The Movement Towards Catholic Reform In The Early Xvi Century

Excerpt from The Movement Towards Catholic Reform in the Early XVI Century Hitherto, the stirring events of the Reformation and Counter-reformation have been the chief, if not the sole, attraction for those who have studied the history of the sixteenth century. That stormy age will always maintain a place of high importance in the thoughts of many, both learned and simple, because in it are to be found the sources of numerous modern problems, religious and political. Yet the episodes which occurred in the years immediately anterior to the Reformation are also of great interest. When the story of this earlier epoch shall have been fully written, its readers will discover that the men of that era and their doings are not less fascinating, not less worthy of being chronicled than those of the age which follows. Until a few decades ago the absence of sufficient and accurate information prevented the execution of such a work. But, during the past generation, a number of scholars in England, Germany, and France have been engaged in examining the records of the closing years of the fifteenth century and the opening ones of the sixteenth. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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MacIntyre is greatly discontented with the nature of contemporary morality, which according to him has a form, i.e. what appears like morality, but lacks essential content. He argues that the most common feature of contemporary ethical discourse is that much of it is used to express individual preferences, which leads to disagreements among philosophers, and eventually results in debates that are interminable in character. MacIntyre attributes the cause of this situation to the activities of the enlightenment philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries who, in an attempt to find rational justification for morality repudiated those essential elements that define the essence of morality and give it its contents. Such elements include historical narrative, tradition, teleology, and divine law. In MacIntyres opinion, morality so constructed was destined for failure, since it was not founded on the true nature of the human person. The obvious consequences of this failure were the birth of diverse post-enlightenment ethical theories and a substantial change in the conception of virtue. In order to remedy this deplorable condition of contemporary ethics MacIntyre, along with other virtue ethicists, advocates a certain renaissance of ethical principles that are founded on the true nature of the human person, characterized by historical narrative, tradition, and teleology, all grounded on divine legislation. Morality thus reconstructed finds its fullest expression in the theory of human character traits, i.e. virtues. This is what has motivated MacIntyres construction of virtue theory, which has brought him into confrontation with the enlightenment philosophers. Our study and analysis of MacIntyres theory of virtue reveals that his account of virtue is inadequate. This inadequacy is what has motivated our own project of reconstructing MacIntyres theory of virtue in view of offering an account of virtue that is adequate. In this way our own project complements that of MacIntyre.

This book examines the emergence of the religious refugee as a mass phenomenon from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It considers how Europeans pictured a range of threats as social contagions and how they dealt with these threats by purging ideas, objects, and people.