John Bossy - Böcker

A study not of the institution of the Church but of Christianity itself, this book explores the Christian people, their beliefs, and their way of life, providing a new understanding of Western Christianity at the time of the Reformation. Bossy begins with a systematic exposition of traditional or pre-Reformation Christianity, exploring the forces that tended to undermine it, the characteristics of the Protestant and Catholic regimes that superseded it, and the fall-out that resulted from its disintegration.

Outram Evennett was a university lecturer in history at Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. This book, based on his Birkbeck Lectures of 1951, represents some twenty years' work on the sources of the Counter-Reformation. Evennett did not live to complete his task, but he has provided a remarkable synthesis of the vast European literature on this subject. His method was to isolate the special and positive characteristics of the Counter-Reformation and to account for them in relation to the environment in which they developed. This approach is highly original; it sees in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation an attempt not to check but to extend and come to terms with the more individualistic and modern environment in which the Catholic Church found itself. The Jesuits are treated as agents of this change. Dr John Bossy has edited these lectures for publication and added a Postscript, analysing some of the problems raised in the years since the lectures were delivered. Professor David Knowles pays tribute to Evennett's memory in a Foreword.

Outram Evennett was a university lecturer in history at Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. This book, based on his Birkbeck Lectures of 1951, represents some twenty years' work on the sources of the Counter-Reformation. Evennett did not live to complete his task, but he has provided a remarkable synthesis of the vast European literature on this subject. His method was to isolate the special and positive characteristics of the Counter-Reformation and to account for them in relation to the environment in which they developed. This approach is highly original; it sees in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation an attempt not to check but to extend and come to terms with the more individualistic and modern environment in which the Catholic Church found itself. The Jesuits are treated as agents of this change. Dr John Bossy has edited these lectures for publication and added a Postscript, analysing some of the problems raised in the years since the lectures were delivered. Professor David Knowles pays tribute to Evennett's memory in a Foreword.

This absorbing account of Catholic and anti-Catholic plots and machinations at the English, French, and exiled Scottish courts in the latter part of the sixteenth century is a sequel to John Bossy’s highly acclaimed Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair. It tells the story of an espionage operation in Elizabethan London that was designed to find out what side France would take in the hostilities between Protestant England and the Catholic powers of Europe. France was a Catholic country whose king was nonetheless hostile to Spanish and papal aggression, Bossy explains, but the king’s sister-in-law, Mary Queen of Scots, in custody in England since 1568, was a magnet for Catholic activists, and the French ambassador in London, Michel de Castelnau, was of uncertain leanings.Bossy relates how Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, found a mole in Castelnau’s household establishment, who passed information to someone in Walsingham’s employ. Bossy discovers the identity of these persons, what items of intelligence were passed over, and what the English government decided to do with the information. He describes how individuals were arrested or fled, a political crisis occurred, an ambassador was expelled, deals were made. He concludes with a discussion of the authenticity of Elizabethan secret operations, arguing that they were not theatrical devices to prop up an unpopular regime but were a response to genuine threats of counter-revolution inspired by Catholic zeal.

This book tells a true detective story set mainly in Elizabethan London during the years of cold war just before the Armada of 1588. The mystery is the identity of a spy working in a foreign embassy to frustrate Catholic conspiracy and propaganda aimed at the overthrow of Queen Elizabeth and her government. The suspects in the case are the inmates of the house, an old building in the warren of streets and gardens between Fleet Street and the Thames. These include the ambassador, a civilized Frenchman, his wife, his daughter, his secretary, his clerk and his priest, the tutor, the chef, the butler, and the concierge. They also include a runaway friar, the Neapolitan philosopher, poet, and comedian Giordano Bruno, who wrote masterpieces of Italian literature, who was later burned in Rome for his anti-papal opinions, and who has been revered in Italy for his honorable and heroic resistance to papal authority. Others in the cast are Queen Elizabeth, her formidable secretary of state Sir Francis Walsingham, and King Henry III of France; poets, courtiers, and scholars; statesmen, conspirators, go-betweens, and stool-pigeons. When not in London, the action takes place in Paris and Oxford; a good deal of it happens on the river Thames. The hero or villain, who calls himself Fagot, does his work most effectively, is not found out, and disappears.  In the first part of the book these events are narrated. In the second the spy is identified and his story put together. John Bossy’s brilliant research, backed by his forensic and literary skills, solves a centuries-old mystery. His book makes a major contribution to the political and intellectual history of the wars of religion in Europe and to the domestic history of Elizabethan England. Not least, it is compelling reading.

This collection of essays by British, American and French scholars uses the records of the law in Western Europe from the fall of Rome to the nineteenth century in an attempt to outline a social history of the West considered as a history of human relations. The primary themes are dispute, arbitration and conjugal relations; the primary influences considered are feud, Christianity and the state. The contributions are discussed overall by an anthropologist lawyer, Simon Roberts, who writes an anthropological introduction, and by the editor in a short historical postscript. The aim has been to strike a new note in social history by attending more closely to actual people and their actual relations; by drawing on the resources of anthropology, legal history, the history of religious feelings and institutions, and of states, to illuminate their behaviour; and by combining the efforts of scholars representing a diversity of intellectual traditions and a long perspective of human experience.

Christians are supposed to love their neighbours, including their enemies. This is never easy. When feud and honour are common realities, it is even harder than usual. This book sketches the history of peace-making between people (not countries) as an activity of churches or of Christianity between the Reformation and the eighteenth century. The story is recounted in four countries (Italy, France, Germany, and England) and in several religious settings (including Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Church of England, and Calvinist). Each version is a variation upon a theme: what the author calls a 'moral tradition' which contrasts, as a continuing imperative, with the novelties of theory and practice introduced by the sixteenth-century reformers. In general the topic has much to say about the destinies of Christianity in each country, and more widely, and strikes a chord which will resonate in both the social and the religious history of the West.