By Hugh Trevor-Roper
The Civil struggle, the recovery, and the wonderful Revolution in England laid the institutional and highbrow foundations of the trendy figuring out of liberty, of which we're heirs and beneficiaries. The hindrance of the 17th Century uncovers new pathways to knowing this seminal time. Neither Catholic nor Protestant emerges unscathed from the exam to which Trevor-Roper topics the period during which, from political and spiritual factors, the identity and extirpation of witches used to be a significant occasion. Trevor-Roper issues out that "In England the main energetic part of witch-hunting coincided with instances of Puritan strain - the reign of Queen Elizabeth and the interval of the civil wars - and a few very fanciful theories were outfitted in this accident. But...the persecution of witches in England was once trivial in comparison with the event of the Continent and of Scotland. Therefore...[one needs to learn] the rage as a complete, all through Europe, and [seek] to narrate its upward thrust, frequency, and decline to the final highbrow and social activities of the time...".
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Extra resources for The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change
Sample text
The growth of princely States in the advanced capitalist societies undoubtedly, in itself, marked an economic regression, whether those States were patronized by Spain or not. Rome, with its swollen clerical bureaucracy, would have been an unmercantile city at any time. But the Spanish patronage, by its own character and by the necessities of State, imposed the pattern in a yet more extreme form. Moreover, it was fatally successful. The wealth and military support of Spain enabled the princely States under its protection to work: to seem economically viable even if they were not; and this illusion lasted long enough for the new system to become permanent.
For why, we must ask, did the lay princes forward this priestly panic? And why did the fugitive Calvinist entrepreneurs so easily, and so permanently, leave the economic centres of Europe? For after all, the era of panic was relatively brief. Catholic princes (as the case of de Witte shows) were prepared to make concessions to economically valuable heretics, and after a generation most of the Calvinist entrepreneurs had lost their doctrinal purity. If de Witte was prepared to serve Wallenstein and have his son baptized as a Catholic, if the merchants of Hamburg were prepared to work for the King of Spain, there is no reason to suppose that they would have absolutely refused to return to their old allegiance in a more tolerant age.
These Erasmians were Christian and Catholic, but they rejected or ignored a great deal of the new external apparatus of official Catholicism: an apparatus which, since it absorbed energy, consumed time and immobilized property, without having any necessary connection with religion, was equally disliked by educated, by pious, and by active men. So, instead of ‘‘mechanical religion,’’ and of monasticism which had come to represent it, the Erasmians extolled ‘‘primitive Christianity,’’ private devotion, the study of the Bible; and they believed intensely in the sanctification of lay life.