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HOBBES AND THE PROTECTORATE Thus far Leviathan had attracted suprisingly little public comment. The Royalists had attacked Hobbes after his defection, and the Presbyterians and Episcopalians had launched minor attacks on his theology and ecclesiology from the autumn of 1652 onwards, but this hardly amounted to a major campaign. The relative silence was such that in 1654 John Davies commented that ‘On this side of the sea, besides the dirt and slander cast on him in Sermons & private meetings, none hath put any thing in Print against him, but Mr Rosse.’ However all of this would soon change, and the reasons were political. One of the most decisive political changes to affect the reception of Leviathan during the 1650s was the establishment of the Protectorate after the Nominated Assembly dissolved itself in December 1653. John Lambert's Instrument of Government envisaged the restitution of a triadic constitutional structure, with a Lord Protector, Council of State and Parliament. Cromwell's installation as Head of State was soon followed in the spring by implementation of religious reforms which created a tolerant national church along the lines proposed by John Owen's Humble proposals. If Hobbes's political and ecclesiastical vision was a rather uncomfortable fit with the republican and tolerationist agendas of the Commonwealth, Leviathan's absolutism and Erastianism were now highly relevant to the new political situation where Cromwell's authority was now publicly recognised and identified with a new settlement in the established church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the reformation, the catholic clergy in poland sought to combat the spread of heretical ideas and, simultaneously, to promote Catholic doctrines, the one abetting the other. Catholic piety and dogma were promoted through devotional works and artwork in newly built or renovated baroque churches, serving as indirect religious polemic against Protestants. In more overt and more direct polemic, the Church provided Catholics with explicit counterarguments to Protestant ideas and and sought to discourage contacts between Catholics and heretics and others who did not submit to the authority of the Church. PROMOTING MARY AND THE SAINTS The vast majority of books written and published by the Catholic clergy in post-Reformation Poland were devotional. Still, even in these works, elements of polemic appeared in the promotion of baroque piety in the form of the cults of Mary, Jesus, and the saints, all figures the Protestants were challenging. The Church offered constructive responses to Protestant claims that Mary was Jesus' mother but not an object of veneration, that the cult of saints was a form of idolatry, and, as the anti-Trinitarians insisted, that Jesus was not divine. Protestants, for their part, acknowledged no intermediaries in the people's relationship with God. Wojciech Węgierski, a seventeenth-century Polish Protestant leader, wrote, “The Holy Scripture says that we should pray concerning our spiritual and bodily needs only to the true God, Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, who knows our hearts and human thoughts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In western europe during the post-reformation period, catholic and Protestant scholars engaged in a scholarly, often ethnographic study of the Jewish religion, and produced competent, if still polemical, works grounded in Jewish sources. But in Poland in the eighteenth century, despite its brief Renaissance of the early sixteenth century, some Catholic clergy were still writing of Jewish thirst for Christian blood in a manner reminiscent of medieval works. In religious rhetoric, as in the ideas of Church hierocracy, Poland froze in time while the outside world moved on. The Polish Catholic Church's reaction to the new religious ideas of the Reformation, including its control of the dissemination of knowledge through restrictions on printing and education, contributed to the cultural insularity of Poland and the Polish Catholic Church, and prevented its clergy, and others, from benefiting from, and participating in, western European Christian scholarship. Polish clergy's writings continued to raise ritual murder accusations and blood libels against Jews as late as the eighteenth century. Whereas the early ritual murder accusations against Jews in twelfth-and thirteenth-century Western Europe were associated with Passover, when Jews were accused of reenacting the crucifixion of Jesus on a small boy, the blood motif was later added to the charges, according to which Jews were said to seek Christian blood in order to make matzah, the unleavened bread eaten during the Passover holiday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catholic church legislation against jews often did not stand alone but coincided with the rise of heretical movements within the Church itself. This was true of the 1215 regulations of the IV Lateran Council promulgated in the midst of the Church's battle against various heresies in Europe, and of the 1555 papal bull Cum Nimis Absurdum, which established the Roman ghetto during the crisis of the Reformation. In Poland the Church reacted in similar ways. According to surviving sources, regulations of Jewish-Christian interaction – first promulgated at the Council of Breslau in 1267 and ordering a geographic segregation between Jews and Christians – did not reappear in Poland until the first half of the fifteenth century when, in the wake of the heresy of Jan Hus in Bohemia, Huss's followers moved north into the Polish territories, thereby posing a challenge to the Church in Poland. Reacting to the Hussite heresy, the 1420 provincial synod held at Kalisz and Wieluń issued a number of decrees against heresy and recommended a number of “remedies” to combat it, requiring, among other things, that secular authorities cooperate with the Church in combating its spread. The “heresy” apparently affected mostly the literate elites. One paragraph of the 1420 synodal laws ordered confiscation of the books of those suspected of heresy when they were captured, but in pre-print culture, only a few could afford to own books. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Piety and government in the age of the young Wesley Wesley was born into a family of the narrowest of Little England sympathies. Both his parents had deserted a dissenting heritage for the Church of England, and the political instinct of both was to prefer loyalty to an English Catholic monarch in the person of James II to obedience to a foreign Protestant saviour in the shape of William III. Samuel Wesley made his peace with the powers in possession earlier than his wife Susanna. But according to John (much later) his father wrote one of the speeches for the defence in the impeachment of Henry Sacheverell, that wild Tory agitator on behalf of all those who damned foreign powers, and with them the Whig generals and their foreign victories on behalf of foreign powers. There is no doubt that this upbringing marked Wesley lifelong. Born into a Jacobite milieu, the younger brother of a (non-Methodist) collaborator of Bishop Atterbury, Wesley did not adopt the world as his parish; indeed his one substantial trip abroad was to a nest of Jacobites in Georgia, headed by General Oglethorpe, who had been christened James Edward for the Old (Jacobite) Pretender. And Oglethorpe as much as Wesley illustrated how difficult it was in a generation born to the titanic struggle against Louis XIV actually to be Little Englanders; for his service to Georgia was conditioned by the fact that he had served under Prince Eugene, and knew all about Habsburg policies of frontier settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) is a prime example of many things, not least of the still persisting sense of evangelical fellowship; for no one could have disliked his Calvinism more than the arch-Arminian John Wesley, yet it was Wesley who went to considerable trouble to make versions of Edwards's works available to his own flock, and this at a time when his own relations with the great representative of English evangelical Calvinism, George Whitefield, were fractious. To the same sense of fellowship testified the publishing history of his most famous tract, the Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God … in Northampton … First published in England in 1737, with a commendatory preface by the Congregationalist ministers John Guyse and Isaac Watts arguing that Edwardsian revival was the old Baxterian middle way, it was almost never out of print for the next century. If ever revival seemed to flag, someone somewhere would reprint the Faithful Narrative as a classic analysis, description, and exhortation to return not to seventeenth-century Puritanism but to the fires of revival. Edwards and ministerial authority In this there was an element of paradox, for Edwards fought desperately to preserve a sort of Reformed Orthodoxy, at a time when it was losing its grip in his own country. And he retained an encyclopedic or systematic mind familiar in the old Reformed tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hostility to Zinzendorf If the eccentric Lusatian Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–60) was not an evangelical it would be hard to know how to classify him; but he tested the boundaries of evangelical accommodation to the limit, and the torrent of abuse that he encountered in the press, which amounted to a major literary industry, was by no means all from predestined opponents on the side of Lutheran Orthodoxy. And all this notwithstanding that the Renewed Unity of the Brethren which he launched from his estate at Herrnhut acquired an honourable place in the history of Protestant missions, and generated some of the most dramatic of all religious revivals in the former Swedish territories east of the Baltic. For this there were two main reasons. The first was that the great puzzle for the count's biographers was his extraordinary capacity to combine a great ability to make a good first impression with an even greater inability to keep the loyalty of men of independent mind. Even two of the men who did come through this stringent test, Spangenberg, who at the end of Zinzendorf's life took control of the community and rescued something from the spiritual and financial morass into which Zinzendorf got it, and the Baron von Schrautenbach, one of his eighteenth-century biographers and admirers, bore witness to the toll it took. Spangenberg admitted candidly that ‘I cannot deny that to me his addresses often appeared paradoxical and his methods of business extraordinary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If Spener was frequently caught between prudence and the desire to tap sources of religious vitality on the one hand, and what could in practice be kept within the bounds of the Protestant establishments on the other, the problem was even more acute for his protégé and disciple, August Hermann Francke (1663–1727). For at an early stage an ecclesiastical career was closed to Francke, partly because he was more open to radical and spiritualistic influences; and although, unlike the radical separatists, Francke wanted the ‘true’ church of the faithful to retain its connexion with the establishment, he was more concerned with the pursuit of Christian perfection than with church reform. Much of his life's work was devoted to the support of Protestants in Moscow and Siberia, Silesia and Bohemia, who had no established church system to cling to. Moreover, the great institutions at Halle which came to provide a badge of evangelical orthodoxy as far away as Newcastle-upon-Tyne, South Wales and Georgia were not institutions of church or state, but an application, at the time unique, of the principle of contract to the work of the kingdom of God. So long as Francke was able to retain the sympathy of the Hohenzollern monarchy, as his son and successor, Gotthilf August Francke, was not, he had in a sense a little more elbow-room than was ever available to Spener. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arndt offered his own version of what the English Puritan Lewis Bayley called the ‘practice of piety’ as a solution to the ills of the church; but many who subsequently called on his name were sure that there was no solution to the ills of the Babel that masqueraded as an ecclesiastical establishment. There were Behmenists of various degrees of radicalism, anti-war prophets, and spiritualists like Christian Hoburg who sought in mysticism an alternative to the ‘school-way’ of confessional Word- and Wind-theology with its Aristotelian methods and its passion for polemic. Mingled with these rather vociferous advocates of peace were assorted mystics, Paracelsists, alchemists, cabbalists, and enthusiastic prophets of judgement drawing in various proportions from the wells described in the last chapter. Their history was recorded by Gottfried Arnold in his Kirchen und Ketzerhistorie but has never as a whole been scientifically written. They were nevertheless continually in the background to the work of Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), himself the offspring of the impeccably Orthodox university of Strasbourg. He it was who distilled the piety of Arndt and the theology of Orthodoxy into a policy of church reform. And he was never able to lose touch with such sources of spiritual vitality as the radical underworld possessed or to escape the reproaches of the unyielding Orthodox that what he proposed must lead to schism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evangelicals, in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, seem generally to have found it easier to recognise each other than others have found it to categorise them. Indeed Ernst Benz found this to be true even of evangelical visions; these were strong in the discovery that God has his own in every confession, and that the true church was built from true, i.e., regenerate, Christians who were to be found in every denomination. Divided by language and theological tradition (Lutheran, Reformed or Anglican), separated by the Atlantic Ocean or (in the case of the Swedish prisoners-of-war) by the huge land mass of Siberia, confronting different problems (survival under the hammer of the Counter-Reformation, reviving a decayed Protestant establishment, or creating religious society from the ground up in America), evangelical friendship in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was as much an evidence of the persisting cohesion of a much riven Protestant world as it was of a desire to change it. The unlikely admiration in New England of Cotton Mather and his son for August Hermann Francke and his son spoke of an understanding on the fringes of the Protestant world for the problems of the centre, of some regrouping of sentiment, of a willingness to try new contractual methods of action. And although evangelicals liked to think of themselves as conservative in doctrine, they were looking to change, and put together a platform of forces for change extending beyond the narrowly theological region, so that their origins form a significant chapter in the history of European thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The great spate of historical inquiry into evangelicalism in the last generation has been curiously uninformative in three respects. It has not dated the beginnings of the evangelical movement (in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word) early enough; what are called early evangelicals here are those who originated in the first century of the movement from c.1670. The new work has also said little about the evangelical identity that was so apparent to the early evangelicals. And it has been overwhelmingly devoted to the Anglo-American aspects of the movement to the neglect of its global reference. For this reason there has never been an account of the internal discussions in the movement about the nature of evangelical identity. Jonathan Edwards thought that the millennial bliss was being anticipated in this present age by labour-saving ingenuity which provided more time for ‘contemplation and spiritual employments’; indeed ‘the invention of the mariner's compass is a thing discovered by God to that end’. The objects of this book are to supply some Edwardsian compass-bearings to the wider evangelical enterprise, and to present, not a rounded discussion of its leading exponents, but an account of where they stood in relation to the pool of common ideas to which they contributed and from which they drew, or (to paraphrase Jonathan Edwards) to mitigate the tedium of the voyage to the other hemisphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE ENGLISH REFORMATION AND THE PROTESTANT DEVIL Baudelaire's famous comment – that the Devil's best trick was to convince mankind that he did not exist – was written in the hindsight of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment that were believed to have rendered Satan a rather unworthy hangover from a more primitive age. Yet for all its contemporary novelty and wit, it gave expression to a far older concern over Satan's effective agency. Take away the connotations of his non-existence (made possible by the late seventeenth-century fashion for scepticism) and the same concern can be found underlining much of the religious and moral polemic produced during the English Reformation and its aftermath. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestants in particular were afraid, not that the Devil might convince man that he did not exist, but that he would persuade them that he was absent from their everyday lives. In England the concept of the Devil underwent a very subtle process of cultural change in the hands of the Protestant reforming clergy. They were convinced that Satan offered an intimate threat to every Christian, especially when his agency was hidden from perception by the physical senses. This conviction was driven equally by a sense of personal danger in the face of demonic power, and by a belief that diabolism lay concealed behind the superficial piety of the Catholic church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analytical preliminaries This book, with its focus on the First Symphony (1908) and Falstaff (1913), addresses a number of problematic issues in the analysis of early modernist music. Chief among them is the difficulty of finding a way into an analysis at all. Which methodology is best to use as a basis for analyzing music that is neither classically common-practice tonal nor yet post-tonal, and which therefore inhabits a troublesome gap between idiolects that many people believe we have come to grips with? Post-tonal theories will inevitably miss the predominantly tonal surface and larger-scale architecture of much of this music, but an orthodox Schenkerian approach is always at risk of skirting round surface ambiguities for the sake of exegetical expediency, and its contrapuntal dependence on a form-generating opposition of tonic and dominant may be anachronistic in a style which has long since discovered other possibilities for structural tension. Section 2 will offer a methodological framework for the analysis of early modernist music in general and Elgar's music in particular. I want to suggest that a modified Schenkerian approach is the best way to pursue our investigation, because the kinds of difficulties we (viz. Anglophone musicologists) face when attempting an analysis of early modernist music invite us to think in terms of voice-leading and contrapuntal prolongation. When confronted, for instance, with a passage without any obvious cadence, we still search for contrapuntal configurations suggesting recognizably functional chords that we hear prolonged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thus far, the debates that this study has surveyed have been confined to the polemical world of English Protestantism. The present chapter expands this purview to an examination of tensions within ‘British’ Protestant thought, for common to the debates surveyed thus far has been the sporadic contribution of Scottish writers, against whom some of the principal conformist works were directed. It is to be remembered that James was King of Scotland before he became King of England, and so when he arrived in London in 1603 he also assumed jurisdiction over the Church of England, while retaining jurisdiction over the Kirk. The problem (as the foregoing sentence suggests) was an extremely complex one, and has yet to receive the attention it deserves. One perspective that may prove useful for our understanding of the complexity of ‘British’ ecclesiology is that of doctrinal dispute. For as we have seen at some length, the Church of England proclaimed itself to be the one ‘true’ church, both ancient and reformed. However, an examination of polemical debates reveals that the Kirk also claimed to exemplify the ‘best reformed’ church and, crucially, a national Church. The contemporary literature in which these questions were explored illustrates tensions within two of the three kingdoms from the point of view of ecclesiology: either the Kirk would remain sovereign over itself, or it would be comprehended by the jurisdiction of Canterbury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theme of governance was explored in controversies in which writers considered the issue of episcopacy based on minute examinations of the governance of the ancient church. In addition, the civil power of the bishops, that is, the power to deprive clergy of livings, continued to raise questions of a legal and constitutional nature, and represented a continuation of the conflict over conformity and the High Commission examined in the previous chapter. There were therefore two planes on which the debate took place. On one hand, episcopacy was a practical issue: it involved claims to rule the Church and to exercise discipline in order to preserve doctrinal uniformity. As an institution, the Church was ordered as an hierarchy, from Convocation down to visitations and injunctions on the level of the diocese; bishops were the channels through which the Crown's sovereignty over the Church was exercised. On the other hand, episcopacy also invited speculation on matters of ecclesiology, and specifically on how well the Church of England emulated the mode of governance that obtained in the ancient church. Did the Apostles and their successors rule over the church as a whole, or were they merely charged with guidance and instruction? The debates on governance, therefore, exposed to scrutiny the tension inherent in a church defined by its advocates as a blend of civil and spiritual elements, and attacked by its critics as an unholy alliance of doctrinal precept and political expediency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chief intellectual tension that underlay Jacobean ecclesiological debates is illustrated by disputes about the proper relationship between civil and ecclesiastical authority. These disputes stemmed from the decision – taken first under Henry VIII and subsequently refined under Elizabeth I – to define the Church of England as the Church authorised by Christ to continue His earthly ministry; this claim served as the basis for the proposition that since the Church of England was so authorised, it retained within itself power and discretion over matters of doctrine and discipline. This authority did not come solely from the Word, but also from statutes that established the Church. After this initial ‘founding’, conformists were obliged to make an articulate case for why a Church established in law could also agree with scripture and the practice of the Apostolic church. As later chapters will show, the retention of certain ceremonies and episcopal governance drew, from Protestant critics, arguments fleshed out with doctrinal or historical criticism, and designed to undermine the authority of the Church and its human governors. At the root of the debate was a difficult question: how could a church so evidently grounded in the realm of human creation, of culture and custom, also take part in the world of the divine creation, that is, the community of believers joined to Christ and one another in a spiritual association that was by its very nature free from the direction of human agents? This question absorbed contemporary defenders of the established Church and others interested in the development of a theory of ecclesiastical polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1580 Europe's confessional boundaries were essentially fixed. The British kingdoms of England and Scotland were secure under the control of Protestant monarchs; in France a Calvinist minority was entrenched, but it was clear the nation would never be converted. In the Netherlands the Protestant north would never be recovered by Spain; the southern provinces would gradually assume a distinct Catholic identity. In Germany the oldest Lutheran states were now entering their third generation since the adoption of a Protestant church order. The Scandinavian kingdoms had also settled to life with a Lutheran state church. Only in eastern Europe would the tides shift in a significant manner, as the Habsburg victories of the 1620s allowed the suppression of the previously dominant Protestant estates of Hungary and Bohemia. That was for the future. For the moment the reality of a confessionally divided Europe was a generally accepted fact of European life and politics. It would be wrong, however, to believe that this relative stability, so clear in retrospect, had calmed the passions raised by the first Reformation conflicts. On the contrary, relations between the faiths remained fractious and unstable, coloured above all by fear. On the Protestant side, this was understandable enough. In 1580 memories of the terrible massacres of Paris (1572) and Antwerp (1576) were still fresh, a reminder of Catholic perfidy, and the imminent danger that hard-won freedoms could still be dashed away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We began this book by emphasizing that the decision to adhere to the new evangelical teaching was often painful, and pregnant with consequences. It meant breaking or reordering a whole web of associations and loyalties, to family, friends, workmates and even the local state power. It could mean separating oneself from comfortable regimes and familiar practices; it called into question the validity of customs practised with relish for a whole lifetime, even for generations. Sometimes the Reformation demanded an impossible choice between conflicting loyalties. Kristen Neuschel has offered an evocative picture of the dilemma posed to the French nobility who owed fealty to the leader of the Huguenot party, Louis de Condé, at the beginning of the Religious Wars. Many were devoutly committed to their Catholic faith; but all other accustomed social tradition urged the precedence of a duty of loyalty to their sworn lord. Inevitably different families, or different members of the same family, resolved these difficulties in contrasting ways. When Condé emerged as leader of the insurgent Huguenot party, some sent their excuses or boldly proclaimed a higher duty to crown and religion. Others dutifully gathered behind Condé's standard at Orleans. Similar unpalatable choices faced thousands of men and women wherever the evangelical message was heard and became embedded in the local culture; many, even among those who headed the call to adhere to the new confessions, did so with grave misgivings and very mixed emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of the foregoing discussion we can now be reasonably satisfied that the production of books in the sixteenth century was deeply shaped by the organization of the market – both the structure of the printing industry, in a series of discrete and quite distinct national markets, and a sophisticated transnational system of distribution and marketing. These industry issues conditioned the book world at all levels: the market in scholarly books, as much as the production and sale of pamphlets. Our purpose now must be to try and locate the book in the culture of persuasion. There can be little doubt that books had a vast and important role to play in shaping the new religious cultures of the sixteenth century. Books were bought in vast quantities, and religious books dominated the market at all levels: at both ends of the spectrum and almost all points in between. From the learned Latin biblical commentaries of Calvin, Brenz and Oecolampadius, to the ‘godly ballad’, with a whole host of Bibles, catechisms, works of devotion and Flugschriften in the middle ranges, the market in religious books dominated the sixteenth-century book world. None doubted their impact in forming opinion – certainly not Luther and his colleagues, who wrote so indefatigably and lavished praise upon the ‘new’ invention; certainly not the Catholic authorities who tried to limit their circulation by censorship and proscription. But in some senses the book has suffered precisely because its influence seems so obvious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We come, at last, to the book. For many who have addressed this subject, this is indeed to come to the heart of the question, for the book looms large in all explanations of the appeal of the evangelical cause: a view shared, it must be said, by the reformers themselves. To the extent that Protestantism was the religion of the word, the word was made print. Luther and his colleagues rejoiced; the reading public devoured the new literature. There can be little doubt that the book did much to shape the Reformation; it must also be acknowledged that the Reformation did much to reshape the book. Our purpose here must be to acknowledge this role, but also to place it in context. As must by now be clear, the book did not function as anautonomous agency, but within the context created by the intermingling of a whole range of communication media. The world of oral communication impacted on print, just as print presented new possibilities for the development of preaching, drama and song. Print culture also brought its own particular dynamic. The Reformation erupted when the book was already a mature technology, tried and tested after seventy years of experimentation and refinement. Nevertheless this was still a developing industry. The full potential of print as a medium of communication had emerged only gradually as authors and publishers tested its relevance to the world of education, scholarship and government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With preaching, music and drama we have investigated three different aspects of the collective culture of sixteenth-century society. Clearly the three impacted on the consciousness of the Christian people in different ways; whereas dramatic performances were occasional, special events in most contexts, by the second generation of the Reformation Protestant peoples would have heard sermons very regularly. Singing, meanwhile, was an engrained part of both their public worship culture and their private entertainments. All helped ensure that the challenge of the new evangelical movement would touch all members of society, both those who had access to the new Protestant teachings through reading – the literate – and those who had not. That there should be no gulf in understanding between these two groups was of course a huge concern to contemporary churchmen, aware as they were of the bookish and cerebral tendency of the theological debate inspired by Luther, and the difficulties of teaching even the barest essentials of the new Christian principles to the population at large: a concern to which the great outpouring of pedagogic literature inspired by the Reformation bears eloquent testimony. The question of how cognizance of the new Christian teachings could be inculcated among the broad mass of the population is also one that has preoccupied historians, though the context of the discussion has been rather different from that proposed in the first half of this book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Catholic visitor to a Protestant worship service in sixteenth-century Europe would immediately have been struck by stark contrasts to the familiar tradition of his own upbringing. The scale of the physical alterations would obviously vary, depending on whether he had stumbled upon a church cleansed of all images for Calvinist worship, or a Lutheran church, in which the internal fabric might be largely untouched. But it is unlikely, one might surmise, that if the service were in progress, his mind would linger much on architecture and internal decoration: more arresting by far was the essential unfamiliarity of the worship service. For a start, there would only have been one service in progress; in this Protestant church he would not have observed one priest celebrating Mass at the High Altar, while others were engaged in duties in the side chapels. No priests would have been hearing confession; the familiar bustle and variety would have been missing. Rather the attention of the congregation gathered in the nave would have been focused on the pulpit, from which the minister would be conducting the service. If his arrival was unplanned, our Catholic visitor would in all likelihood have first heard the voice of the minister, leading the congregation in prayer, reading from Scripture or preaching. Preaching would obviously have occupied the longest time: probably an inordinate length for someone not inured by long practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After preaching and song we turn to examine one further aspect of oral culture: drama. As with the other two media, drama had a rich and varied mediaeval heritage; the three modes of communication were in many respects closely connected, and each drew on the traditions and associations of the other. Popular theatricals made much use of song and the playing of musical instruments: drums, horns and pipes provided the steady backcloth to the other more dramatic special effects expected by a discerning and demanding audience. Mediaeval drama also shared much in common with the preaching tradition. We have already laid some stress on the theatricality of the mediaeval sermon, and preaching certainly shared with the more overt theatrical performances the sense of a special event for which large and eager crowds would gather in the expectation of something rousing and unusual. The two events had much in common in terms of their unfolding rhythm and drama: the long period of anticipation, the gathering of large bodies of eager auditors, milling noisily in the city's public space; the carefully managed choreography of the performance, the skill of the performer to rouse emotion and build to a thrilling climax. Preachers were well aware of the weight of expectations that fell on their performance; if they failed to entertain and enthral, travelling players offered other free entertainments. This does not imply, however, that the great preachers were necessarily opposed to drama, or resented the competition of dramatic presentations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luther and his colleagues would make much play with the concept of the new evangelical sermon. We should certainly not underestimate the element of novelty, and the surprise of the new. The priest who commandeered the pulpit – often his own pulpit – to launch a bold attack on time-honoured practices and the doctrine of the community he served was bound to cause a sensation. The impact on his congregation, moved, excited, troubled or appalled, was clearly profound. But it was so precisely because the sermon was so fundamental a part of church life. It also played an important role in the wider information culture of pre-modern society. In a world where most information continued to be conveyed by word of mouth, few could doubt that preaching represented one of the primary means of communication with a wider public. This was a world the reformers instinctively understood. Few doubted that, if they were to reach their audience, it would be through the medium of the word: and that meant in the first instance the word preached, as much as their published works. Many of those who would make up the first generation of the leaders of the Reformation had made their reputation first as preachers; they owed both their local reputation and the opportunity to contribute to the new evangelical movement to their skill in the pulpit. All, without exception, regarded preaching as fundamental to their duty as pastors, and to their evangelical mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did people choose the Reformation? What was it in the evangelical teaching that excited, moved or persuaded them? How, and by what process, did people arrive at the new understandings that prompted a change of allegiance, and embedded them in their new faith? These are questions central to an understanding of the Reformation movement, but they are far more often approached obliquely than answered directly. We know that Luther and other evangelicals preached a powerful doctrine of redemption and salvation; we know that they conjured a sense that the Reformation would address long-standing discontents about the relationship between clergy and people; and we know that large parts of Europe would ultimately accept the new Protestant churches. But precisely what moved people – either as individuals, or as part of a community – to abandon one allegiance and embrace another is a complex and difficult question. What we can be certain is that, in the first generation of evangelical agitation, the decision to adhere to the Reformation was often a very painful one. It involved difficult choices and life-changing decisions. It involved exchanging the familiar round of traditional observance for a new order which was untested and largely unknown. It involved accepting the good faith and charismatic authority of preachers who had often emerged from a comparatively lowly position in the local clerical hierarchy, ignoring the counter-charges of those who denounced them as false prophets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the Fascist racial press campaign (1937–43), one of the regime's most intense efforts took the form of the publication and distribution of a new illustrated magazine devoted entirely to the pursuit of a new racial consciousness among the Italian populace. La Difesa della Razza, published biweekly from August 5, 1938, to June 20, 1943, had a very large print run and was distributed extensively throughout Italy. Its foundation was closely linked with the publication of the so-called Manifesto of Racist Scientists, the chief goal of which was to establish a biological approach – as opposed to a political approach – to the “Jewish question” in Italy. The text of the Manifesto appeared for the first time in an unsigned article (“Fascism and the Race Problems”) in Il Giornale d'Italia on July 15, 1938, and was subsequently cited or reprinted by all the national newspapers. Ten days later, a Comunicato (Communiqué) of the National Fascist Party dated July 25, 1938, provided a version of how it had come about and listed the names of its supposed authors: ten scientists, for the most part young assistant lecturers. Both the version supplied in the Comunicato and the reconstruction attempted by De Felice, however, should now be revised because of information provided by a document that has since surfaced about which De Felice knew nothing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]