Through an insightful examination of popular sermons by some of the most famous preachers of the day, Donna Spivey Ellington discusses the importance of Marian devotion to the religious understanding of European Christians in the late medieval and early modern periods. She charts a dramatic shift of emphasis in the public portrayal of the Virgin Mary from the 15th through 17th centuries. As Europe experienced the impact of printing and increased literacy, the Protestant Reformation, the growing development of individualism and a private sense of self, and changing attitudes to women, Marian devotion was also transformed. The Church's portrait of the Virgin gradually became focused less on her body and more on her soul.

Indulgences have been synonymous with corruption in the Catholic Church ever since Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517. Tingle explores the nature and evolution of indulgences in the Counter Reformation and how they were used as a powerful tool of personal and institutional reform.

In the late fifteenth century, votive panel paintings, or tavolette votive, began to accumulate around reliquary shrines and miracle-working images throughout Italy. Although often dismissed as popular art of little aesthetic consequence, more than 1,500 panels from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are extant, a testimony to their ubiquity and importance in religious practice. Humble in both their materiality and style, they represent donors in prayer and supplicants petitioning a saint at a dramatic moment of crisis. In this book, Fredrika H. Jacobs traces the origins and development of the use of votive panels in this period. She examines the form, context and functional value of votive panels, and considers how they created meaning for the person who dedicated them as well as how they accrued meaning in relationship to other images and objects within a sacred space activated by practices of cultic culture.

Concerning itself with the complex interplay between iconoclasm against images of the Virgin Mary in post-Reformation England and stage representations that evoke various 'Marian moments' from the medieval, Catholic past, this collection answers the call for further investigation of the complex relationship between the fraught religio-political culture of the early modern period and the theater that it spawned. Joining historians in rejecting the received belief that Catholicism could be turned on and off like a water spigot in response to sixteenth-century religious reform, the early modern British theater scholars in this collection turn their attention to the vestiges of Catholic tradition and culture that leak out in stage imagery, plot devices, and characterization in ways that are not always clearly engaged in the business of Protestant panegyric or polemic. Among the questions they address are: What is the cultural function of dramatic Marian moments? Are Marian moments nostalgic for, or critical of, the 'Old Faith'? How do Marian moments negotiate the cultural trauma of iconoclasm and/or the Reformation in early modern England? Did these stage pictures of Mary provide subversive touchstones for the Old Faith of particular import to crypto-Catholic or recusant members of the audience?

Although commonly regarded as a prejudice against Roman Catholics and their religion, anti-popery is both more complex and far more historically significant than this common conception would suggest. As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, anti-popery is a powerful lens through which to interpret the culture and politics of the British-American world. In early modern England, opposition to tyranny and corruption associated with the papacy could spark violent conflicts not only between Protestants and Catholics but among Protestants themselves. Yet anti-popery had a capacity for inclusion as well and contributed to the growth and stability of the first British Empire. Combining the religious and political concerns of the Protestant Empire into a powerful (if occasionally unpredictable) ideology, anti-popery affords an effective framework for analyzing and explaining Anglo-American politics, especially since it figured prominently in the American Revolution as well as others. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, written by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic working in history, literature, art history, and political science, the essays in Against Popery cover three centuries of English, Scottish, Irish, early American, and imperial history between the early sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. More comprehensive, inclusive, and far-reaching than earlier studies, this volume represents a major turning point, summing up earlier work and laying a broad foundation for future scholarship across disciplinary lines. Contributors: Craig Gallagher, New England College * Tim Harris, Brown University * Clare Haynes, Independent Researcher * Susan P. Liebell, St. Joseph’s University * Brendan McConville, Boston University * Anthony Milton, University of Sheffield * Andrew R. Murphy, Virginia Commonwealth University * Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker, Rutgers University, New Brunswick * Laura M. Stevens, University of Tulsa * Cynthia J. Van Zandt, University of New Hampshire * Peter W. Walker, University of Wyoming Early American Histories

The Bible had a profound impact on early modern culture, and bible-reading shaped the period's drama, poetry, and life-writings, as well as sermons and biblical commentaries. This volume provides an account of the how the Bible was read and applied in early modern England. It maps the connection between these readings and various forms of writing and argues that literary writings bear the hallmarks of the period's dominant exegetical practices, and do interpretative work. Tracing the impact of biblical reading across a range of genres and writers, the discussion demonstrates that literary reimaginings of, and allusions to, the Bible were common, varied, and ideologically evocative. The book explores how a series of popularly interpreted biblical narratives were recapitulated in the work of a diverse selection of writers, some of whom remain relatively unknown. In early modern England, the figures of Solomon, Job, and Christ's mother, Mary, and the books of Song of Songs and Revelation, are enmeshed in different ways with contemporary concerns, and their usage illustrates how the Bible's narratives could be turned to a fascinating array of debates. In showing the multifarious contexts in which biblical narratives were deployed, this book argues that Protestant interpretative practices contribute to, and problematize, literary constructions of a range of theological, political, and social debates.

The Lady of the Angels and Her City recounts Wendy Wright's visitations to her hometown's many Marian churches and shrines. But it is much more than a personal pilgrimage narrative. It offers important glimpses into the history of Los Angeles Catholicism, American Catholic culture, and Mary's place in Catholic theology and tradition. It peeks into the heroic labors of the religious orders that went on mission there and the waves of immigrants who have arrived on American shores. With Wright, readers will consider: Readers who know the geography of Los Angeles Catholicism will surely enjoy Wright's reflection on familiar places. But there is much here that will fascinate anyone interested in either the history of Christianity in America or devotion to Mary by those who love her today.

There have been many histories of Christian art and architecture but none written be a theologian such as Kevin Seasoltz. Following a chapter on culture as the context for theology, liturgy, and art, Seasoltz surveys developments from the early church up through the conventional artistic styles and periods. Comprehensive, illuminating, ecumenical.

Sacred Journeys in the Counter-Reformation examines long-distance pilgrimages to ancient, international shrines in northwestern Europe in the two centuries after Luther. In this region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saints’ cults and pilgrimage were frequently contested, more so than in the Mediterranean world. France, the Low Countries and the British Isles were places of disputation and hostility between Protestant and Catholic; sacred landscapes and journeys came under attack and in some regions, were outlawed by the state. Taking as case studies hugely popular medieval shrines such as Compostela, the Mont Saint-Michel and Lough Derg, the impact of Protestant criticism and Catholic revival on shrines, pilgrims’ motives and experiences is examined through life writings, devotional works and institutional records. The central focus is that of agency in religious change: what drove spiritual reform and what were its consequences for the ‘ordinary’ Catholic? This is explored through concepts of the religious self, holy materiality, and sacred space.

Few areas of early modern English history have roused such passions and interpretations as the rule of Mary Tudor and her efforts to return the country to Catholicism following the reigns of her father and brother. In this book, Dr Wizeman explores Catholic theology and spirituality according to the religious literature printed during the reign of Mary Tudor (1553-1558). As part of the strategy to renew Catholic religion in England after the reformations under Henry VIII and Edward VI, Marian theologians, authors and editors produced numerous works of catechesis, religious polemic, devotion and sermons. These writings demonstrate that the Catholicism of Marian England was not a mere insular reaction to the preceding decades of religious change, nor a via media polity which eschewed important elements of traditional religion while embracing tenets of the Reformation. Rather the theology and spirituality of Mary Tudor's church, as well as many of its strategies for religious renewal, was intimately connected to - and in fact anticipated or paralleled - the theology, spirituality and strategies for reform embraced by Counter-Reformation Catholicism, especially after the promulgation of the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545-1563). After considering the recent historiography of Mary Tudor's reign, the book contextualises these writings through a brief history of the Marian church and a discussion of the authors and dedicatees. It then presents an analysis of the Marian writers' and theologians' views on revelation, christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, sacramental theology, piety and eschatology. Finally, the study compares the Catholic belief asserted in these works to that found in texts by English theologians printed before 1553, especially John Fisher, and by contemporary theologians in Europe, particularly Bartolomé Carranza, as well as the Tridentine catechism, and the decrees and official texts of the English Reformation.