Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Altars Restored : The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547-c.1700, PDF eBook

Altars Restored : The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547-c.1700 PDF

PDF

Please note: eBooks can only be purchased with a UK issued credit card and all our eBooks (ePub and PDF) are DRM protected.

Description

Altars are powerful symbols, fraught with meaning, but during the early modern period they became a religious battleground.

Attacked by reformers in the mid-sixteenth century because of their allegedly idolatrous associations with the Catholic sacrifice of the mass, a hundred years later they served to divide Protestants due to their re-introduction by Archbishop Laud and his associates as part of a counter-reforming programme.

Moreover, having subsequently beenremoved by the victorious puritans, they gradually came back after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

This book explores these developments, over a 150 year period, and recaptures the experience of the ordinary parishioner in this crucial period of religious change.

Far from being the passiverecipients of changes imposed from above, the laity are revealed as actively engaged from the early days of the Reformation, as zealous iconoclasts or their Catholic opponents - a division later translated into competing protestant views. Altars Restored integrates the worlds of theological debate, church politics and government, and parish practice and belief, which are often studied in isolation from one another.

It draws from hitherto largely untapped sources, notably the surviving artefactual evidence comprising communion tables and rails, fonts, images in stained glass, paintings and plates, and examines the riches of local parish records - especially churchwardens' accounts.

The result is a richly textured studyof religious change at both local and national level.