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European Calvinism: history, providence, and martyrdom
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
For students of the Reformation one of the main conceptual problems is undoubtedly the distance between the mind-set of our age and theirs. We look at the Reformation as a new beginning, the moment when the Church fragmented into competing Churches, and one of the fundamental developments of the Early Modern Age: a term which in itself presents a view of progress and change as one of the determining characteristics of the age.
Contemporaries, however, had a very different perception; they saw the movement for evangelical reform as one of renovation and renewal. They believed that they were attempting to recover what was best in the past of the Church, which had since become hopelessly corrupted. With others of their contemporaries they despised innovation. One can surely only understand Martin Luther if one recognizes the depth of his conservatism; that his personal crusade was to a large extent fuelled by a sense of moral outrage and indignation at what the papacy had done to his Church.
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References
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24 Histoire des vrays Tesmoins de la verite de l’evangile (Geneva, 1570), sig. aivr-viir.
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26 For the placards, Corpus documentorum inquisitionis haereticaepravatis Neerlandicae, ed. P. Fredericq, 5 vols (Ghent and The Hague, 1889–1902), 4, pp. 43–5, 5, pp. 1–5. James Tracey, ‘Heresy law and centralization under Mary of Hungary: conflict between the council of Holland and the central government over the enforcement of Charles V’s Placards’, ARC, 73 (1982), pp. 288–90.
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31 Although frequently practised in France (to prevent the condemned stirring up the crowd gathered for their execution), this practice seems not to have been known in the Netherlands.
32 Archetypes such as Romanus, the early Church martyr, whose end was marked by several miracles. The first attempt to put him to death was thwarted when a miraculous shower doused the flames; at the second, successful, attempt Romanus praised God despite the removal of his tongue. Haemstede, Ceschiedenisse, pp. 25–6. For the early Church sources, H. Delehaye, ‘S. Romain, martyr d’Antioche’, AnBoll, 50 (1932), pp. 240–83. Cynthia Hahn, ‘Speaking without tongues: the martyr Romanus and Augustine’s theory of language in illustrations of Bern Burgerbibliothek Codex 264’, in Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell, eds, Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1991), pp. 161–80.
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34 Ibid., sig. *iir-v.
35 Ibid., sig. *iiv.
36 Ibid., sig. *ivr
37 Ibid., sig. *vr.
38 Compare Luther: Kolb, For All the Saints, p. 26.
39 Gordon, Protestant Identity.
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43 Haemstede, Geschiedenisse, p. 428.
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59 A point made to me in conversation by my colleague in St Andrews, Bruce Gordon.
60 For the conservatism of the ‘later’ Luther see particularly Mark Edwards, Luther and the False Brethren (Stanford, 1975); idem, Luther’s Last Battles, Politics and Polemics, 1531–46 (Leiden, 1983).