Browsing by Subject "Reformation"
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Item Elizabethan psalm explication and protestant hermeneutics(2010-05) Roberts, Michael Reid; Whigham, Frank; Rebhorn, WayneIn recent years, several scholars of the Reformation have worked to complicate the notion of early Protestantism as a singular and liberating hermeneutic movement. In particular, critics like James Simpson and Ramie Targoff have targeted Tudor Bible scholarship as stifling and restrictive. Looking at Elizabethan psalm explications, I see neither a purely liberating nor a purely restrictive hermeneutic culture, but instead a combination of the literal and the figurative, of poetics and theology. Examining three different psalm explications by Martin Luther, John Hooper, and Thomas Wilcox, I find a wide variety of approaches to the Psalms, which suggests a relative interpretive freedom even among the Elizabethan Protestant elite. This analysis leads me to conclude that even early in the development of Protestant England there was no such thing as a unified Protestantism, but instead a patchwork of methods that trace back to humanism and Catholicism as well as emerging theories of literalism and poetics.Item The fiend in the fog : a history of Satan in early modern Scotland(2012-05-29) Brock, Michelle D.; Levack, Brian P.; Kamil, Neil; Hardwick, Julie; Canizares-Esguerra, Jorge; Whigham, Frank; Cowan, BrianThis dissertation, the first comprehensive study of Satan in early modern Scotland, attempts to recreate the role of the devil in the mental worlds of Scots from the beginning of the Scottish Reformation in 1560 through the early eighteenth century. In doing so, I address three interrelated questions. First, what did Scottish men and women believe about the devil? Second, how did their demonic beliefs inform culture, individual and communal identities, and lived experience in Scotland? Last, how did Scottish demonic belief compare and relate to British, Atlantic, and European demonologies? This dissertation demonstrates that Scots of all sorts were involved in the creation of a varied but shared spectrum of demonic belief that was profoundly and consistently influenced by the theology and practice of Reformed Protestantism. Ultimately, belief in the devil produced a dynamic cultural dialogue about good, evil, and the self through which these Scots constructed individual and communal identities. Throughout the early modern period, Scottish religious, social, and political turmoil combined with the introduction of Reformed Protestant theology and an increased concern for the Apocalypse to provoke a re-evaluation of demonology. Historians have often assumed that ordinary people were uninterested in or unaware of these evolving ideas about Satan, due to both their illiteracy and their focus on the basic struggle to make ends meet. By investigating a wide array of sources, such as court records, diaries, and sermons, my dissertation unearths the demonological ideas not just of elites, but also of ordinary men and women whose beliefs about Satan have long been presumed unrecoverable. This dissertation thus demonstrates that elite and uneducated Scots alike engaged in a complex exchange of beliefs about the devil that reshaped Scottish demonology and engendered new ways of believing and behaving for Scots of all sorts.