Deviance and Nonconformity, Term 2, Week 8
The Reformations
and Deviance
Naomi Pullin
n.r.wood@warwick.ac.uk
Aims of today
• Understanding what the Reformation was
• Assess whether it represents change or
continuity
• Examine its impact on concepts of deviance
• Consider the experiences of religious
minorities
• Ask whether ‘disenchantment’ and atheism
were the consequences of the Reformation
‘Ecclesia semper reformanda est’:
The church is always reforming
Link between consolidation of
Church power and rise of
‘heretics’ in Middle Ages:
• Innocent III’s reforms (11981216)
• Fourth Lateran Council (1215)
• > persecution of heretics incl.
Cathars, Waldensians,
Franciscans, Jews and Muslims
Pope Innocent III
What is the Reformation?
• Not a specific event that can be
given a precise date: a long and
complex process.
• Closely linked to the humanist
agenda of C15th and C16th.
• Humanists sought true message
of God, through study and retranslation of the Bible
Desiderius Erasmus
(1466-1536)
Martin Luther
31 October 1517 - 95 Thesis nailed on
door of Wittenberg Cathedral
Key reforms:
• Solafidianism – by faith alone
• rejection of sale of indulgences
• reduces the number of sacraments
from 7 to 2 (baptism and the
Eucharist remain)
• rejection of purgatory
• rejection of clerical celibacy
• abolition of monasteries.
Martin Luther
(1483-1546)
Consequences of the Reformation:
Divided States
•
•
•
•
It suited many countries to break with Rome
Countries like England and France in
constant state of flux
Most rulers agreed that religious diversity
was dangerous > persecution
Thirty Years War (1618-1648) has strong
religious ideology
Bloody Mary
•
•
•
Restored Catholicism
to England in 1553
Reintroduced the
Heresy Acts
300+ Protestants
burned as heretics.
Mary I Queen of England
(1553-1558)
John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563)
Godly Martyrs in
Coventry (1555)
Anne Askew (1546)
Elizabeth I
•
•
•
•
Restored Protestantism
to England in 1558
189 people executed for
Catholic beliefs
Catholics hanged for
treason and not burnt
for heresy
Spectacles of
punishment, e.g.
Margaret Clitherow
crushed to death
Margaret Clitherow
(1556-1586)
St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572)
Radical Reformers
• Reformation creates conditions for a multiconfessional society
• People can openly question and debate
nature of salvation
• Groups have social/political as well as
theological basis for appeal
Münster
Rebellion
(1534-5)
• First leader: Jan Matisse – very popular and
charismatic
• Jan of Lieden takes over late 1534 – tyrant
who advocates polygamy and executes anyone
who disobeys is authority
• Protestant and Catholic authorities unite to
end siege
English Civil Wars (1640s/1650s)
Thomas Edwards (1646)
Uses sectarian excess as propaganda against
religious toleration
Thomas Edwards: Gangraeana
England has become a land of the “many
headed monstrous Hydra of Sectarism, ... this
land is become already in many places a
Chaos, a Babel, another Amsterdam [and he
refers to Amsterdam here, because it is the
first country in Europe to adopt religious
Toleration]; but worse than Amsterdam, is the
fact that the English nation is on the highway to
Münster”.
Religious Radicals: England
• Rise of new Protestant sects from 1640s:
incls. Levellers, Seekers, Ranters, Diggers,
Adamites, Quakers, Muggletonians, and Fifth
Monarchists.
• Distinctly social component to their
persecution
The Ranters
• Christ within more
important than historical
Christ
• Didn’t need outward help
to assist salvation
• Believed that all actions –
good or sinful– determined
by God’s will
• Leaders: Abiezer Coppe
and Lawrence Clarkson
• The Ranters Monster
(1652): Mary Adams
The Quakers
• Begins with George Fox,
c.1652
• Doctrine of the ‘Light
Within’ open to all
• Reject social hierarchy and
paid preaching
George Fox (1624-1691)
Samuel Pepys Diary 29 July 1667:
‘a man, a Quaker, came naked through the [Westminster] Hall,
only very civilly tied about the privates to avoid scandal, and with
a chafing-dish of fire and brimstone burning upon his head ...
crying, ‘Repent! repent!’
Quaker Sufferings records
names of over 12,000
sufferers:
Joseph Besse, A Collection of
the Sufferings of the People
Called Quakers (2 vols, 1753)
James Nayler (1656)
With the face of brass this woman that you see
most Impudently doth afirm, that shee
The mind of God, in all poynts, more doth know
them from the Sacred Scriptures, ere could flow
Presumptious wretch it were more fitt that shee
at home showld keepe, and mind her
housewifery
And if noe meanes to live on, worke for bread
than idlye gossip with hir magot head.
Atheism and Deism
Lucien Febrve, The
Problem of Unbelief in the
Sixteenth Century: The
Religion of Rabelais
(1942).
‘Atheist’ Etienne Dolet
(1509-1546)
Conclusions
• Reformation creates an ‘age of confessions’
• Persecution of religious minorities linked to a
struggle for power – new forms of piety and
new forms of persecution
• Reformation does not introduce toleration
• More of a social agenda attached to
persecution of religious minorities postReformation
• Reformation creates new types of unbelievers,
but not until C17th that we see emergence of
‘atheism’