Quoting Rom. 10:17, "Faith commeth by hearing," English reformers stressed the aural in worship and argued that noise in church disturbs not only liturgy and sermon but also the salvation of souls. Visitation articles and ecclesiastical canons regulated the sounds of lay behavior; religious polemic describes liturgical practices as "noisy" to brand them as misguided at best and devilish at...
Fifteenth-Century Italian Epithalamia
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Fifteenth-century Italian humanists constructed elaborate genealogies of brides and grooms in Latin wedding orations. These family histories not only demonstrate the creative ways in which humanists praised elites by referring to classical and mythic pasts, but also the surprising extent to which humanists integrated and emphasized pagan and barbaric origins. This article focuses on two...
"Workes of Josephus" as a Catholic Text
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Thomas Lodge is atypical among early modern English writers concerned with Jewish religious and historical texts. Whereas it was common for English theologians to use Jewish scholarship in support of their Protestant arguments, Lodge's 1602 translation ofThe Famous and Memorable Workes ofjosephus offers English readers the works of Josephus as a defense of Catholic understandings of Christian...
Cranach's Schneeberg Altarpiece
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This article demonstrates how Cranach the Elder's Schneeberg Altarpiece of 1539, the first evangelical retable, instructs viewers in Lutheran theology and actively perpetuates evangelical public devotional practice. The strategies of the retable s iconography, which derive from Luther's sermons and other writings, explicate Luther's notion of justification by grace through faith. This model of...
Gardiner & the Making of a Protestant Villain
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Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester 1531-55, is familiar as "Wily Winchester," the villain of Foxe's Actes and Monuments. Foxe, however, was building on a long evangelical tradition which cast Gardiner as Antichrist's chief agent in England. This reputation was grounded less on Gardiner's own conduct than on the reformers' need for a scapegoat to explain the failure of their early hopes and...
Academic Reformers & Latin Instruction in Salamanca
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Humanism in sixteenth-century Salamanca has been assessed in strikingly contrasting ways. From one point of view, the careers of academics like Antonio de Nebrija seem to indicate a "humanist revolution" in Spain's leading university. From a more pessimistic perspective, intellectual life appears to have been irreparably stifled by church and crown. This investigation seeks a plausible...