HIS109Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: John Calvin, False Pregnancy, Elizabethan Era
Document Summary
By the 16th century, the english church was relatively stable and relatively wealthy. By 1500, there were 12,000 monks and nuns in. The income of the english church was also high. The problem with wealth and spirituality is that it tends to fray the edges of commitment. The aristocratic monasteries often had 4 or 5 servants for every monk and nun. These young people were pledged to the convent when they were eight years old, and had no vocation. The ideas of (cid:498)poverty, chastity and obedience(cid:499) had no meaning. The most famous the deed of st. paul"s, who was heir to an enormous fortune, and to an eight year old. There were attempts to reform the english church, attempts that were powerfully informed by ideas of northern christian humanists. he used that fortune to found a school that is there to this day.
