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The parish register provides a unique opportunity to understand popular religion in England in the period of the Reformation. It can provide evidence of popular practice connected to the rites of passage of baptism, marriage and burial, but some parish registers contain valuable information about many aspects of parish life, including religious practice and the way in which changes in religion impacted the lives of people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Catholic Europe, 1592-1648: Centre and Peripheries

2015

Reviews and Short Notices General Must We Divide History into Periods? By Jacques Le Goff. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Columbia University Press. 2015. xiv + 160pp. £20.00. Jacques Le Goff's slight book contains a big idea. Tackling head on both generally established ideas of periodization and specifically the place of the Renaissance within this, he argues vigorously for a critical pause and a rethink. Le Goff, well known the other side of the Channel and central to the Annales School, built his career on recasting understandings of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. Working across themes of time, trade, work, intellectual life, urban culture and religious experience he did much to enrich our understanding of the Middle Ages. For years Le Goff argued for the dynamism, complexity and sophistication of the Middle Ages, with past work explicitly locating the construction of a medieval Europe within the context of early twenty-first century preoccupations with 'European-ness' (see his The Birth of Europe, 2006). Beginning with an exploration of ideas of chronology, eras and periods, in this book he usefully reminds us that conventions such as dating from the birth of Christ and historians' use of centuries to stand for certain ideas and trends both are part of a longer history of historians trying to organize the past, and continue to serve to make the past manageable and understandable. Indeed, he makes it plain that 'there is nothing neutral or innocent, about cutting up time into smaller parts' (p. 2). Through discussing, for example, early Christian fathers' attempts at constructing both a chronology and a meaningful periodization, he serves to historicize our own present-day conceptions of history as charting rapid change and of 'progress'. In contrast, from St Augustine until the fourteenth century, there prevailed a sense in which 'the world grows old', and that Christendom was marking time until the second coming of Christ. Acknowledging that people in the past understood time, history and their own place in history on very different terms from our own is a crucial tool for understanding and reconstructing past world-views. All this is simply a prelude to his larger concern, that of resituating and reinterpreting the relationship between the Renaissance and modernity. Rather than standing for the beginning of a new era the Renaissance was the last incarnation of a world we would think of as medieval, forming part of a 'long Middle Ages' extending up to the mid-eighteenth century. Since Michelet and Burckhardt, the idea of the Renaissance as marking the beginning of the early modern period has been a commonplace, and it still provides the organizing logic for vast swathes of undergraduate programmes.

History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century_Vol 2

Light of the World Publications , 2024

In the state in which things were, through the greater part of Europe, during the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, and for some time both before and after that period, the constitution of the church of Rome may be considered as the most formidable combination that ever was formed against the authority and security of civil government, as well as against the liberty, reason, and happiness of mankind, which can flourish only where civil government is able to protect them. In that constitution, the grossest delusions of superstition were supported in such a manner by the private interests of so great a number of people, as put them out of all danger from any assault of human reason; because, though human reason might, perhaps, have been able to unveil, even to the eyes of the common people, some of the delusions of superstition, it could never have dissolved the ties of private interest. Had this constitution been attacked by no other enemies but the feeble efforts of human reason, it must have endured for ever…

History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century_Vol 5

Light of the World Publications, 2024

Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, XXIX, 4 (2005) /3 (original) (raw)

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