created a belief in the nature of diabolical witchcraft, a horrific and fearful entity that understandably may have produced widespread fear in a profoundly spiritual and religious society.
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THURSDAY, MARCH 8th, 2007, 4-5pm, 3222 ANGELL HALL . Debora Shuger (English, UCLA) presents a talk, "The Reformation of Penance: Penitential Theology, Purgatory, and the Law in Early Modern England." A prolific writer, she is the author of Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England (2006), Political Theologies in Shakespeare's England (2001), The Renaissance Bible (1994), Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (1990), and Sacred Rhetoric (1988). She is ... the co-editor of Religion and Culture in Renaissance England (1997). For more information about this event, please contact Jonathan Smith at jonws@umich.edu.
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While educational travel was extremely popular among early modern Englishmen, the practice attracted extensive public criticism. Rather than examining travel itself, this book explores the vivid public images of educational travellers, their development and popularity, and the fears and prejudices in English society that engendered them.
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English Reformation