Reforming the English episcopate 1600-1660

Reforming the English episcopate 1600-1660

This paper investigates the purpose and the power of the reformed episcopate in seventeenth-century England. It takes issue with one particular interpretation of episcopacy in the Stuart period, namely the notion that the Reformation of the Tudor period created a crisis for English bishops. Scholars who propound this view, including R.B. Manning and Andrew Foster, argue that reformist impulses and principles fatally undercut both the authority and the purpose of episcopacy. Historians who pinpoint a crisis in the English episcopacy also locate at least some attempt by bishops to defend their order by recourse to jure divino theories of episcopacy, meaning that bishops underpinned their order by asserting its divine origins. This paper cuts across both ideas. It instead argues that members of the Stuart episcopate pinpointed the distinctively reformed attributes of bishops and that the episcopate staked a claim to a distinctively reformed identity, one not indebted to jure divino ideas and one which complicates modern scholarly perceptions of a reformist crisis in the episcopacy.

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