This is a study of the religious culture of sixteenth-century England, centred around preaching, and is concerned with competing forms of evangelism between humanists of the Roman Catholic Church and emerging forms of Protestantism. More than any other authority, Erasmus refashioned the ideal of the preacher. Protestant reformers adopted 'preaching Christ' as their strategy to promote the doctrine of justification by faith. The apostolic traditions of the preaching chantries provided standards that evangelical reformers used to supplant the mendicant friars in England. The late medieval cult of the Holy Name of Jesus is explored: the pervasive iconography of its symbol 'IHS' became one of the attributes of moderate Protestant belief. The book also offers fresh perspectives on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century figures on every side of the doctrinal divide, including John Rotheram, John Colet, Hugh Latimer and Anne Boleyn.

Why were so many religious images and objects broken and damaged in the course of the Reformation? Margaret Aston's magisterial new book charts the conflicting imperatives of destruction and rebuilding throughout the English Reformation from the desecration of images, rails and screens to bells, organs and stained glass windows. She explores the motivations of those who smashed images of the crucifixion in stained glass windows and who pulled down crosses and defaced symbols of the Trinity. She shows that destruction was part of a methodology of religious revolution designed to change people as well as places and to forge in the long term new generations of new believers. Beyond blanked walls and whited windows were beliefs and minds impregnated by new modes of religious learning. Idol-breaking with its emphasis on the treacheries of images fundamentally transformed not only Anglican ways of worship but also of seeing, hearing and remembering.

Religion, politics and fear: how England was transformed by the Tudors. The English Reformation was a unique turning point in English history. Derek Wilson retells the story of how the Tudor monarchs transformed English religion and why it still matters today. Recent scholarly research has undermined the traditional view of the Reformation as an event that occurred solely amongst the elite. Wilson now shows that, although the transformation was political and had a huge impact on English identity, on England's relationships with its European neighbours and on the foundations of its empire, it was essentially a revolution from the ground up. By 1600, in just eighty years, England had become a radically different nation in which family, work and politics, as well as religion, were dramatically altered. Praise for Derek Wilson: 'Stimulating and authoritative.' John Guy. 'Masterly. [Wilson] has a deep understanding of . . . characters, reaching out across the centuries.' Sunday Times.

Italian sermons tell a story of the Reformation that credits preachers with using the pulpit, pen, and printing press to keep Italy Catholic when the region’s violent religious wars made the future uncertain, and with fashioning a post-Reformation Catholicism that would survive the competition and religious choice of their own time and ours.

A Clear Vision for What It Means to Be Anglican Today Conceived under the conviction that the future of the global Anglican Communion hinges on a clear, welldefined, and theologically rich vision, the Reformation Anglicanism Essential Library was created to serve as a go-to resource aimed at helping clergy and educated laity grasp the coherence of the Reformation Anglican tradition. With contributions from Michael Jensen, Ben Kwashi, Michael Nazir-Ali, Ashley Null, and John W. Yates III, the first volume in the Reformation Anglicanism Essential Library examines the rich heritage of the Anglican Communion, introducing its foundational doctrines rooted in the solas of the Reformation and drawing out the implications of this tradition for life and ministry in the twenty-first century.

This is a literary study of the seventeenth-century pamphlets and sermons delivered to the Long Parliament by Stephen Marshall, a leading English Puritan. Marshall was known as preacher to the Long Parliament and for his participation in the further reformation of the English Church in the 1640s. His understanding of the role of civil magistracy was deeply rooted in his concept of the English Reformation. He was convinced that the constitutional changes during the sixteenth-century English Reformation defined the role of civil magistrates. The King became the Supreme Head of the English Church, and the civil magistracy consisting of King-or-Queen-in Parliament had the responsibility to spearhead the reformation of the English Church. He also insisted that restoring godly preaching and teaching in every local church would eventually complete the English Reformation. Marshall also argued that the Henrician schism paved the way for England to become a Christian Commonwealth where the Church is lodged, whose characteristic was the unity among the people of God. This implied that in England, Presbyterians, Independents, and Erastians all belonged to one body of Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church. In a Christian Commonwealth, civil magistracy was a divine institution and had the highest power of ordering and governing the church, according to Marshall. It was the civil magistracys responsibility to protect and to take care of Gods people in all godliness. And in order to do so, magistrates should be rightly informed from the Word of God. Though Marshall showed his opposition to King Charles Is political innovation that precipitated an unfortunate war in 1642, his vision of a Christian Commonwealth where English magistracy consisting of the King-or-Queen-in-Parliament did not change. If the king could be persuaded to agree with the ecclesiastical reform Puritans proposed through Parliament, he would still be an instrument of reform.

It is a commonly held belief that medieval Catholics were focussed on the 'bells and whistles' of religious practices, the smoke, images, sights and sounds that dazzled pre-modern churchgoers. Protestantism, in contrast, has been cast as Catholicism's austere, intellective and less sensual rival sibling. With iis white-washed walls, lack of incense (and often music) Protestantism worship emphasised preaching and scripture, making the new religion a drab and disengaged sensual experience. In order to challenge such entrenched assumptions, this book examines Tudor views on the senses to create a new lens through which to explore the English Reformation. Divided into two sections, the book begins with an examination of pre-Reformation beliefs and practices, establishing intellectual views on the senses in fifteenth-century England, and situating them within their contemporary philosophical and cultural tensions. Having established the parameters for the role of sense before the Reformation, the second half of the book mirrors these concerns in the post-1520 world, looking at how, and to what degree, the relationship between religious practices and sensation changed as a result of the Reformation. By taking this long-term, binary approach, the study is able to tackle fundamental questions regarding the role of the senses in late-medieval and early modern English Christianity. By looking at what English men and women thought about sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, the stereotype that Protestantism was not sensual, and that Catholicism was overly sensualised is wholly undermined. Through this examination of how worship was transformed in its textual and liturgical forms, the book illustrates how English religion sought to reflect changing ideas surrounding the senses and their place in religious life. Worship had to be 'sensible', and following how reformers and their opponents built liturgy around experience of the sacred through the physical allows us to tease out the tensions and pressures which shaped religious reform.

The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon is the first book to survey this rich new field for both students and specialists. It is divided into sections devoted to sermon composition, delivery, and reception; sermons in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; English Sermons, 1500-1660; and English Sermons, 1660-1720.

God's Ploughman, provides a unique study of the life and ministry of one of early modern England's most significant preachers. Rather than offering a biography or analysis of sermons, the author creates a new genre, the 'preaching life.' The result is an integrative study that situates Latimer's life and ministry within the rapidly changing religious, cultural, and political environment of Tudor England. COMMENDATION "Mike Pasquarello, well-versed in homiletics and historical theology, is perfectly positioned to repossess one of the most significant sixteenth-century English preachers and prelates, Hugh Latimer. Letting Latimer speak can only deepen our understanding of the great age of religious reform and the resistances reformers encountered." - Peter Iver Kaufman, University of Richmond, USA