ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the role of sensation and sensory culture in sixteenth-century English reform of worship until the death of Elizabeth. It turns towards two exemplary sensory problems within English reform, the sensory language surrounding the Royal Supremacy. The chapter explores how the godly things of scriptural religion ought to be experienced; Henrician and Edwardine reform efforts, and finally the contention surrounding Elizabethan worship. It examines the sixteenth-century England and how renaissance culture excited anxiety while core changes in doctrine ultimately forced reassessment of what sensation meant to English Christianity. Empirical sensory practices placed heightened value on the particular accidental qualities of an object as more essential to its definition than abstraction of its substance. Empirical sensory practices inverted medieval epistemological hierarchies, but also dramatically exposed the practical failure of its systems of knowledge and their reconciliation with sensible experience.