Browsing by Subject "English Reformation"
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Item Open Access “Newter”-ing the Nicodemite: Reception of John Calvin’s Quatre sermons (1552) in Sixteenth-Century England(2015) Woo, Kenneth JosephThis dissertation examines the publication history of a single work: John Calvin’s 1552 Quatre sermons de M. Jehan Calvin traictans des matières fort utiles pour nostre temps, avec briefve exposition du Pseaume lxxxvii. Overlooked for both its contribution to Calvin’s wider corpus and its surprising popularity in English translation, successive editions of Quatre sermons display how Calvin’s argument against the behavior of so-called “Nicodemites” was adapted to various purposes unrelated to refuting religious dissimulation. The present study contributes to research in Calvin’s anti-Nicodemism by highlighting the fruitfulness of focusing on a discrete work and its reception. Borrowing a term (“Newter”) from John Field’s 1579 translation of Quatre sermons, this study’s title adumbrates its argument. English translators capitalized on the intrinsic malleability of a nameless and faceless opponent, the Nicodemite, and the adaptability of Quatre sermons’ genre as a collection of sermons to reshape—or, if you will, disfigure—both Calvin’s original foes and his case against them to advance various new agenda. Yet they were not the first to use the reformer’s sermons this way. They could have learned this from Calvin himself.
My examination of Quatre sermons opens by setting the work in the context of Calvin’s other writings and his political situation (Introduction, chapters one and two). Calvin’s unrelenting literary assault on French Nicodemism over three decades has long been recognized for its consistency and negativity. Yet scholars have tended to neglect how Calvin’s polemic against religious dissimulation could exhibit significant flexibility according to the needs of his context. Whereas Calvin’s preface promises simply to revisit his previous argument against participation in the Mass, his approach to Nicodemism in Quatre sermons seems adapted to accomplish goals beyond decrying false worship, offering a carefully-crafted apology for Calvin’s pastoral authority directed at his political situation. Repeatedly emphasizing God’s purpose to bless his children through the ministry of a rightly-ordered church, Quatre sermons marks a shift in Calvin’s anti-Nicodemite rhetoric away from purely negative critique, stressing instead God’s provision of spiritual nurture via political exile. Read in light of Calvin’s 1552 context, two audiences emerge: sermons ostensibly targeting believers in France who hid their faith also appear especially designed to silence Calvin’s foes in Geneva.
The remainder of the study examines the reception of Quatre sermons in the rapidly shifting religious and social contexts of Marian and Elizabethan England, where it appeared in more unique editions than any of Calvin’s writings besides the Institutio and the reformer’s 1542/45 Genevan Catechism. Calvin’s anti-Nicodemism has not been examined for its distinct contribution to the overall English reception of his thought. Five English versions of Quatre sermons appeared between 1553 and 1584—four of these under a Protestant queen, a situation quite different from the French context Calvin addressed. After situating Calvin’s position within the currents of Tudor Protestant anti-Nicodemism (chapter three), I place each of the five translations in its particular context, investigating prefaces, appendices, marginalia, and translation methods to discover how and why individuals used Quatre sermons (chapters four to six). Like Calvin in 1552, those who brought Quatre sermons to English readers were not primarily concerned with Nicodemism. Rather, the malleability of Calvin’s Nicodemite as polemical opponent and the flexibility of Quatre sermons as a sequence of discrete, interrelated parts made it popular with those eager to press Calvin into the service of a variety of diverse goals he could not have imagined, including turning his anti-Nicodemism against fellow members of the English church.
Item Open Access The Whole Booke of Psalmes, Protestant Ideology, and Musical Literacy in Elizabethan England(2018) Arten, SamanthaThe Whole Booke of Psalmes, first published in 1562, was not only the English Reformation’s primary hymnal, but also by far the most popular printed music book published in England in the sixteenth century. This dissertation argues that in addition to its identities as scriptural text and monophonic musical score, the WBP functioned as a music instructional book, intended by its publishers to improve popular music education in Elizabethan England. Motivated by Protestant ideology, the WBP promoted musical literacy for the common people. This dissertation further demonstrates that the WBP made a hitherto unrecognized contribution to music theory in early modern England, introducing the fixed-scale solmization system thought to originate at the end of the sixteenth century. Drawing upon musicology, book history, and the study of Reformation theology, this dissertation makes a contribution to post-revisionist English Reformation scholarship, arguing that the WBP and its music-educational materials formed part of the process of widespread conversion from Roman Catholicism to English Protestantism.
John Day’s highly successful claim to monarchical authorization and religious authority for the WBP made the book the most prominent guide to a Protestant musical aesthetic for the common people. According to the WBP, the English Protestant musical identity was characterized by several features: communal singing of easy monophonic melodies, particularly by the laity rather than clergy and musical professionals; a broad selection of appropriate texts that encompassed Scripture (particularly the psalms), liturgical canticles, and catechetical texts; regular singing both devotionally as a household and as a congregation in church settings; and performance with instrumental accompaniment. Musical literacy was an imperative: if being a Protestant meant becoming an active part of musical worship, then it was crucial to teach all the laity to sing well, enabling them to fully inhabit that identity.
For this reason, many of the 143 known editions published from 1562 to 1603 contained one of two features intended to teach basic musical literacy: a letter to the reader which served as an introductory music theory treatise, and a special font that assigned solmization syllables to individual pitches for ease of sight-reading, which was accompanied by its own single-page explanatory preface. These prefaces made the WBP unique among the music-theoretical works produced in sixteenth-century England, the prefaces being neither the sort of introductory essays found in instrumental instruction books nor freestanding music theory textbooks. Their content was simple and accessible, with the goal of educating their common readers in the musical skills necessary for the singing of psalms (but not improvisation or composition, critical topics in other sixteenth-century English music theory treatises), and both prefaces employed religious language that gave sacred meaning to music education. The WBP’s simplified solmization system made an important advance in the history of music theory, one that has up until now been thought to originate thirty years later with music theorists Thomas Morley and William Bathe.
Yet as we know from early Jacobean documents and practices, the average early seventeenth-century churchgoer remained unable to read music and was therefore unable to utilize the WBP as a musical score. I contend that the failure of the WBP’s didactic content was due to music printing errors that significantly hindered the psalter’s capacity to improve musical literacy. Despite John Day’s introduction of the music preface and printed solmization syllables and the general policy of his successors to maintain Day’s general structure, content, and Protestant message, the usefulness of the WBP in promoting musical literacy and Protestant musical devotion was severely hampered by seemingly musically-illiterate compositors and a lack of editorial oversight.