Word: popishness
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...Edmund S. Morgan’s forthrightly-titled essay “Puritans and Sex,” in the December 1942 New England Quarterly. And it turns out that Puritans were by no means the prudes we imagined. One Boston minister, for example, criticized “that Popish conceit of the Excellency of Virginity.” Court records, Morgan writes, reveal that “[w]hen fornication, adultery, rape, or even buggery and sodomy appeared, [members of the Puritan establishment] were not surprised, nor were they so severe with the offenders as their codes...
...some tombstones and a few peculiar carvings, known as spirit stones, meant to repel devils. This wasn't because the Puritans hated art in principle--they didn't, as their portraiture, decorated furniture and other artifacts show--but because they disapproved of images of God and the prophets as "popish," too close to the idolatry they associated with the hated religion of Rome. They were, after all, the direct descendants of the iconoclasts who had destroyed nearly all the medieval art of England. The early New Englanders were people of the Word, not the Image. Truth lived in the Word...
...Popish Plot...
Perhaps the flaws on Cosi Fan Tutti stem from the fact that Squeeze put the LP together in the studio before trying their stuff out live. If the songs on this record had begun as live riffs, spontaneous bits of popish nonsense in the best Squeeze tradition, they might have gone somewhere. Rather, the Fab-Four-that-almost-was (they're actually five now) worked very hard on pulling off a masterpiece in the sterile confines of an airless studio. The result doesn't snap, it rarely crackles, and it never pops...
Spectacles like this undoubtedly led some people to question the purpose of the holiday, and, with the rise of Puritanism, Christmas's very existence was threatened. Regarding the good cheer as "pagan" and "Popish," England's Roundhead Parliament in 1643 abolished the observance of the day. The King protested and mobs attacked those who opened their shops. But Parliament adopted strong measures, and for the next 12 years Christmas as a general English holiday ceased...