For her third-year dissertation UoP history student Sadie White looked into representations of the French Queen Catherine de’ Medici, one of several late-sixteenth century female rulers famously denounced by John Knox in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558). As Sadie describes, Catherine, foreign, from a family considered inferior in status to the French monarchy, no great looker, and barren for the first ten years of her marriage, has had a hard press over the years, both in her own time, and still today, as represented in contemporary TV and film drama. She is a salutary reminder of how female rule continues to be […]
Tag Archives | religious conflict
Disorderly baptisms in mid-seventeenth century England
Baptism is as a rite of central importance within the Christian religion. Deriving from the Gospels, it was one of only two of the original seven Catholic sacraments retained by English Protestants. In late-sixteenth and seventeenth century England, with high birth rates, and everyone required to attend church by law, it was a very familiar ritual, commonly performed before the congregation on a Sunday. It also generated much controversy, over its precise theological meaning, as well as the way, time and place in which it should be conducted. During the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, many of the existing practices of the English Church was challenged and reformed, including […]