Providence in Early Modern England

Walsham, Alexandra

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198208877.001.0001

Cited by 38 publications

(34 citation statements)

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“…Once seen as miraculous, they came to be narrativised in terms of Providenceeas God's portentous warnings and righteous judgement. 42 Throughout the seventeenth century, and amongst all ranks of society, 'many continued to cling to the idea that the natural world was a billboard on which the Lord painted thundering sermons about the dire consequences of sin and impiety'. 43 These attitudes were not confined to reformed Europe, but were cross-confessional, polemical tools.…”

Section: Providential Pamphletsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…44 Providentialist interpretations of events were so common, Walsham argues, that they formed an 'ingrained parochial response to chaos and crisis'. 45 Providentialist pamphlets, typically costing four pence each, were targeted at an educated readership of middling-income consumers, and designed to be both informative and didactic. 46 This was literature engaged in the process of Reformation.…”

Section: Providential Pamphletsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Local narratives do occasionally contain providential interpretations, which were indeed 'a practical source of consolation in a hazardous and inhospitable environment'. 122 The register from Headcorn, Kent, shows a tradition of providential interpretations of particularly bad floods. In 1625 the register records that 'such a flood of water upon the grounds of the said parish as drowned all the meadow ground to a great value such as in the memory of any man living never was seen the like'.…”

Section: Parish Registersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Understanding flooding in early modern England

Morgan

2015

Journal of Historical Geography

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Flooding was a recurrent part of rural life in early modern England. Explanations of the historical understanding of floods have traditionally relied on religious and providential arguments made in popular printed literature. In this paper, popular printed accounts of flooding are brought together with under-exploited archival sources to provide a different description of perceptions of flooding in early modern England. Local manuscript accounts of flood events are found in the marginal notes inserted into local registers of baptisms, marriages and burials. Institutional records of commissions of sewers provide another perspective on floods, as community-staffed bureaucracies recorded and attempted to manage the damage caused by overflowing rivers and raging seas. Brought together, these local narratives provide a new and different view of the experience of flooding. Paying close attention to the ways in which flood events were narrativized, this paper explores the customary, religious, personal and productive narrative frames invoked by contemporaries. By using underappreciated and traditional archival sources in new ways, this paper provides a rereading of early modern attitudes towards geographical phenomena previously derived from print.

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Section: Providential Pamphletsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Providential Pamphletsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Parish Registersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Understanding flooding in early modern England

Morgan

2015

Journal of Historical Geography

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“…The commercialization of the genre of stories of the 'strange but true ' led to their abuse and doubts about their authenticity arose in the context of the fabrication of wonders by unscrupulous journalists and booksellers intent upon making profit out of what increasingly came to be seen as popular 'credulity '. 90 From the early seventeenth century onwards, there is a distinct sense, that, at least in some quarters, familiarity began to breed contempt. Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy have advanced a not dissimilar thesis about the role which the expansion of the periodical press played in transforming the hermeneutics of suicide : they argue that the literary style and tone of such texts promoted an increasingly ' secular ', sympathetic, and even sentimental attitude towards those who committed the sin of self-murder, a crime that had earlier been regarded as a consequence of acute diabolical temptation.…”

Section: I Imentioning

confidence: 99%

The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed

Walsham

2008

Hist. J.

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130

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A B S T R A C T. This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the ongoing debate about the role of the Protestant Reformation in the process of 'the disenchantment of the world '. It considers the development of this thesis in the work of Max Weber and subsequent scholars, its links with wider claims about the origins of modernity, and the challenges to this influential paradigm that have emerged in the last twenty-five years. Setting the literature on England within its wider European context, it explores the links between Protestantism and the transformation of assumptions about the sacred and the supernatural, and places renewed emphasis on the equivocal and ambiguous legacy left by the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Attention is also paid to the ways in which the Reformation converged with other intellectual, cultural, political, and social developments which cumulatively brought about subtle, but decisive, transformations in individual and collective mentalities. It is suggested that thinking in terms of cycles of desacralization and resacralization may help to counteract the potential distortions of a narrative that emphasizes a linear path of development.The tendency to herald the Protestant Reformation as a milestone on the road towards modernity and secularization, a landmark in the narrative of progress that traces the eventual triumph of rationalism over ' superstition ' in the age of the Enlightenment, has deep roots in Western European and Anglo-American culture and scholarship and continues to exert considerable influence. In particular, the idea that the religious revolution launched by Luther, Calvin, and other reformers played a critical role in eliminating assumptions about the intervention of magical and supernatural forces in the world has proved remarkably resilient. If it has stimulated and shaped many seminal contributions to the historiography of the early modern period over the last century, it has also served, in some ways, to constrain and distort our understanding of this era. This review offers a series of critical reflections and observations on the evolution and fortunes of this thesis against the backdrop of a body of recent research which has seriously complicated, challenged, and undercut it. Focusing especially on England, but set within a wider Continental context, its aim is to review the current state of the debate and to provide an interim report on

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“…56 Alexandra Walsham describes it as 'an invisible prism' that helped 'to focus the refractory meanings of both petty and perplexing events'. 57 Mendelson points out that most of the surviving seventeenth-century women's diaries and memoirs, displaying 'the urge to impose some comprehensible order upon the fortuitous incidents that made up their lives', were moulded by a providential interpretative framework. 58 Moreover, for mothers the ceremony of churching, with its opening declaration that 'it hath pleased Almighty God of his goodness to give you safe deliverance, and hath preserved you in the great danger of childbirth', would have been a familiar one.…”

Section: The Politics Of Deliverancementioning

confidence: 99%

Imagining the Pain and Peril of Seventeenth-century Childbirth:: Travail and Deliverance in the Making of an Early Modern World

Howard

2003

Social History of Medicine

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Providence in Early Modern England

Cited by 38 publications

References 0 publications

Understanding flooding in early modern England

Understanding flooding in early modern England

The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed

Imagining the Pain and Peril of Seventeenth-century Childbirth:: Travail and Deliverance in the Making of an Early Modern World

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