This thesis examines the life and works of the English Calvinist clergyman Daniel Featley (1582-1645) through the lens of various printed and manuscript sources, especially his manuscript notebooks in Oxford. It links his story and thought to the broader themes of early Stuart religious, political, and intellectual history. Chapter one analyses the first thirty- five years of Featley’s life, exploring how many of the features that underpin the major themes of Featley’s career—and which reemerged throughout his life—were formed and nurtured during Featley’s early years in Oxford, Paris, and Cornwall. There he emerges as an ambitious young divine in pursuit of preferment; a shrewd minister, who attempted to position himself within the ecclesiastical spectrum; and a budding polemicist, whose polemical exchanges were motivated by a pastoral desire to protect the English Church. Chapter two examines Featley’s role as an ecclesiastical licenser and chaplain to Archbishop George Abbot in the 1610s and 1620s. It offers a reinterpretation of the view that Featley was a benign censor, explores how pastoral sensitivities influenced his censorship, and analyses the parallels between Featley’s licensing and his broader ecclesiastical aims. Moreover, by exploring how our historiographical understandings of licensing and censorship have been clouded by Featley’s attempts to conceal that an increasingly influential anti- Calvinist movement was seizing control of the licensing system and marginalizing Calvinist licensers in the 1620s, this chapter (along with chapter 7) addresses the broader methodological issues of how to weigh and evaluate various vantage points. Chapters three and four analyse the publications resulting from Featley’s debates with prominent Catholic and anti-Calvinist leaders. These chapters examine Featley’s use of patristic tradition in these disputes, the pastoral motivations that underpinned his polemical exchanges, and how Featley strategically issued these polemical publications to counter Catholicism and anti-Calvinism and to promulgate his own alternative version of orthodoxy at several crucial political moments during the 1620s and 1630s. Chapter five focuses on how, in the 1620s and 1630s, the themes of prayer and preaching in his devotional work, Ancilla Pietatis, and collection of seventy sermons, Clavis Mystica, were complementary rather than contradictory. It also builds on several of the major themes of the thesis by examining how pastoral and polemical motivations were at the heart of these works, how Featley continued to be an active opponent—rather than a passive bystander and victim—of Laudianism, and how he positioned himself politically to avoid being reprimanded by an increasingly hostile Laudian regime. Chapter six explores the theme of ‘moderation’ in the events of the 1640s surrounding Featley’s participation at the Westminster Assembly and his debates with separatists. It focuses on how Featley’s pursuit of the middle way was both: a self-protective ‘chameleon- like’ survival instinct—a rudder he used to navigate his way through the shifting political and ecclesiastical terrain of this period—and the very means by which he moderated and manipulated two polarized groups (decidedly convictional Parliamentarians and royalists) in order to reoccupy the middle ground, even while it was eroding away. Finally, chapter seven examines Featley’s ‘afterlife’ by analysing the reception of Featley through the lens of his post-1660 biographers and how these authors, particularly Featley’s nephew, John Featley, depicted him retrospectively in their biographical accounts in the service of their own post-restoration agendas. By analysing how Featley’s own ‘chameleon-like’ tendencies contributed to his later biographers’ distorted perception of him, this final chapter returns to the major methodological issues this thesis seeks to address. In short, by exploring the various roles he played in the early Stuart English Church and seeking to build on and contribute to recent historiographical research, this study sheds light on the links between a minister’s pastoral sensitivities and polemical engagements, and how ministers pursued preferment and ecclesiastically positioned themselves, their opponents, and their biographical subjects through print.

Co-tutelle de thèse Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne / Université Libre de Bruxelles, sous la direction conjointe de Michel KAPLAN (Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne) et de Jean-Marie SANSTERRE (Université Libre de Bruxelles)<p><p><p>L’épiscopat constitue un fondement essentiel mais méconnu de l’Église mésobyzantine. Malgré la relative rareté des sources, il est possible d’en retracer l’histoire et les grandes évolutions :une part importante de l’hagiographie de l’iconoclasme et post-iconoclaste concerne en effet métropolites et évêques, témoignant du lien fort existant entre ceux-ci et le peuple des cités dont ils ont la charge, particulièrement quand ils sont considérés saints par la population. De nombreuses sources épistolaires, ecclésiastiques et sigillographiques, émanant des évêques eux-mêmes, permettent d’approcher les réalités du corps épiscopal et celles de la société provinciale qu’il représente auprès des autorités centrales. L’évêque apparaît également comme le relais des volontés impériale et patriarcale dans les provinces de l’Empire. Dans un contexte de compétition de pouvoir avec les autorités locales, l’évêque tente ainsi d’imposer le sien propre, dans ses aspects spatiaux, sociaux, religieux et symboliques.<p>L’approche collective et les approches individuelles de l’épiscopat doivent permettre de comprendre les réalités sociales d’un Empire de plus en plus centré sur sa capitale et dont sont progressivement détachées, du moins dans les sources, les périphéries. Une histoire décentrée de l’Empire byzantin passe dès lors par des études régionales mais aussi par des études consacrées à des groupes sociaux enracinés dans tout l’Empire, surtout lorsque, comme les évêques, ils revendiquent la spécificité de leur région et leur attachement à une société provinciale qui constitue le socle de l’Empire.<p><p>/ <p><p>The episcopate is an essential structure of the middle-Byzantine Church ;however, it remains little known. Although sources are limited, its history and evolution can still be reconstructed, as a large portion of the iconoclastic and post-iconoclastic hagiography deals with metropolitans and bishops. The sources reveal the strong connection between bishops and the inhabitants of the cities under their responsibility, especially when the population considers them as saints. Numerous epistolary, ecclesiastic and sigillographic documents issued by bishops themselves partially unveil the realities of the episcopal group and the provincial society that bishops represent to the central authorities. The bishop also serves as relay of both imperial and patriarchal wills to the provinces of the Empire. Competing with local authorities, the bishop thus tries to impose his own influence in its spatial, social, religious and symbolic dimensions.<p>Both collective and individual approaches of the episcopate make the social realities of the Empire more understandable, as it becomes more and more focused on its capital city while its peripheries gradually move away, which documentation seems to imply. Regional studies, but also studies focused on social groups established across the whole Empire, are the fundamentals of a decentred history of the Byzantine Empire. This is especially true since social groups such as bishops claim the specificity of their regions and their link to a provincial society that represents the cornerstone of the Empire. / Doctorat en Histoire, art et archéologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished