CHURCH AND STATE
fig. 16-4 (a) Henry VIII, portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger (1540). (b) Elizabeth I bestriding the map of England, portrait by Marcus Gheerhaerts (1592).
The English reformation was totally unlike the German and Swiss ones whose musical effects we have yet to consider. It was led from above by the monarch; it was as much a political as a religious commotion, and it carried a portentous tinge of nationalism. Its origin was a quarrel between King Henry VIII and Pope Clement VII, who had refused Henry’s request for annulment of his marriage to his first wife, Katharine of Aragon, for failing to produce a male heir to the throne. (Behind the pope’s ostensibly ecclesiastical judgment there lurked another political power: Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, Katharine’s nephew, whose troops had already sacked Rome once, taking Clement prisoner, and threatened to do it again.) When Henry divorced Katharine in defiance of the church, the pope excommunicated him, and the king retaliated in 1534 with the Act of Supremacy, which made the king the head of the Church of England.
- Citation (MLA):
- Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 16 The End of Perfection." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 15 Mar. 2025. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780195384819-div1-016009.xml>.
- Citation (APA):
- Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 16 The End of Perfection. In Oxford University Press, Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century. New York, USA. Retrieved 15 Mar. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780195384819-div1-016009.xml
- Citation (Chicago):
- Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 16 The End of Perfection." In Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 15 Mar. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume1/actrade-9780195384819-div1-016009.xml
