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Holy Families: The Spiritualization of the Early Modern Household Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Alexandra Walsham
Alexandra Walsham*
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Extract

The household has been a compelling metaphor for the Christian Church since biblical times. In his epistle to the Ephesians (3: 15), St Paul wrote of ‘the whole family’ of Christ’s followers ‘in heaven and earth’; in Galatians 6: 10, he equated the congregation of the elect with ‘the household of faith’. But these were merely variations on a more ancient theme. In the Old Testament too the language of kinship is deployed to describe the community of God’s chosen people, the Jews, while the idea of the family as the basic building block of human society and the state has its roots in the fourth century BCE, in Aristotle’s celebrated treatise on Politics. The interrelated tropes of the household as a microcosm and nursery of the Church and commonwealth continued to be invoked throughout the medieval period and they proliferated in the wake of the religious upheavals inaugurated by the Reformation. Expressions of these commonplaces abound in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. A long succession of Protestant ministers compared families with ‘seed-plots’ and ‘seminaries’ in which the tender plants of godly religion and good citizenship were nurtured, and with ‘[bee]hives, out of which swarm the materials for greater assemblies’.

Type
Research Article
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Studies in Church History , Volume 50: Religion and the Household , 2014 , pp. 122 - 160
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2014

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References

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78 As noted by Morgan, Godly Learning, 143.

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103 London, BL, MS Lansdowne 50, no. 76, fol. 164r.

104 Kew, TNA, SP 12/16/47.

105 TNA, SP 14/19/72, cited in Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 386.

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