AKC 3 General Spring Term 2008 Power & Protest 28/01/08

AKC 3 General – Spring Term 2008 – Power & Protest 28/01/08

AKC 3 – 28 JANUARY 2008

THE CREATION OF A PROTESTANT IDENTITY

DR DAVID CRANKSHAW, KING’S COLLEGE LONDON

Learning Outcomes

• An understanding of some key elements of England’s Protestant identity

• An understanding of how those elements were created, or at least of how efforts were made to create them

• An understanding of the complications, compromises and ambiguities attending those efforts

• An understanding of aspects of Protestant fundamentalism in the later sixteenth century

Some Key Names (check online edition of Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for details)

Robert Browne / John Dudley, duke of Northumberland / John Hooper / Francis Russell, earl of Bedford
Martin Bucer / Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester / Hugh Latimer / Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset
Thomas Cartwright / John Field / Peter Martyr Vermigli / Francis Walsingham
Thomas Cranmer / Edmund Grindal / Matthew Parker / John Whitgift
Robert Crowley / Henry Hastings, earl of Huntingdon / Nicholas Ridley / Thomas Wilcox

Structure of Lecture

1. Henry VIII: Reform and Reaction

2. The Myth of the English Reformation

3. What Was England’s Protestant Identity?

a) Anti-Catholic
b) Reformed theology: Zwinglian to Calvinist
c) A religion of the Word: Bible
d) A religion of the Word: Preaching / e) Iconoclastic/iconophobic
f) An edifying clergy: professionalized?
g) Nationalist
h) Internationalist

4. How Was It Created?

i. Martyrdom and Martyrology

a) Thomas Brice’s Compendious Register (1559) / b) John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563 and later)

ii. Parliamentary Legislation (selected examples)

a) Acts of Supremacy (1534, 1559)
b) Acts of Uniformity (1549, 1552, 1559)
c) Treasons Act (1571)
d) Act prohibiting the bringing in and execution of papal bulls and other instruments from Rome (1571) / e) Act against fugitives overseas (1571)
f) Act to retain the Queen’s subjects in their true obedience (1581)
g) Act against Jesuits, seminary priests and other such-like disobedient persons (1585)

iii. Royal Injunctions

a) Edwardian Injunctions, 1547 / b) Elizabethan Injunctions, 1559

iv. Liturgies (church services)

a) Purposes
b) First Edwardian Book of Common Prayer (1549) / c) Second Edwardian Book of Common Prayer (1552)
d) Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer (1559)

v. Doctrinal Statements

a) The Forty-Two Articles (1553) / b) The Thirty-Nine Articles (1563, 1571)

vi. Bibles (selected examples)

a) William Tyndale’s New Testament (1526)
b) The Great Bible (1539) / c) The Geneva Bible (1560)
d) The Bishops’ Bible (1568)

vii. Preaching: Indoctrination and Training

a) Book of Homilies (1547, 1559)
b) Urban lectureships / c) ‘Prophesyings’ and combination lectures
d) Schemes of Bible study

viii. Threats

a) Elizabeth’s imprisonment under Mary I
b) The Problem of the succession: Mary, Queen of Scots
c) The Northern Rebellion (1569) / d) The papal bull of deposition (1570)
e) Plots against the queen: e.g. Babington Plot (1586)
f) The Spanish Armada (1588)

5. Complications, Compromises and Ambiguities

a) Geographical structure: barely reformed
b) Economic problems: appropriation and impropriation
c) Polity: episcopacy versus presbyterianism
d) An unreformed canon law (failure of the Edwardian Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum) / e) Liturgical ambiguity
f) Elizabeth I and the Chapel Royal
g) The cathedrals
h) Clergy and patronage
i) Popular religious conservatism

6. Protestant Fundamentalism: The Godly and the Multitude

a) Adiaphora (‘things indifferent’)
b) The Vestiarian Controversy over the surplice
c) Separatism and congregationalism
d) The Admonition to the Parliament (1572) / e) Pressure group politics: petitions and surveys of the ministry
f) The ‘reformation of manners’
g) Godly living

7. Conclusion: One Established Church, Multiple Identities