Why did the late 19th century suck so much when it came to academia and history? The more I read, the more amply distorted views of historical events and explainations all seem to come out of the 1870-1910 time period. Current example: the English Reformation. Until the 1970s we seem to have lived with this view of:
The Reformation came to England, and it was good. It was godly. Catholicism was morally bankrupt, no one believed in any of it, anti-clericalism was rampant, and besides, it was really just old "celtic" pagan worship smooshed into the Chruch. You can see it in the cult of saints! All saints and Mary, no Jesus. Christianity started out ok, but by 300 it was corrupt (by all of these celtic and gaulish invaders) and it's been downhill ever since. Enter the Lollards, who noticed everything wrong and preped the soil for the seeds of dissent. Yeah, there was Henry and his wives, but the ground was ready for the Reformation anyway (remember Lollards, soil analogy, and duh! we're Anglican now so we must have always wanted to be).. the good English people just needed the smallest indication that they could overthrow Catholicism and it would be all icon-burning from there on out... of course those icons are really PAGAN idols, so it's all good. We had a little blip when Mary took the throne, but everyone hated her and her Spanish husband and she died, so moving on to ELIZABETH - the single greatest Protestant monarch! She beat the pants off the Spanish, protected England formt he papists and just generally kicked ass. End of Story, (don't look to closely into the 17th century...).
Of course, in the last 30 years the cultural and social historical turns overturned much of this narrative. There are now several English reformations, Catholicism in England really flourished up until Henry VIII's split, and arguable through his death. It's possible that the schsm could have been resolved, and that had Mary lived longer England would have gone back into the Catholic fold. It would have been a reformed version of Catholicism, but Catholicism nonetheless. There is also furhter evidence that on the whole your everday Englishman and women generally went with the authority of their worldly rulers rather than their spiritual conviction (at least through the early years of Elizabeth). Abandoning Catholicism did not necessarily mean one became an enthusiastic Protestant. There are numerous accounts of conversions, but on the whole people did what they always do and went with the flow.
What surprises me the most is the current, I would argue non-academic, mainstream misperception of the late medieval Catholic Church, specifically the accusations of "paganism" in late Medieval Catholicism. This is were the 19th century has messed things up. Late 19th century folklorists,looking for 19th revived forms of psuedo Celtic religious "practice" in medieval Catholicism "found it" in practices. TThere is the tendency to take the Reformation-Era Protestant charge of paganism (which was referring to Roman paganism) and read into it a 19th century mystified Celtic paganism, in which pagan rituals are searched for in festivals that were often not only regular Christian practice, but many which had been developed as recently as the 14th century. This extends to view of Guy Fawkes Day, which as been attributed to a pagan bonfire festival, but was really “derived directly from the misfortunes of Guy Fawkes and his partners and not from any pagan tradition of kindling bonfires and burning effigies at the onset of winter” (Hutton, 183). Of the major holy days w/in the traditional religious calendar year, only the celebration of New Year's on Jan 1st and the decorating of Churches/altars with greenery canbe difinitively traced to Roman practice. Yes, other holiday may not be found in the New Testament, but that doesn't mean that they were some how wrenched from a long-dead Celtic or native pagan tradition either. They developed as part of Christianity, Christian life based on good works, and Christian practice. Heck, most of them were as a way of 1) marking the seasons and 2) fundraising for the parish. I guess it comes down to whether you believe that all Christian practices should only be practiced if they can be found in the New Testament - which really limits "real Christianity" to not developing until 1500 years after the life of Christ. As a historian, I find it hard to believe that millions of people got it wrong until Luther (or Huss or Wycliff) came along. Talk about historical removal from your sources... And I think, hope, that most historians today can put their religious beliefs, whatever they may be, aside as they dig into their material. The revisionist work on the Reformation seems to bear that out... but it still hasn't seeped down into the mainstream or even secondary school levels of education.
So on a final note, as someone who believes that all religions are a human construction - and therefore all equally fantasy - I find it funny that I'm still reading some histories where people are fighting over whose sky god is more real.
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