Andrew Weeks, “The Faustian Reformation”, CenSAMM conference, 500 years: The Reformation and its Resonations (published 4 October 2017)
"We have grown accustomed to an expanded concept of the Reformation that began 500 years ago. We are familiar with the long and multiple, the radical and magisterial reformations. In my presentation, I intend to draw on a strand of Reformation historiography that goes back to the late nineteenth century and flourished again at the end of the twentieth. Its findings stress the anticlerical and antiauthoritarian motives within the popular reformation. By focusing on this well documented aspect of the German Reformation, we can capture important facets of its distinctness, as well as its impact in Germany and abroad. The antiauthoritarianism of the German Reformation informed popular literature, medicine, nature theory, and mystical dissent. In this light, we can re-interpret an anonymous literary work that became emblematic of the age, the 'Faustbook' of 1587; and we can better understand the German reforming tradition of Paracelsus, Valentin Weigel, and Jacob Boehme and their wider European influence."
“The Siege of Munster”, In Our Time (BBC Radio 4, 5 Nov 2009)
“Melvyn Bragg and guests Diarmaid MacCulloch, Lucy Wooding and Charlotte Methuen discuss the Siege of Munster in 1534-35. In the early 16th century, the Protestant Reformation revolutionised Christian belief. But one radical group of believers stood out. The Anabaptists rejected infant baptism and formal clergy, and believed that all goods should be held in common. They were also convinced that the Second Coming was imminent. In 1534, in the north-western German city of Munster, a group of Anabaptists attempted to establish the 'New Jerusalem', ready for the Last Days before the coming Apocalypse. But the city was besieged by its ousted Prince-Bishop, and under the reign of its self-appointed King, a 25-year-old Dutchman called Jan van Leyden, it descended into tyranny. Books were burned, dissenters were executed, and women were forced to marry. As starvation spread, King Jan lived in luxury with his 16 wives. The horrors of Munster have resonated through the European memory ever since.”
Podcast available here
Marta Quatrale, “Nos esse tubam illam nouissimam: (Gnesio-) Lutheran Identity and the Revelation of the Antichrist in the so-called 'Herrgotts Kanzlei'”, CenSAMM conference on 500 years: The Reformation and its Resonations Conference (published 15 Sept. 2017)
“Within the context of a confessional use of historiography, Lutheran apocalyptic self-identification has been originally and programmatically oriented against the Roman Church. As asserted in the Formula of Concord itself, the importance of the Reformation as historical event should be found in the historical revelation of the hidden pattern of Revelation as a whole. This happens through the event of the revelation of the identity of the (already existent but hidden) Antichrist. Despite the recognition of several 'Antichrists', …the proper Antichrist remained for Luther himself the Papacy. Shortly after Luther’s death, as a consequence of the defeat of the Protestant Schmalkaldic League in the Schmalkaldic War of 1546/47, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V ordered at the 1548 Diet of Augsburg the so-called Augsburg Interim (Declaration of His Roman Imperial Majesty on the Observance of Religion Within the Holy Empire Until the Decision of the General Council). In this context, such “generally protestant” historical awareness – the fact that everything concerning the Pope, and later, everything concerning each possible kind of political theology, lies on fictive, so invalid premises – found a perfect storm for the development of a new, more radical self-legitimation within the Reformation itself: the so-called Hergotts Kanzlei in Magdeburg, forerunner of the Gnesiolutheran (namely, 'truly Lutheran') production. The reason is to trace back to one of its implied assumption: if intended in its apocalyptic potential, the legitimation of Lutheranism as historical event of revelation is made possible due to its historical defeat, recognised as sign of the divine presence, historically revealing itself as mortifying bond. My aim here is to shortly sketch this process, and to trace back its implications to clarify the apocalyptic connotation of the construction of the concept of '(Gnesio-) Lutheran Identity', as controversial element first and foremost in the negative sense of the refusal of any possible theological-political claim.”
Raheem Oluwafunminiyi, “Luther versus Us: Encountering the Reformation through the Eyes of an African Class”, CenSAMM conference, 500 years: The Reformation and its Resonations (published 4 October 2017)
“A decade ago as a fresher in one of the local universities, along with ninety-five students across three departments (History, English and French) in the Arts Faculty, were offered the course, European History, 1300-1789. Each outline was examined once every week in a two and half hour class, sometimes less, but one particular topic – The Reformation and Rise of Protestantism – appeared atypical. Aside the fact that it lasted for three weeks, close to 4 hours was spent haggling critically over wide-ranging issues under this rather ‘provocative’ topic. For three weeks, fierce debates on why the principal actor, Martin Luther would openly challenge the Church took centre stage. A good number questioned Luther’s arguments against the Church while others criticised the latter for its non-receptiveness to change. The class took an introspective assessment of Luther’s 95 Theses, a piece many accused him of ‘stealing’ from earlier reformists like Peter Waldo, John Wycliffe, John Huss, Desiderius Erasmus among others. This group, albeit, argued that Luther presented absolutely nothing new, they were of the conviction, nevertheless, that the Church needed reforms and it was only a matter of time that someone would eventually emerge to call for a shift. Not a few believed Luther was wrong, yet a handful openly went up in arms against his decision to perpetually back the Catholic Church and Catholicism he had inadvertently fragmented into two distinct ideologies. This study reflects on this three-week class where ninety-five African students critically engaged Luther and the Reformation through robust, and at other times, critical debates. It identifies and examines some of the contentious issues that characterised the Reformation era through the eyes of this class and the divisive propensities such religious encounters tend to assume in strictly African academic (student) settings. Oral interviews shall also be conducted among select students of that class to gauge their opinions on how they perceive the Reformation 500 years after. While it may have thawed in coming centuries across Europe, this study contends that the Reformation would be re-awakened in distant West Africa in the second decade of the 20th century where African independent churches established by Africans also split from mainline historic churches, enacting reforms doctrinally native to African peoples.”
Michael Questier, “The Protestant Reformation in England and the Making of Catholic Saints”, CenSAMM conference, 500 years: The Reformation and its Resonations (published 3 October 2017)
“If there is one thing on which many scholars of the English Reformation are agreed, it is that the Catholic account of that historical event is, if not exactly a fantasy, then so heavily coloured by polemical and hagiographical bias as to be almost incompatible with “mainstream” versions of politics and religion in the sixteenth century and after. Nor would one deny that (though Catholics are not alone in this) there has been a fair amount of myth-making in the way in which Catholic narratives of their past have been compiled. On the other hand, that process has itself remained largely concealed. The contention of this paper is that we should look again at the nineteenth- and twentieth-century English response to the Roman curia’s legal procedures for investigating the causes of those in the Reformation period who were, in their own time, acclaimed for their heroic sanctity; and this included those who suffered for their opposition to, as they saw it, heresy and heretical tyranny. The complex investigations conducted by Rome’s officials and agents, in the period up to 1987, into cases of alleged martyrdom for religion, it is argued here, have in fact contributed substantially to the accumulation of the historiographical traditions which are now central to our narratives of the Reformation.”
Ariel Hessayon, "Conjunctions between early modern English radicalism and Western esotericism", CenSAMM conference on 500 years: The Reformation and its Resonations Conference (published 15 Sept. 2017)
“In retrospect the events that began in the new university town of Wittenberg in 1517 initiated more than one Reformation. Following G.H. Williams's seminal work it is conventional to think of both a Magisterial and a Radical Reformation spreading through Europe during the sixteenth century. In this paper I want to make the case that England experienced not only a Magisterial Reformation through its break with the papacy and adoption of Calvinism by the state church, but also a Radical Reformation during the English Revolution of 1641-1660. The Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century was not a cohesive movement. Indeed it might best be conceived as a jumble of ideas spread by a heterogeneous assortment of charismatic and committed believers. And yet a number of the key doctrines and demands that emerged during this period subsequently reappeared in a different English context. I think this is significant. Accordingly, I want to explore these notable commonalities: identification of the Pope with antichrist within an intoxicating apocalyptic milieu; hostility to university trained clergy and calls for the abolition of tithes; desire to return to an uncorrupted primitive Christianity practised and preached by the Apostles (occasionally extending to community of goods); opposition to infant baptism; and, if somewhat rarely, denial of the Trinity.”
BBC Radio 4 interview with the historian of the seventeenth century Christopher Hill (broadcast 14 Oct. 1991) available here
“The Muggletonians”, a short film about the Muggletonians, including interviews with Christopher Hill and William Lamont, and the prophetic speculation of E.P. Thompson about the existence of a Muggletonian archive
Matthew Bingham, “Baptism, Scandal and the Kingdom of God: Baptists during the English Revolution”, CenSAMM/Queen's University Belfast symposium, The Gender of Apocalypse (published 10 Feb. 2016)
“From their early seventeenth-century beginnings, English Baptists were regularly pilloried as seditious and scandalous, dangerous to both religious orthodoxy and civic peace. Often, this rhetoric took on an overtly sexualized dimension as English Baptists were connected with the polygamous Anabaptist uprising in sixteenth-century Munster. Because male Baptist ministers regularly baptised female converts by full immersion, the former were often portrayed as licentious seducers. This paper will explore such sexualized, gendered rhetoric and connect it with Baptists' strong sense of Christ's return and his impending millennial reign, showing how these themes worked to reinforce each other for both Baptist separatists and their polemical opponents.”
“George Fox and the Quakers”, In Our Time (BBC Radio 4, 5 April 2012)
“Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the origins of Quakerism. In the mid-seventeenth century an itinerant preacher, George Fox, became the central figure of a group known as the Religious Society of Friends, whose members believed it was possible to obtain contact with Christ without priestly intercession. The Quakers, as they became known, rejected the established Church and what they saw as the artificial pomp and artifice of its worship. They argued for religious toleration and for the equality of men and women. Persecuted for many years, particularly after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the Quakers survived to become an influential religious group, known for their pacifism and philanthropy.”
Podcast available here
Ariel Hessayon, “The Fifth Monarchists and Thomas Venner's rebellion of 1661”, from the 20017 CenSAMM conference, Violence and Millenarian Movements (published 27 April 2017)
Ariel Hessayon, “Jane Lead and the Philadelphian Society, c.1697–1704", CenSAMM/Queen's University Belfast symposium, The Gender of Apocalypse (published 9 Feb. 2016)
“The Philadelphian Society first appeared openly at London in January 1697. Their name was taken from Philadelphia, meaning brotherly love in the original Greek, the sixth of the seven churches in Asia Minor to whom John sent a book containing his revelation. These seven historical churches were understood as types, with the Philadelphian church superseding the Church of England, Presbyterianism, Independency, Anabaptism, the Fifth Monarchists and Quakers. According to a retrospective self-serving history of this small religious movement they were not a ‘peculiar sect’ or party but a ‘spiritual people’ with strong millenarian beliefs. Philadelphian teaching, moreover, emphasised the fulfilment of prophecies and full completion of divine promises, including the conversion of the Jews; primitive Christianity as practised by the Apostles; peace, love and Protestant church unity; the Reformation of Manners; charity; the necessity of private and public revelation, which superseded insufficient human learning; and the ‘deeply Mystical Work of the Regeneration and Ascension of Souls’. Against the backdrop of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), the Glorious Revolution (1688–89), the Toleration Act (1689), and the lapse of the Licensing Act (1695), not to mention the belief that Christ’s second coming would occur on 23 August 1697, this paper explores the public emergence of the short-lived Philadelphian Society within the wider contexts of an emerging British Enlightenment, spiritual devotions, visionary experiences and apocalyptic expectation. Although it has been argued that the Philadelphians must be considered a ‘spectacular failure’, they are peculiar in that so many of their guiding spiritual lights, so many readers and indeed authors of their texts, had been women. Foremost was Jane Lead (1624–1704). Accordingly, the construction of Lead’s message and its dissemination together with her social network and the movement’s disintegration on her death will be the principal focus here.”
Matthew Rowley, “From Children of Abraham to Seed of the Serpent: Changing Beliefs concerning Native Americans before and during King Philip's War, 1620-1676”, CenSAMM conference, Violence and Millenarian Movements (published 27 April 2017)
“Between 1620 and 1676, Puritan attitudes towards the Native Americans went through three main—though at times overlapping—phases: ambivalence, expectation, and disillusionment. As with other European colonies in the Americas, their beliefs were usually complex and tension-laden. The Pequot War (1636–1637) initially drove the English towards closer relations with their Native neighbours. By mid-century, many came to believe that the conversion of Algonquian Indians held special eschatological importance for New England and the world. By 1676, these hopes were dashed. As Puritans and Algonquians entered the prolonged and costly ‘King Philip’s War’, English beliefs took a decisive negative turn—with some even plotting the extermination of civilian Indian converts. This paper details these changing beliefs and evidences the relationship between perceived injustice, scriptural and eschatological reflection, and the justification of violence.”
John Coffey, “Protestant Millennialism and British Antislavery, 1770-1840” CenSAMM conference on 500 years: The Reformation and its Resonations Conference (published 15 Sept. 2017)
“The abolitionist movement has been studied as an episode in the history of capitalism, empire, and domestic political culture, but it is also a puzzling episode in the history of English-speaking Protestantism. Why did many British (and American) Protestants come to believe that the eradication of slavery was possible and even imperative? This belief flew in the face of received wisdom, and was at odds with the traditional Augustinian view that slavery (like war) was a necessary evil in a fallen world. This lecture will address the problem by exploring the impact of the rise of Protestant millennialism over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It will argue that millennialism injected a new sense of possibility into Protestant culture. In particular, millennialist expectation inspired the rise of an evangelical missionary movement in the late eighteenth century. Missionary millennialism would powerfully inform the outlook of many abolitionists, including William Wilberforce and other leading activists. It is no coincidence that the great era of missionary expansion and postmillennial eschatology was also the age in which many Protestants came to believe that they could change the world, that slavery could be eradicated across the globe"
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Christopher Rowland, “‘John Saw these things Reveald in Heaven on Patmos Isle’: the Book of Revelation anticipates Blake’s Apocalypse”, CenSAMM conference, Apocalypse in Art: The Creative Unveiling (published 9 July 2018)
“The words and images of William Blake (1757-1827) typify the meaning of ‘apocalypse’. Indeed, ‘unveiling’ that which is ‘veiled’, whether in our minds and habits, in Christian doctrine and practice, and political structures and ideology, are at the heart of Blake’s work. Blake never used the word ‘apocalypse’ or ‘apocalyptic, though Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the word of Blake when he described him as an ‘apo-, or rather ana-calyptic Poet, and Painter’. The Book of Revelation, the paradigmatic apocalypse, profoundly influenced Blake’s texts and images. It is no surprise that images from Revelation make their appearance among his images, especially the pictures he painted of biblical scenes. How Blake interpreted the Apocalypse in his art will be the particular concern of this paper, though attention will be given to the wider influence of apocalyptic themes in his thought.”
