Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Fasting In England In The 1560s: "A Thinge Of Nought"?, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

We continue to learn about the unsettled condition of the Elizabethan religious settlement in the early 1560s. “Perceived deficiencies” associated with a woman's sovereignty and supreme governance of the realm's reformed church dictated that counsel be “insistently proposed to and, at points, imposed upon” Elizabeth I “by her godly male subjects.” We now appreciate, however, that the queen was not drawn or driven to the left by puritans, as John Neale influentially suspected in the 1950s. And we may conclude from David Crankshaw's recent study of the Canterbury provincial convocation of 1563 that the bishops her government appointed were not …

Religion On The Run, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

"At one time English religion had emphasized the static or the recurrent aspects of worship. Then for a century or more, England was conscious of acting a sacred history as opposed to reenacting it". Sommerville's observation should shock no one familiar with his "century or more," roughly 1530 to 1660, although the declared opposition between "acting" and "reenacting" is likely to strike those who still read Bale, Foxe, Dering, or Dell as rather forced. Yet, so many of the contrasts in Secularization are terribly suggestive, announcing that religion "was changing from devotion to deliberation".

What may surprise some historians, however, …