Empiricism & Particularity in the English Reformation

My new book project, Empiricism and Particularity in the English Reformation, will examine the ways in which medieval moral culture's emphasis on discretion operated in conjunction with late fifteenth-century and sixteenth-century epistemological changes in the context of religious reform.

Its central claim is that the reformation was essential to in the transition and overturning of knowledge hierarchies in the early modern period just as much as the contentions of art or natural philosophy or medicine. Reformers, of any camp, sought to establish their religious and cultural claims of authority through evidentiary or forensic methodologies which cut up or particularized religious life in increasingly minute ways: reformers produced lists of failures, transgressions, or false practices. Such practices employed methods of proof and discretion to disassemble the nature of late medieval belief and knowledge systems at the same time as religious culture contested for the expression of universal claims on truth and authority. The well known particularization, dissection, and empiricism of renaissance artists and textual scholars, or natural philosophers, alchemists, and physicians did not sit well in religious contexts. A 'singular man' was a heretic, a believer caught up in the business of his own self-opinionation which grew out of an overwhelming tendency towards sense-based epistemologies and delusion that fragmented religious systems of knowledge. Yet reformers dissected and broke up the late medieval church, seeking proof - either in scripture or customs - for increasingly particular aspects of Christian life.

This particularization was coupled with the traditional moral call to discern good from evil, which all Christians embraced and which formed the crux of good christian living. The well-worn accounts of authority in the reformation, its contestation and conflicts, have tended not to look at the processes of particularization and empirical practice within the contexts of traditional moral teachings, and the ways in which contestation, busy-ness, and sense-based proof altered the nature of opinionation and belief formation outside of academic theological discourses.

This project will examine the nature of singularity and particularity at the advent of the reformation in England, and its nature to questions of unity and political authority. This discussion will be situated within an account of traditional - and shifting - moral and religious literature that urged English men and women to discern between particular instances good and evil as a matter of daily living, and to list sins and transgressions in the manner of a spiritual diagnosis. I will also trace the development of lists of wrongdoings among religious and moral polemicists, and their relationship to postive lists and descriptions of true godly Christianity within moral and religious literature. The reformation saw concerted interest in what constituted the 'marks of the true church' and the godly community. I will contend that the pursuit of these marks are the most obvious indication of the ways in which claims of religious authority were established and articulated. In theological terms, the question can be seen clearly in the shift from a primarily apophatic mode of religious proof to a kataphatic mode. The need for precise definitions, lists of attributes, and the proliferation of systematic theological accounts in confessions, decrees, or canons, and their new accessibility as rendered in catechisms, exhibits the cultural importance of breaking down systems of Christian belief into increasingly precise components.

The intent is not to argue that systematic accounts of doctrine were new, but that the contestation of religious practices and the traditional calls for discernment severely altered the relationship between opinion and belief, and the role of individual believers in adjudicating the particular forms of religious life. It is this widespread cultural engagement in discernment and the practices of empirically-based methods for proving religious belief that indicate the intimate ties the reformation as a cultural process has to its sister 'happenings' of the renaissance and early science. The moral necessities of discernment made these epistemological shifts not just a matter of learned men in science and medical life, or artists, or textual critics, but of anyone going into a church, seeing a smashed statue, or contesting over the nature of kneeling, the wearing of a surplus, etc.

This study will sit alongside Kuhnian accounts of the history of science, looking to explore how the historiographical interests of the past four decades might integrate and operate within the vast historiography of the English reformation. In this sense it seeks to straddle several historical debates and subfields, and integrate them into an account of the practices of perception that suggest a new way of appreciating the ways in which then reformation operated culturally, and how its cultural practices might be better integrated into its sister fields.