Margo Todd – författare

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century brought a radical shift from a profoundly sensual and ceremonial experience of religion to the dominance of the word through the Book and sermon. In Scotland, the revolution assumed proportions unequaled by any other national Calvinist Reformation. This book explores how such a dramatic shift was accomplished and what effect it had on the masses of people in the pew or in the alehouse.Margo Todd draws on source material from the operations of “kirk sessions,” the most local of the Calvinist church courts, which give details of varied aspects of daily life: baptism, marriage, and burial, poor relief and education, fasts and feasts, sexual offense, and doctrinal error. She shows how the kirk sessions balanced the exercise of discipline with social service to produce a distinctively Scottish Reformed culture in which traditional ritual and drama, propitiatory devices, and even imagery were not discarded but reconstructed in Protestant guise.

Few periods of English history have been so subject to `revisionism' as the Tudors and Stuarts. This volume offers a full introduction to the complex historiographical debates currently raging about politics and religion in early modern England. It* draws together thirteen articles culled from familiar and also less accessible sources* embraces revisionist and counter-revisionist viewpoints* combines controversial works on both politics and religion* covers Tudor as well as early Stuart England* includes helpful glossary, explanatory headnotes and suggestions for further reading.These carefully edited and introduced essays draw on the new evidence of newsletters and ballads and ritual, as well as the more traditional sources, to offer a new and broader understanding of this transformative era of English history.

Few periods of English history have been so subject to `revisionism' as the Tudors and Stuarts. This volume offers a full introduction to the complex historiographical debates currently raging about politics and religion in early modern England. It* draws together thirteen articles culled from familiar and also less accessible sources* embraces revisionist and counter-revisionist viewpoints* combines controversial works on both politics and religion* covers Tudor as well as early Stuart England* includes helpful glossary, explanatory headnotes and suggestions for further reading.These carefully edited and introduced essays draw on the new evidence of newsletters and ballads and ritual, as well as the more traditional sources, to offer a new and broader understanding of this transformative era of English history.

Traditional views of puritan social thought have done a great injustice to the intellectual history of the sixteenth century. They have presented puritans as creators of a disciplined, progressive, ultimately revolutionary theory of social order. The origins of modern society and politics are laid at the feet of zealous English protestants whose only intellectual debts are owed to Calvinist theology and the Bible. Professor Todd demonstrates that this view is fundamentally ahistorical. She places puritanism back in its own historical milieu, showing puritans as the heirs of a complex intellectual legacy, derived no less from the Renaissance than from the Reformation. The focus is on puritan social thought as part of a sixteenth-century intellectual consensus. This study traces the continuity of Christian humanism in the social thought of English protestants.