Hey everybody. We're going to start our unit on the Puritans by going back to Europe in the 1500s and 1600s to talk about the Protestant Reformation. The Protestant Reformation is important for us because it'll help us better understand some of the origins of specific Puritan religious views and also some of their motivations for why they wanted to leave Europe and come to North America. The book you're reading for this unit Kenneth Lockridge's, "A New England Town," Starts with the Puritans leaving England and coming to Massachusetts. By starting here it gives us some some helpful background to understand and fill in some gaps that Lockridge doesn't want to talk about at the beginning of his book so that's why we're starting here okay. Now prior to the 1500s, Europe was largely unified religiously under the Catholic Church. In the Middle East and in parts of Eastern Europe there existed what we would refer to as the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church doesn't play much part in the story we're telling so we're we're not really talking about the Orthodox Church. But for the rest of Europe, for the majority of Europe prior to the 1500s, believers were Catholic. But the unity of the Catholic Church started to breakdown in the early 1500s and the person we most associate with this breakdown was a german monk by the name of Martin Luther. Luther had become increasingly disturbed by what he saw were problems with the direction of the Catholic Church. This would eventually lead him to create a series of complaints about the direction of the church in the form of questions and then go to his large local cathedral (it was it was a Castle Church in Wittenberg) and post these 95 complaints that he had arrived. This came to be known, this document came to be known, as the 95 Theses. This image I start this presentation with is of Martin Luther with his 95 Theses nailed to the front door of Castle Church. The most famous example, there were lots of others in this document but the most famous complaint Luther had about the direction of the church was of the practice of "indulgences." An indulgence was a dispensation you could buy from the church that would allow sins to be forgiven either for yourself, for family, for friends, or even for somebody who had already died. You'd make an offering to the church and these sins would be forgiven. Luther was horrified by this practice of indulgences. He didn't find it anywhere referred to in the Bible and didn't believe it should be part of Christian teaching and so this was one of the things that he complained about in the 95 Theses. Now Luther's goal was to reform the Catholic Church but what he wound up doing is actually dividing the Christian church in Europe. Luther would be excommunicated, kicked out of the Catholic Church by the Pope. The Pope is the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church and the Pope excommunicated Luther. But what happened is that Luther and his followers started to create their own denomination of Christianity. To this day there's there's a denomination of Christians known as Lutherans that marks its origins to the the 95 Theses and Luther nailing these these complaints on the cathedral door. What's important about Luther also is that he was not in isolation. Other people were also increasingly desirous of breaking away from the Catholic Church so it's sort of like Luther was the straw that broke the camel back. Once Luther and his followers broke away from the Church many others in Europe felt like they could also start breaking away from the Catholic Church This breaking away from the Catholic Church is what comes to be known as the "Protestant Reformation." Now the root word in Protestant is "protest." These were the people that protested against the Catholic Church and broke away. But there was tremendous diversity in the religious beliefs of these various Protestants that were breaking away. Just because you disagreed with the teachings of the Catholic Church and developed your own ideas about Christian faith didn't necessarily mean you agreed with somebody else that was breaking away from the catholic church. For example, to this day there are various types of of Christians that call themselves Protestants that have very different interpretations of Christianity form one another. For example you have very conservative interpretations of of Christianity, say Southern Baptist and Southern Methodists. But you also have very liberal interpretations coming out of the Protestant tradition-- denominations like the Unitarians, for example. All right, so Protestant doesn't necessarily designate a specific set of beliefs per se, other than these were the people that broke away from the Catholic Church. Spoiler alert, the Puritans are going to be one of these groups of people that break away. But to understand that, we need to now look more specifically at Europe and the experiences of the English with the Protestant Reformation. When it comes to England it would be King Henry VIII who was king of England in the early 1500s that took England away from the Catholic Church and helped create a new Protestant denomination in England. Here's Henry right here. Yes, this handsome fellow right here. What's interesting about Henry's motivations for breaking away from the Catholic Church is that they weren't terribly religious his reasons for doing so. They were more personal and also financial as it turns out. Henry was married to a woman, Catherine of Aragon, and Henry had become frustrated with his wife because she hadn't bore him a male heir. At the same time, he was becoming infatuated with one of her ladies in waiting, Anne Boleyn. So he wanted, Henry wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn but strictly speaking this is a no-no in the Catholic Church. Divorce is not allowed. Now what you can do in the Catholic Church is apply for an annulment. An annulment in Catholic terms is not so much a divorce, it's a claim that the marriage actually never took place in the eyes of the Church. And so Henry applied for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, however the Pope denied this request. Turns out that Catherine's nephew was the king of the Holy Roman Empire and the king of the Holy Roman Empire put pressure on the Pope to not allow this annulment to go through and so it didn't go through. However, Henry noticed what was going on in continental Europe where people were starting to break away from the Catholic Church--for example, groups like the Lutherans. This inspired Henry to break away from the Catholic Church. You didn't need permission to get annulment for your marriage from the Pope if you're no longer Catholic. And so in 1534 Henry VIII helped put through parliament the creation of what comes to be known as the "Church of England. The specific law was the Act of Supremacy that placed the king of England, in this case Henry VIII at the head of a newly created church that came to be known as the Church of England. This is going to be important, because later on we're going to talk about the Puritans and their ideas about separation of church and state and the relationship between church and the government. And one of the things that's going to deeply influence their thinking was the fact that Henry VIII and other English monarchs are not only going to be the political rulers of England, but they're also going to be the head of the Church of England. And for the Puritans, they're going to interpret this as causing problems and so later on when they create their churches and they create their governments in Massachusetts, they're going to try and avoid this problem. We're going to talk about how they do that when they get there but i want to get that into your head right now. To understand that this decision by Henry, to place himself both as the political leader of England--which he already was-- and now the head of this newly created protestant church the Church of England is a faithful decision and something that the Puritans later on are going to try and avoid. So you get the Church of England and England is no longer Catholic and is now a protestant country. However, not everybody was pleased with this new Church of England. It turns out Henry maintained a lot of the outer trappings, some of the look, some of the feel of the Catholic Church. Again, he wasn't necessarily motivated to break away from the Catholic Church because of profound religious beliefs. He wanted to divorce his wife. And, oh by the way, when the Church of England was created, the English crown confiscated all Catholic possessions-- their lands, property, wealth that they had in England. It was tremendous windfall both for the king himself personally but also prominent members of Parliament that Henry made sure to pay off to help ease this transition away from the Catholic Church to the Church of England. But Henry didn't have a big problem with the religious teachings of the Catholic Church so when it came time to create the Church of England there was still a fair amount of look and feel of the older Catholic Church still remaining. In the Church of England to give you one example of this is, other Protestants that broke away often rebelled against the grandeur of the Catholic Church. Think of large Catholic Cathedrals with with their stained glass and gold and marbled floors. A lot of other protestants moved in a very different direction. As we'll see, the Puritans are going to be one. Puritan churches became very plain buildings. In fact, they they didn't even really refer to them as churches. They called them "meeting houses." They were simple and they were unadorned. They were functional--you could almost think of the way that the Puritans thought about churches is kind of like-- the old multi-purpose rooms a lot of you had in elementary school. Where you know, it was a place where you ate lunch but you also had assemblies and on rainy days when you could not play outside, you'd do stuff in the multi-purpose room. That's kind of the way the Puritans thought of their churches. They held religious services there but they also had town meetings and and other things. The structure itself was not important for the Puritans. It didn't need to be grand, it didn't need to be beautiful. It was simply a place for believers to gather. The church was not a physical structure, the church was a collection of believers. However, Henry VIII liked the big Catholic cathedrals and so he maintained them in the Church of England, so you still had large magnificent churches, stained glass, marble, and gold. For some Protestants in England, the Church of England seemed like a compromise that had not broken away sufficiently hard enough from the Catholic Church. Some of these people tried to reform this newly created Church of England to get it to be less Catholic and break harder in the spirit of the Rrotestant Reformation. This is where our friends the Puritans are going to come in. The Puritans were these people that were they were dissatisfied with the direction of the Church of England. They were happy the Church of England had broken away from the Catholic Church but they were disappointed it didn't break away hard enough. So this is where their name came from-- "Puritans"--it was actually originally a term of derision that other members of the Church of England labeled these people that wanted to reform the church. They would make fun of them, "Oh, you're the Puritans. You're the ones that think you're so holy. You're the ones that think you're so better than." That's where the name comes. These were the people that wanted to purify the Church of England. In the beginning the numbers of these Puritans would be relatively small but as time would go on they would gain followers and as they gained followers they became more and more problematic for monarchs of of England. And so that's probably a good place for us to stop. Here you you get the Protestant Reformation. You get the Puritans that are a byproduct of this Reformation through trying to further purify the Church of England. In our next lecture we'll start talking about the Puritans leaving England and coming and we'll talk a bit more about some of their disagreements with the later monarchs of England Henry VIII in terms of the decision making for leaving England and coming to Massachusetts Okay, all right. I'll see you next time, bye.