Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Note on conventions
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Abbey ruins, sacrilege narratives and the Gothic imagination
- 2 Anti-popery and the supernatural
- 3 Answering back: orality and controversy
- 4 Martyrs and confessors in oral culture
- Conclusion: orality, tradition and truth
- Notes
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Note on conventions
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Abbey ruins, sacrilege narratives and the Gothic imagination
- 2 Anti-popery and the supernatural
- 3 Answering back: orality and controversy
- 4 Martyrs and confessors in oral culture
- Conclusion: orality, tradition and truth
- Notes
- Index
Summary
… as for oral Traditions, what certainty can there be in them? What foundation of truth can be laid upon the breath of man? How do we see the reports vary, of those things which our eyes have seen done? How do they multiply in their passage, and either grow, or die upon hazards?
What impact did post-Reformation Catholicism have on England's oral culture? The Protestant theologian Joseph Hall provides one point of entry in an influential passage from his tract The Old Religion, usually held to be the first occasion in English when oral tradition is named as such. Attacking Catholics for investing tradition with an authority comparable to the written word of God, he makes pejorative use of the familiar idea that traditions could be passed down verbally as well as contained in writing, and links oral tradition, oral transmission and unreliability in a way that implies a strong pre-existing association between Catholics and orality. As against the fixedness of print, oral communication was seen as having infinite potential to distort, and it became a powerful metaphor to express the fears about the fertility of ignorance that are so common in anti-Catholic polemic.
But this is only one reason why the association between orality and Catholicism was a natural one in post-Reformation England.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England , pp. 1 - 22Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007