C John Sommerville
Biographic Data
| ID | 162612 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C John Sommerville |
| GIVEN NAMES | C John |
| FAMILY NAME | Sommerville |
| SIGNATURE | SOMMERVILLE C J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Florida |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 81 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Chinese Views of Childhood
Chinese in the twentieth century, intent on modernizing their country, condemned their inherited culture in part on the grounds that it was oppressive to the young. The authors of this pioneering volume provide us with the evidence to re-examine those charges. Drawing on sources ranging from art to medical treatises, fiction, and funerary writings, they separate out the many complexities in the Chinese cultural construction of childhood and the w…
Stark's Age of Faith Argument and the Secularization of Things: A Commentary
Rodney Stark has recently argued that secularization theory stands or falls with the historical existence of an “age of faith”, which is thought to present a contrast with our present religiously-mixed situation. He presents much recent evidence that the medieval period does not fit that description. But he misconceives the issues. First, faith is not the most natural description of medieval religion, which is better seen as religious culture. As…
Post-secularism Marginalizes the University: A Rejoinder to Hollinger
Like David Hollinger I think that the history of secularization, or as he prefers, de-Christianization, has been unduly avoided and might well be at the center of contemporary American historiography. As he says, this ought to bring religious history more into the mainstream. But I would like to develop some of his points in a different way than he does in the recent "Perspectives" section inChurch History. Our differences derive from the fact th…
Interpreting Seventeenth-Century English Religion as Movements
A number of historians have indicated, perhaps unconsciously, that the concept of religious movement would be useful in reference to seventeenth-century English religious history. But while some have used the term "movement" in describing some religious initiatives, no one has explored the implications of that concept for understanding either religious life or the England of that day. Rather, we continue to force things into the terms of "church"…
The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making
Secular Society/Religious Population: Our Tacit Rules for Using the Term 'Secularization
The increasing discussion of secularization is hampered by several ambiguities. What we need is not some new, academic definition, but to recognize that we already adopt several different meanings for the word, depending on whether we are referring to a society, a population, an institution, an activity, or a mentality. Therefore, treating secularization as a general decline of religion is hardly meaningful. This recognition will make it possible…
Creating and Dividing the Audience, 1640-60
When the corantos delivered information from the edge of the known world it had not been difficult for government to break the news habit. Even when freed from restraint in 1638, the news industry, such as it was, did not revive. But things were different by the 1650s, after periodical news had held up a mirror to readers so that they could recognize themselves among the issues and the forces of the day. The Civil War created a need for periodica…
Living in a Permanent Revolution
Quotes like these make us wary of criticizing our news media and watchful of any threat to press freedom. Though we may rail against the bias of editors or incompetence of reporters, we seem unshaken in our conviction that news is vital and part of the natural order. One might, indeed, claim that our society is literally based on a communion in the news. On the other hand, we also have a feeling that modem societies are in some respects dysfuncti…
Organizing a News Industry, 1640–60
So far, we have only seen periodical news as a commercial sideline among a handful of printers. That was to change when the monarchy lost control of England in 1641 and was too distracted to control the publication of domestic news. In the early 1640s, entrepreneurs competed to develop news production in a variety of ways. Elements with which we are familiar-partisanship, statistics, verbal caricature, editorials, humor, advertisements, and even …
The Coffeehouse as a Periodical Medium, 1660–80
Rather than imagine that periodical news is primarily to provide information about the world, it is possible to see its job as starting the discussion necessary to create an authentic public opinion. If one takes that view, it would follow that accurate or important information-always problematical-is not absolutely necessary to its purpose. Its function could be well served even at a time when the news industry was at low tide, which was certain…
Turning Culture into News: Literature
By the time that the Tatler was dismissing science, it would have been widely understood that the public was moving on to other interests. For the interval had seen the development of literary periodicals. More surprising, it would not be long before England saw the development of an imaginative literature that turned news discourse into an art form.In July 1691, four months after the appearance of the Athenian Mercury, a general review appeared …
Periodicity and Press Freedom, 1670-90
we are used to thinking of the press as an instrument that can be turned on government to create pressure for change. But whence comes the pressure that is needed to win press freedom where it had not existed? To all appearances, the restored Stuart monarchy had succeeded in strangling the infant press. It may seem paradoxical to look at the controlled press itself as part of the explanation for the Revolution of 1688 and its associated changes. …
Developing Despite Monopoly, 1660-80
Histories of English journalism pass rapidly over the period 1655–95 as a dead spot, the era of a managed press when the promise of mid century experiments went unrealized. The perspective of those historians, of course, is that of the journalists-what they were trying to do and what they were kept from doing.’ From that viewpoint it was a frustrating period. Our perspective is that of readers-what they paid money for and read week after week thr…
Turning Religion Upside Down
If periodical news found a natural affinity for politics, it discovered the opposite with religion. Religion is about the abiding realities-about the eternal, if you like-while periodicity encourages a concentration on the transitory and the mundane. Religion tries to deepen the mystery of our existence, while news of religion transforms it into fact. The distorting effect of news on religion had nothing to do with an antireligious bias among ear…
The Club Image and Vicarious Community
The defining moment in the life of the English reading public came at around the tum of the eighteenth century, shortly after the press found itself free. That was when local affairs became part of the world of news, when the image of the club became symbolic of the informed public, and when caricature began to replace civil discourse. Together, these changes would tend to reduce periodical publication from a medium to a mechanism. That is, they …
Inventing Periodical Publication, 1620–40
News may be one of humanity’s oldest pleasures, but daily news is a comparatively recent invention. The time it took for publishers to master the technique of regular, periodical news, and the false starts in the development of that idea, show how curious a notion it is-natural though it may seem after three centuries. And the shock registered by some of those publishers’ better-educated contemporaries reinforces the sense that a whole culture mu…
Dedication
Turning News into Politics
Whole books have been written on news and politics in eighteenth-century England. They describe the government’s attempts to license or tax the press, or to subsidize some papers and intimidate others by libel actions. They mention the press’s influence in shifting power between political parties or against a particular “ministry.” And of course they are especially alert to any possible contribution the press may have made to the American or Fren…
Turning Culture into News: Science
Real press freedom-the freedom to follow political issues-did not arrive in England with the Revolution of 1688. The implications of the revolution for a news industry were not realized until 1695. But in the meantime, in the less sensitive area of intellectual culture, periodical publication began to change the tempo of the arts, science, and scholarship. The demands of a publishing schedule began a long process by which England would exchange c…
The Strangeness of Periodical News
There is a common saying that, whoever discovered water, it wasn’t a fish. That is how we are with periodical news. Daily news is the element in which we swim, so we think of it as a part of nature. For many of us, having news daily seems necessary to being socially conscious, much less “informed.” We can hardly imagine a time, a little more than three centuries ago, when there was not a daily budget of published news from all over. And we can ha…
The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics Of Daily Information
This is the first book to analyse the essential feature of periodical media, which is their periodicity. Having to sell the next issue as well as the present one changes the relation between authors and readers--or customers—and subtly shapes the way that everything is reported, whether politics, the arts and science, or social issues. So there are certain biases that are implicit in the dynamics of news production or commodified information, qui…
Is Religion A Language Game: A Real World Critique of the Cultural-Linguistic Theory
The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith
In this provocative work, Sommerville examines the onset of secularization in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, exploring how and why various aspects of life - art, language, work, play, technology, and power - became divorced from religious values. The work helps modern readers understand what life was like in an age in which religion suffused society and was as basic to thought as the structure of language. Sommerville argues that secu…
The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c. 1580.
prize-winning account of the pre-Reformation church recreates lay people's experience of religion in fifteenth-century England. Eamon Duffy shows that late medieval Catholicism was neither decadent nor decayed, but was a strong and vigorous tradition, and that the Reformation represented a violent rupture from a popular and theologically respectable religious system. For this edition, Duffy has written a new Preface reflecting on recent developme…
Religion in the English Enlightenment: A Review Essay
The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics Of Daily Information
This is the first book to analyse the essential feature of periodical media, which is their periodicity. Having to sell the next issue as well as the present one changes the relation between authors and readers--or customers—and subtly shapes the way that everything is reported, whether politics, the arts and science, or social issues. So there are certain biases that are implicit in the dynamics of news production or commodified information, qui…
Secular Society/Religious Population: Our Tacit Rules for Using the Term 'Secularization
The increasing discussion of secularization is hampered by several ambiguities. What we need is not some new, academic definition, but to recognize that we already adopt several different meanings for the word, depending on whether we are referring to a society, a population, an institution, an activity, or a mentality. Therefore, treating secularization as a general decline of religion is hardly meaningful. This recognition will make it possible…
The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England
The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England
The Anti-Puritan Work Ethic
For years those who have looked for the contribution of religion to the “spirit of capitalism” have concentrated on the English Puritans and their Calvinist counterparts elsewhere. Those scholars have relied on literary evidence to make their points, and to establish the relationship between Calvinist doctrines or assumptions and an ascetic and compulsive devotion to work. It came as a surprise, therefore, when a rigorously quantitative content a…
Religious Faith, Doubt and Atheism
RELIGIOUS FAITH, DOUBT AND ATHEISM C. John Sommerville C. John Sommerville University of Florida Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 128, Issue 1, August 1990, Pages 152–155, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/128.1.152 Published: 01 August 1990
The History of Childhood and Youth: Beyond Infancy
Bibliographic Note: Toward a History of Childhood and Youth
If there is one thing that both sides of the generation gap could agree upon, it would probably be the importance of childhood experience to the development of the individual and of society. And, although professional historians have long neglected the history of the child, and of the cultural construct the publication record of the past several years is evidence of a surge of interest in this field.I This note will cite the literature in English…
Post-secularism Marginalizes the University: A Rejoinder to Hollinger
Like David Hollinger I think that the history of secularization, or as he prefers, de-Christianization, has been unduly avoided and might well be at the center of contemporary American historiography. As he says, this ought to bring religious history more into the mainstream. But I would like to develop some of his points in a different way than he does in the recent "Perspectives" section inChurch History. Our differences derive from the fact th…
Breaking the Icon: The First Real Children in English Books
Bibliographic Note: Toward a History of Childhood and Youth
If there is one thing that both sides of the generation gap could agree upon, it would probably be the importance of childhood experience to the development of the individual and of society. And, although professional historians have long neglected the history of the child, and of the cultural construct the publication record of the past several years is evidence of a surge of interest in this field.I This note will cite the literature in English…
Religious Typologies and Popular Religion in Restoration England
There have been numerous studies of the religious leaders of early modern Europe, but accounts of the religious attitudes and interests of the general public have been highly impressionistic. It might seem a hopeless task to try to reconstruct a profile of the religious mind of such a remote period, and yet historians are not deterred from making broad characterizations, and other disciplines sometimes build on them. The question is not so much w…
Parenthood in America
Popular Religion in Restoration England
Popular Religion in Restoration England
The Anti-Puritan Work Ethic
For years those who have looked for the contribution of religion to the “spirit of capitalism” have concentrated on the English Puritans and their Calvinist counterparts elsewhere. Those scholars have relied on literary evidence to make their points, and to establish the relationship between Calvinist doctrines or assumptions and an ascetic and compulsive devotion to work. It came as a surprise, therefore, when a rigorously quantitative content a…
Breaking the Icon: The First Real Children in English Books
Why Studying Children's Literature Isn't Fun Anymore
The Distinction between Indoctrination and Education in England, 1549-1719
International Relations and Politics
The religious music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
(1984). The religious music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Religion: Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 245-267
The History of Childhood and Youth: Beyond Infancy
Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 . Linda A. Pollock
The Destruction of Religious Culture in Pre‐industrial England
Anglican, Puritan, and Sectarian in Empirical Perspective
Religious Faith, Doubt and Atheism
RELIGIOUS FAITH, DOUBT AND ATHEISM C. John Sommerville C. John Sommerville University of Florida Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 128, Issue 1, August 1990, Pages 152–155, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/128.1.152 Published: 01 August 1990
Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640.
The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith
In this provocative work, Sommerville examines the onset of secularization in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, exploring how and why various aspects of life - art, language, work, play, technology, and power - became divorced from religious values. The work helps modern readers understand what life was like in an age in which religion suffused society and was as basic to thought as the structure of language. Sommerville argues that secu…
The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith.
The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England
The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century
Part 1 The story of child labour. Part 2 The search for order 1680-1810 order and idleness work schooling order as a spectacle. Part 3 The response to child labour 1780-1850: the climbing boys factory children slaves the order of nature. Part 4 Savages: noble savages and children of nature the children of the street recapitulation. Part 5 Waifs and strays: rescue work the prevention of cruelty to children cities the worship of childhood. Part 6 C…
The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c. 1580.
prize-winning account of the pre-Reformation church recreates lay people's experience of religion in fifteenth-century England. Eamon Duffy shows that late medieval Catholicism was neither decadent nor decayed, but was a strong and vigorous tradition, and that the Reformation represented a violent rupture from a popular and theologically respectable religious system. For this edition, Duffy has written a new Preface reflecting on recent developme…
Religion in the English Enlightenment: A Review Essay
The Discovery of Childhood in Puritan England
Religion on the Run
Reflexions de l'A. sur les conclusions qu'exposent trois ouvrages recents sur la vie religieuse en Angleterre ou en France a la fin du Moyen Age et au debut des temps modernes. 1) C. John Sommerville, «The Secularization of Early Modern England : From Religious Culture to Religious Faith», New York, 1992. 2) J. Stachieniewski, «The Persecutory Imagination : English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair», Oxford, 1991. 3) L. Taylor, «…
Sociology (35 works) · Political science (31 works) · Law (27 works) · History (24 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity (15 works) · Art (13 works) · Media studies (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Psychology (12 works)