Browsing by Subject "Reformation"

In 1526, a Spaniard in the papal court of Clement VII addressed a treatise against Luther’s Bondage of the Will, calling it On Fate and Free Will and arguing good works are not only possible before one receives God’s grace but a necessary prerequisite to that grace. The position, which acknowledges a human need for grace but assigns the beginning of salvation to human effort, is one church historians conventionally refer to as semipelagianism. The Spaniard, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, went on to serve Charles V as royal historian, and to defend the latter’s conquest of the Americas and subjugation of those contintents’ indigenous populations at the Valladolid debates in 1550–1551. The logic by which he did so is generally attributed to a high view of plenary papal authority in the temporal world, combined with an Aristotelian hierarchy of being that conveniently labeled the indigenous peoples of the Americas “natural slaves.” This dissertation uses Sepúlveda’s published treatises in order to trace his treatment of themes such as natural reason, natural law, divine law, human free will, and divine grace, in order to demonstrate that Sepúlveda's logic in his defense of the conquest was actually rooted precisely in the semipelagian theology he deployed in his writings against Luther. He argued that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were barbarians and appropriately labeled according to Aristotle's natural slave category, but he began with the theological conviction that they had failed to embrace what natural reason alone could teach them about God, and failed moreover to “do what is in one” by turning to God and obeying the divine law as revealed in nature, all of which Sepúlveda took to be prerequisite for the receipt of grace. The indigenous peoples of the Americas were not barbarians in Sepúlveda’s mind because they belonged to Aristotle’s natural slave category, but “natural slave” was a useful term he deployed to further describe those who had failed to take the initiative for their salvation, as required by the semipelagian theology he deployed against Luther.

Affects are not reducible to feelings or emotions. On the contrary, Affect Before

Spinoza investigates the extent to which affects exceed, reconfigure and reorganize

bodies and subjects. Affects are constitutive of and integral to dynamic economies of

activity and passivity. This dissertation traces the origins and histories of this definition

of affect, from the Latin affectus, discovering emergent affective approaches to faith,

devotional poetry and philosophy in early modernity. For early modern believers across

confessions, faith was neither reducible to a dry intellectual concern nor to a personal,

emotional appeal to God. Instead, faith was a transformative relation between humans

and God, realized in affective terms that, in turn, reconfigured theories of human agency

and activity. Beginning with John Calvin and continuing through the work of John

Donne, John Milton, and Baruch Spinoza, Affect Before Spinoza posits affectus as a basis

of faith in an emergent Reformed tradition as well as a term that informs disparate

developments in poetry and philosophy beyond Reformed Orthodoxy. Calvin's

configuration of affect turns existing languages of the passions and of rhetorical motives

towards an understanding of faith and certainty. In this sense, Calvin, Donne, Spinoza

and Milton use affectus to pose questions of agency, will, tendency, inclination, and

determinism.

As a saint with no biblical or historical basis for her legend, St. Anne could change radically over time with cultural and doctrinal shifts even as her status as Mary's mother remained at the core of her legend and provided an appearance of consistency. "Mother, Matron, Matriarch: Sanctity and Social Change in the Cult of St. Anne, 1450-1750" takes issue with the general view that the cult of St. Anne in Northern Europe flourished in the late Middle Ages, only to wither away in the Reformation, and advances a new understanding of it. It does so by taking a longer view, beginning around 1450 and extending to 1750 in order to show how St. Anne's cult and the Holy Kinship elucidated long-term shifts in religious and cultural mores regarding the relationships between domesticity and sanctity, what constituted properly pious lay behavior, and attitudes towards women (in particular older women). Materials used include vita, devotional texts, confraternal records, sermons, treatises, and works of art across the time period under investigation. After a definite period of decline during the mid-sixteenth century (as evidenced by lower pilgrimage statistics, confraternity records, and a lack of text production), St. Anne enjoyed a revival in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Catholicism in a "purified" form, reconfigured to suit new religious and social norms which emphasized patriarchal authority within the household and obedience to the Catholic Church among the laity. In this context, St. Anne became a humble, pious widow whose own purity serves as proof of Mary's Immaculate Conception, and whose meek devotion to her holy daughter and grandson exemplified properly obedient reverence for the laity.