'A very hot discourse': Anti-episcopal and anti-Catholic pamphlets in the 'Thomason Tracts', 1640-1642.

摘要

The pamphlet or broadside was used as a medium for disseminating religious ideas since the beginning of Luther's Reformation. Printing had been exploited extensively and effectively by early and later Protestants in Europe and England. The advent of relatively mass-circulated printing material created a more dispersed, atomistic and individualistic audience with new links made to more distant collective units. This division of experience was heightened by the rise of English Protestantism and its subsequent separation into disparate sects.;Anti-Catholicism took many elite and popular forms in England during the late sixteenth and early to mid-seventeenth centuries. The explicit identification of the Roman Church with Babylon and the Pope as Antichrist gained legitimacy with the publication of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments in 1570. It warned of the political danger posed to England, as the first and most rancorous enemy of the Roman church, by popery and about the role that the English were fated to play in the destruction of the "false church".;From November 1640 onwards, the assembly of the Long Parliament gave critics of Caroline religious policies a forum for effective complaint. The boundaries of "popish" extended beyond criticisms of the Catholic Church to include the policies of Archbishop Laud and, for some writers, all bishops, as well. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).