Liturgy as an instrument of confessional identification: William Laud and the challenge of “foreign churches” in England

This publication presents the first translation into Russian of a number of documents which portray the religious policy of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, supported by Charles I Stuart, towards foreign Reformed churches in the Province of Canterbury. The documents include royal orders given in various forms, notarial instruments, petitions from Calvinist congregations to both the King and the Archbishop, and excerpts from correspondence between representatives of said congregations. They demonstrate the role of liturgy as an instrument of confessional identification and, consequently, of politico-religious loyalty in seventeenth-century Reformation England. The authors also note the correlation of Laud’s ideas with the transformation of the corporate foundations of English society and the formation of an “individualist” type of relationship between the Crown and its subjects, based on archaic feudal law and the precedents of the classical Middle Ages, the essence of which consisted of personal ties of allegiance between the monarch (his “body natural”) and the subject, rather than between the subject and the “body politic” of the monarch (i.e., the “country”).