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This study of English Benedictine nuns is based upon a wide variety of original manuscripts, including chronicles, death notices, clerical instructions, texts of spiritual guidance, but also the nuns' own collections of notes. It highlights the tensions between the contemplative ideal and the nuns' personal experiences, illustrating the tensions between theory and practice in the ideal of being dead to the world. It shows how Benedictine convents were both cut-off and enclosed yet very much in touch with the religious and political developments at home, but also proposes a different approach to the history of nuns, with a study of emotions and the senses in the cloister, delving into the textual analysis of the nuns' personal and communal documents to explore aspect of a lived spirituality, when the body which so often hindered the spirit, at times enabled spiritual experience.
The men and women that followed the 6th-century customs of Benedict of Nursia (c.480-c.547) formed the most enduring, influential, numerous and widespread religious order of the Latin Middle Ages. This text follows the Benedictine Order over 11 centuries, from their early diaspora to the challenge of continental reformation.
The historiography of English Catholicism has grown enormously in the last generation, led by scholars such as Peter Lake, Michael Questier, Stefania Tutino, and others. In Suspicious Moderate, Anne Ashley Davenport makes a significant contribution to that literature by presenting a long overdue intellectual biography of the influential English Catholic theologian Francis à Sancta Clara (1598–1680). Born into a Protestant family in Coventry at the end of the sixteenth century, Sancta Clara joined the Franciscan order in 1617. He played key roles in reviving the English Franciscan province and in the efforts that were sponsored by Charles I to reunite the Church of England with Rome. In his voluminous Latin writings, he defended moderate Anglican doctrines, championed the separation of church and state, and called for state protection of freedom of conscience. Suspicious Moderate offers the first detailed analysis of Sancta Clara's works. In addition to his notorious Deus, natura, gratia (1634), Sancta Clara wrote a comprehensive defense of episcopacy (1640), a monumental treatise on ecumenical councils (1649), and a treatise on natural philosophy and miracles (1662). By carefully examining the context of Sancta Clara's ideas, Davenport argues that he aimed at educating English Roman Catholics into a depoliticized and capacious Catholicism suited to personal moral reasoning in a pluralistic world. In the course of her research, Davenport also discovered that "Philip Scot," the author of the earliest English discussions of Hobbes (a treatise published in 1650), was none other than Sancta Clara. Davenport demonstrates how Sancta Clara joined the effort to fight Hobbes's Erastianism by carefully reflecting on Hobbes's pioneering ideas and by attempting to find common ground with him, no matter how slight.
Demonstrates how, far from being peripheral, the stable communities of conventual religious in mainland Europe acted as important centres of religious and secular activity in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation. This collection aims to explore new perspectives on the British and Irish conventual, mendicant and monastic movements in mainland Europe and rediscover their roles and wider impact within early modern European Catholicism. Building on recent scholarship, the book addresses a historiographical imbalance, which has led to an over-emphasis being placed on the role of the Society of Jesus in the development of British and Irish Catholicism following the Protestant Reformation. The stable communities of religious in mainland Europe also acted as important centres of religious and secular activity. This volume explores the ways in which British and Irish conventuals and monastics, both men and women, engaged with the seismic religious and philosophical developments of the early modern period, such as the Catholic Reformation and the Enlightenment in mainland Europe, as well as important political developments at 'home', exploring the connections between centres and peripheries. Building on recent movements within the field to 'decentralise' the Catholic Reformation and recognize the international nature of Catholicism, the volume aims to change the perception that the activities of British and Irish religious were 'peripheral', bringing the islands' experience in line with work on their European confreres and the broader global network of the religious orders.
This volume includes two early seventeenth-century translations of Roman Catholic books by English recusant nuns - Catherine Greenbury (a Franciscan) and Mary Percy (a Benedictine). To practise their faith on the continent both these women fled Elizabethan England where Roman Catholic practice had been outlawed under pain of severe penalty (even death). Catherine Greenbury was born at York into a wealthy upper middle-class family but left England after the death of her husband, shortly after the birth of her daughter in or around 1616. After establishing herself in Brussels in a convent dedicated to St Elizabeth, she became its first elected 'Mother' in 1626. During her early years here she translated the work included in this volume - François van den Broecke's biography in Dutch of the saintly Queen Elizabeth of Portugal. A comparison of Greenbury's version with the Dutch text shows not only that the translation is very competent and faithful, but also that she takes the editorial freedom to improve the text. Lady Mary Percy, daughter of Thomas Percy the seventh Earl of Northumberland, left England for Flanders and in 1598 she founded a Benedictine convent in Brussels especially for Englishwomen. Here Mary Percy translated a 1598 French edition of Breve compendio, by the Italian Jesuit Achille Gagliardi with his student Isabella Berinzaga, a mystical handbook which guides the reader through a series of elaborately defined stages striving towards 'deiformitie' - a state in which the soul is 'united unto the will of God'.
A sparkling new collection on religion and imperialism, covering Ireland and Britain, Australia, Canada, the Cape Colony and New Zealand, Botswana and Madagascar. Bursting with accounts of lively characters and incidents from around the British world, this collection is essential reading for all students of religious and imperial history.
What buried secret lies beneath the stones of one of England's greatest former churches and shrines? The ruins of the Benedictine Abbey of Bury St Edmunds are a memorial to the largest Romanesque church ever built. This Suffolk market town is now a quiet place, out of the way, eclipsed by its more famous neighbour Cambridge. But present obscurity may conceal a find as significant as the emergence from beneath a Leicester car-park of the remains of Richard III. For Bury, as Francis Young now reveals, is the probable site of the body - placed in an `iron chest' but lost during the Dissolution of the Monasteries - of Edmund: martyred monarch of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of East Anglia and, well before St George, England's first patron saint. After the king was slain by marauding Vikings in the ninth century, the legend which grew up around his murder led to the foundation in Bury of one of the pre-eminent shrines of Christendom. In showing how Edmund became the pivotal figure around whom Saxons, Danes and Normans all rallied, the author points to the imminent rediscovery of the ruler who created England.
The Use of Hereford, a local variation of the Roman rite, was one of the diocesan liturgies of medieval England before their abolition and replacement by the Book of Common Prayer in 1549. Unlike the widespread Use of Sarum, the Use of Hereford was confined principally to its diocese, which helped to maintain its individuality until the Reformation. This study seeks to catalogue and evaluate all the known surviving sources of the Use of Hereford, with particular reference to the missals and gradual, which so far have received little attention. In addition to these a variety of other material has been examined, including a number of little-known or unknown important fragments of early Hereford service-books dismembered at the Reformation and now hidden away as binding or other scrap in libraries and record offices.
Newly revised and updated, the second edition of English Catholicism 1558–1642 explores the position of Catholics in early modern English society, their political significance, and the internal politics of the Catholic community. The Elizabethan religious settlement of 1559 ostensibly outlawed Catholicism in England, while subsequent events such as the papal excommunication of Elizabeth I, the Spanish Armada, and the Gunpowder Plot led to draconian penalties and persecution. The problem of Catholicism preoccupied every English government between Elizabeth I and Charles I, even if the numbers of Catholics remained small. Nevertheless, a Catholic community not only survived in early modern England but also exerted a surprising degree of influence. Amid intense persecution, expressions of Catholicism ranged from those who refused outright to attend the parish church (recusants) to ‘church papists’ who remained Catholics at heart. English Catholicism 1558–1642 shows that, against all odds, Catholics remained an influential and historically significant minority of religious dissenters in early modern England. Co-authored with Francis Young, this volume has been updated to include recent developments in the historiography of English Catholicism. It is a useful introduction for all undergraduate students interested in the English Reformation and early modern English history.