The congrégations in Geneva, held on Fridays, were instituted for the ongoing training of the ministers of the word and for the preservation of unity in doctrine. The sources reveal also that lay members of the church were present on a regular basis in the biblical study meetings. This essay is intended to identify as many individual lay participants as possible and to evaluate their social...
The Character of an Antipuritan
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This article considers antipuritans in Elizabethan and early Stuart England as they were portrayed in didactic texts, especially dialogues, and as they appear in court records. When godly Protestants were dubbed “puritan,” they responded with the antipuritan, a caricature of their critics as dull-witted despisers of religion who excused their indifference by calling the zealous “puritans.” The...
Post-Tridentine Parish Life in the Cracow Diocese
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This article analyzes how Tridentine reform was introduced to rural and township parishes of the Cracow diocese in the initial stage of the reform’s implementation. The work focuses on those areas where the Reformation was at its most advanced. Calvinism and to a small extent Antitrinitarianism became popular mostly with the nobility and the gentry, but seldom did they gain followers in other...
Catholic Worship & Communal Identity after Edict of Nantes
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The terms of religious coexistence established by the Edict of Nantes in 1598 posed many challenges as French Catholics and Protestants struggled to bridge the gap between the edict’s provisions and their everyday lives. This article focuses on two pastoral visitations conducted in the dioceses of Vaison and Aix-en-Provence in the wake of the edict’s promulgation. Not only were they among the...
Henry Peacham’s “The Art of Drawing” (1606)
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Far from being a naively provincial document in the history of art treatises, Henry Peacham’s The Art of Drawing (1606) deserves credit for introducing English readers to continental art theory and pedagogy. His groundbreaking handbook borrows an incremental teaching method from Serlio, an art-theoretical superstructure from Lomazzo, and an imitative drawing program from Fialetti, and...
Literary Communities: Madeleine Des Roches’s City of Women
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The poetry of Madeleine Des Roches (ca. 1520–87) exhibits a concern with literary community. In Ode 3, from the 1578/79 OEuvres, she draws on a rich tradition of writings about women and postulates a new community for women writers. The interest in community extends to her sources, which were written by members of important literary groups or which create fictional communities. Des Roches...
The Bresse Clergy Assembly & Tithe Grants, 1560–80
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Studies of the political impact of tithe collection in medieval and early modern Europe have tended to consider the phenomenon as secular taxation of church property. This article examines how, in the parts of the archdiocese of Lyon subject to the sovereign house of Savoy (Bresse, Bugey, and Valromey), the regional clergy assembly itself was responsible for tithe assessment and collection....