medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
At 3:59 PM -0500 9/16/02, Dennis Martin wrote:
>Yes, but there are clear differences (and major ones in the 16thc
>debates) about what happens after death and whether people (saints)
>in heaven ought to be invoked as intercessors. Some of the
>Reformers initially maintained some elements of the traditional
>veneration of saints, but for the most part this faded by the later
>16thc and 17thc. Robert Kolb had a book on this in Lutheranism, I
>think, about 10 years back.
Someone was disagreeing with me recently about which "Roman"
practices were still permitted in England in the reign of Elizabeth I
(dates above). I was under the impression that the _invocation_ of
saints was prohibited by Elizabeth's religious settlement, but my
informant says not. Can anyone provide concrete information one way
or the other?
Connected with this is a yet more nebulous issue. My informant says
(gotta love the specificity here :)) that she saw "a TV documentary
on Jamestown" (USA) sometime within the past year which had turned up
some rosary beads -- certainly an odd thing for anyone to be carrying
in an English colony at that period, I would think.
My informant's assertion was that the archaeologists had concluded
that rosaries continued to be widely used by Anglicans in the late
16th and early 17th centuries, even by those who were Puritans. This
sounds pretty dubious to me, and I'd like to know where she could
have gotten this impression -- and of course, I'd also like pointers
to actual sources for what _was_ dug up in Jamestown, who said it was
a rosary and on what basis, etc., if anyone knows of them. (I have a
feeling she is just overreacting to something that sounds like what
she wants to hear, and I'd like to know the facts for myself.)
I do know that "does anyone in your parish still use rosary beads?"
was one of the list of questions bishops were supposed to ask on
their official visitations to parishes, which presumably implies
"...and if so, tell them not to." This is from a document early in
the 1560s.
TIA,
--
_________________________________________________________
O Chris Laning
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+ Davis, California
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