MONTAGU, Richard

by Richard Montagu

£1,450 · Offered by Sokol Books

First edition, published posthumously, a year after the author s death, of this controversial work intended to help mend the schism between the Church of England and the Vatican by the celebrated anglican Bishop Montague. Richard Montague was educated at Eton and Cambridge, became chaplain to James I, Bishop of Chichester in 1628 and of Norwich in 1638. He disliked the extremes of both Calvinism and Romanism, a position which did little to ingratiate him with either group. In the present work Montagu examines Jewish doctrine and practices before the birth of Jesus, and their implications for Christianity; in doing so he argues strongly against Casaubon, Scaliger, and other Protestant scholars, while defending the Catholic Baronius and his Annales Ecclesiastici. The importance of Foxe s history of martyrdom in the struggle for the identity of the English Church is confirmed by the fact the Bishop of Norwich Richard Montagu, .., published posthumously his own volume of Acts and Monuments in 1642, when the argument in England was almost lost, for the next eighteen years at least. The difference between his view of the Church and that propounded in the Song of Songs is shown in the full title for the work: The acts and monuments of the church before Christ Incarnate. The very idea that the church could exist before the coming of Christ was anathema to those who believed that the Church was His Bride : Montagu argued that there always had been a visible church in existence, that t

• Binding: Hardcover

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