Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction The 1590s: the second reign of Elizabeth I?
- 1 The patronage of the crown in Elizabethan politics: the 1590s in perspective
- 2 Regnum Cecilianum? A Cecilian perspective of the Court
- 3 Patronage at Court, faction and the earl of Essex
- 4 Peers, patronage and the politics of history
- 5 The fall of Sir John Perrot
- 6 The Elizabethan establishment and the ecclesiastical polity
- 7 Ecclesiastical vitriol: religious satire in the 1590s and the invention of puritanism
- 8 Ecclesiastical vitriol: the kirk, the puritans and the future king of England
- 9 Social strain and social dislocation, 1585–1603
- 10 Lord of Liberty: Francis Davison and the cult of Elizabeth
- 11 The complaint of poetry for the death of liberality: the decline of literary patronage in the 1590s
- 12 Summer's Last Will and Testament: revels' end
- 13 The theatre and the Court in the 1590s
- Index
7 - Ecclesiastical vitriol: religious satire in the 1590s and the invention of puritanism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction The 1590s: the second reign of Elizabeth I?
- 1 The patronage of the crown in Elizabethan politics: the 1590s in perspective
- 2 Regnum Cecilianum? A Cecilian perspective of the Court
- 3 Patronage at Court, faction and the earl of Essex
- 4 Peers, patronage and the politics of history
- 5 The fall of Sir John Perrot
- 6 The Elizabethan establishment and the ecclesiastical polity
- 7 Ecclesiastical vitriol: religious satire in the 1590s and the invention of puritanism
- 8 Ecclesiastical vitriol: the kirk, the puritans and the future king of England
- 9 Social strain and social dislocation, 1585–1603
- 10 Lord of Liberty: Francis Davison and the cult of Elizabeth
- 11 The complaint of poetry for the death of liberality: the decline of literary patronage in the 1590s
- 12 Summer's Last Will and Testament: revels' end
- 13 The theatre and the Court in the 1590s
- Index
Summary
The 1590s present the historian of the Elizabethan church with a professional problem. The decade lies in a kind of double rain shadow. On the far side loom the mountainously momentous 1580s, when militant puritanism briefly threatened ecclesiastical revolution, in part a response to the apparently extreme danger posed by an equally vigorous Catholic revival. Two deeply antithetical, intensely politicized religious fanaticisms confronted a hardline archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, backed up by a queen impersonating a rock, Semper Eadem. This gives the historian of the mainstream with an instinct for narrative plenty to write about. On the other side of the rain shadow extend the early years of the next century and of the new dynasty, which for a time, and especially at the Hampton Court Conference, brought a large Scottish question mark to bear on the English ecclesiastical polity, one which Dr Wormald will clarify elsewhere in this volume. This too makes a story. By comparison, the intervening nineties were strangely uneventful.
To be sure, uneventfulness and the ordinariness of conformity throw down a challenge to which historians of religion should not be afraid to respond. One recalls the poet Clough and his image of the silent main, flooding in ‘far back through creeks and inlets’. In those creeks and inlets this was a decade of ecclesiastical growth and improvement: a rising proportion of candidates for ordination who held university degrees, more preachers than ever before.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Reign of Elizabeth ICourt and Culture in the Last Decade, pp. 150 - 170Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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