Religious Reform And British Concept Of Death And Its Embodiment

In the medieval belief system of Christianity, death occupy an important position.A set of integrated theoretical concepts and practical mechanism were derived from the belief of death,among them, the "original sin", salvation and eternal life are the important contents. To the 12 th century, the idea of death and its practice further developed, the main performance is the spread of purgatory faith and the practice of rescuing the soul from the purgatory at an early date.As the place where the soul will suffer from the moment of death till the last judgement, purgatory exacerbated the people for fear of death.In order to shorten the time of the souls in purgatory,various practice of the salvation of the soul obtain further development, such as held the dead mass, charitable donations, buried in the holy place and bought indulgences, etc.In 16 th century, the religion reformation broke out in Western Europe.For a variety of realistic and religious interests,British religious reformers,led by the king, made a series of new death regulations in the form of legislation, mainly reflected in abandoning purgatory faith,forbidding selling indulgences,upholding the primacy of the bible,canceling the wake at night and the requiem mass, etc.Because the government carried such regulations mandatorily, a large number of chapels which attached to the church were for ced to confiscate, indulgences were banned, but efforts to redeem the soul didn’t have changed much.Official position at Protestant the fanatic member and the Catholic really produced certain influence, but it is undeniable that the common people who occupy the great majority of population, their thoughts still incline to conservative.In this case,even if in those place which affected by the protestant deeper such as the south and eastern region, the Catholic tradition still keeps powerfully influencing people’s daily life.The Pro-testantism world,regardless of the cities or the countryside,never break off with tradition more profoundly.True,British social collective consciousness has experienced a great change that, in order to solve the communication between the dead the living, the system which being constructed took over two centuries broke up.However, what need to be pointed out is that,to a great extent,these funeral practice and the change of faith were not the function of the religion reformation.In fact,it is the result of social secularization and the increas-ing of individualism.The new mode of death that those people with power or wealth suggested or established in the society didn’t carry out expansion.In the presence of such reformation, people response to it didn’t with the same voice.The official words were abdicated to the strong of social custom. At the same time, during the protestant reforma-tion, the efforts of removing the old didn’t achieve the desired results. On the contrary,such reformation pave the way for the fully secularization thoughts into the funeral rites.At such social level,the practice of death did not closely reflect the changes of death theory,such reformation in England didn’t bring about profound impact like the traditional impression in our mind.This article focus on the death theory and practice during the reformation,aiming at revealing the misconceptions and understanding deviation about religious reformation.At the same time, from the perspective of this micro-historical research,makes possible corrections to those existing problems.