Posted on 10/08/2013 5:24:17 PM PDT by marshmallow
A new exhibition at Tate Britain highlights the scale of destruction to artworks in the Tudor period – a staggering amount of books and music were also destroyed
The slashed and broken medieval images displayed in the new Art Under Attack exhibition at the Tate are a reminder of what we lost in the hundred and fifty years after the Reformation. Even now there is denial about the scale of the erasing of our medieval past. The Tate estimates we lost 90% of our religious art. It was probably even more than that. The destruction was on a scale that far outstrips the modern efforts of Islamist extremists. And it was not only art we lost, but also books and music.
We think of Henry VIII and the destruction of the monasteries, but that was not the end of the destruction, it marked the beginning. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, hailed the reign of his son, the boy king Edward VI, as that of a new Josiah, destroyer of idols. After his coronation an orgy of iconoclasm was launched. In churches rood screens, tombs with their prayers for the dead, and stain glass windows, were smashed. The Elizabethan antiquarian John Stow complained, some of this Christian Taliban “judged every image to be an idol”, so that not only religious art, but even the secular thirteenth century carvings of kings in Ludgate were broken.
Books too were burned on a vast scale. Earlier this year Melvyn Bragg was on TV telling us about William Tyndale during the reign of Henry VIII, and the forces of Catholic conservatism blocking publication of his English bible with its attached Lutheran commentaries. But conservatives were not alone in wishing to suppress books that contained ideas they did not agree with. When the monasteries were suppressed.....
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicherald.co.uk ...
The Church was a major part of that society because it controlled about 10% of the estates of Europe. The Church constantly struggled to keep the nobility from taking that property by getting the right to choose bishops and abbots et al. As it was, enough nobles gained office to bias the Church to the nobility. Still it was an institution that often rewarded personal merit, both men and women.
The Pilgrimage of Grace, if it has found the right leader, might have overthrown the government if it had marched on London. It is my understanding that it was only faith in Henry himself that prevented it from becoming a civil war.
Well, Richard Aske was a pretty good leader, and, yes, the Pilgrimage nearly toppled Henry from his throne, but Henry VIII was duplicitous, making promises to the men assembled that he did not keep, and butchering thousands of them in the end.
. . . . The Pilgrimage of Grace was about the maintenance of community. It sought a recognition of regional integrity, and broadly identified the new heresy with the disruption of the social order. It sought to preserve the structural integrity of a society in which a sacramental understanding of the world retained considerable vitality, and for which religious institutions remained “a constellation of sanctuaries, the points of material contact with the unseen world.” It originated at the popular level, in village after village, were faith had its deepest roots. Here, the people took their stand. In the largest sense, the Pilgrimage of Grace was a defense of “Christ’s faith” as expressed so simply in Lincolnshire by ordinary men. Whether they understood it or not, it was also a pilgrimage in the truest sense of the medieval pilgrimatio ideal. It was a living supplication of brave men taking up the cross against the destruction of what they considered to be beautiful and sacred, a valiant defense of what was familiar, and of what was loved, of the Abbeys as the patrimony of the poor, and of Heaven, as it was sacramentally perceived.
Henry’s, or Cranmer’s Reformation was a revolution from the top. The story is that after she became queen, Mary had her father’s body thrown into the river. The present infatuation with him. a kind of attempt to humanize this monster, to make him a romantic figure, is a symbol of the coarsening of elite opinion.
They had Aske, they needed a Catholic Oliver Cromwell.
I had never heard that about Mary. Wow!
Imagine how she must have felt as a girl about twenty who went from bring a Princess Royal to a bastard. Required as Elizabeth later was, to live daily in fear of her life. Birds in gilded cages. Not to let loose, not even to be killed while Henry continued his quest for a male heir. Then come Edward and living under the rule of a child tyrant, himself the pawn of his relatives. It is amazing that either girl was able to retain her sanity, and why each was warped although in different ways.
Imagine how she must have felt as a girl about twenty who went from bring a Princess Royal to a bastard. Required as Elizabeth later was, to live daily in fear of her life. Birds in gilded cages. Not to let loose, not even to be killed while Henry continued his quest for a male heir. Then come Edward and living under the rule of a child tyrant, himself the pawn of his relatives. It is amazing that either girl was able to retain her sanity, and why each was warped although in different ways.
Have to take a look.
I have a coworker named Catherine Howard. We suggested she attend the Halloween party in a headless costume.
I described them. I didn’t criticize them.
You have a guilty conscience, are embarrassed by being inspired by him, and took it as criticism.
All older girls in the British royal family get to be heir, and wait for a male to be born, or not.
Think of those who are born bastards, like Edward IV, who later were elevated to the purple.
They are all mad. Can’t not be.
Of course sermons were in the vernacular, so the clergy could tell the people what the clergy wanted them to know.
The publishing of the Bible was subversive, in the sense that people could read the Bible themselves, see the pretense behind Catholic authority.
One of the exercises in new testament Greek translation is to derive a translation most at odds with the conventional translation. The translation Peter’s commission can be translated with “on this rock” being not Peter, but on the confession.
Peter was not infallible, or he couldn’t have denied how Christ three times?
Cranmer’s revolution would only be a revolution if the Catholic Church pretended to be a government.
Popery without the Pope is what some called it. Normally that change in government by some already in government is called a coup.
It was caesaropapism, the form invented by Constantine and perpetuated in Byzantium and in Moscovy.
Not embarrassed by him at all. He’s a wonderful man. Put your pretend-to-be-a-psychologist act back in the box it came in.
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