This volume seeks to address a relatively neglected subject in the field of English reformation studies: the reformation in its urban context. Drawing on the work of a number of historians, this collection of essays will seek to explore some of the dimensions of that urban stage and to trace, using a mixture of detailed case studies and thematic reflections, some of the ways in which religious change was both effected and affected by the activities of townsmen and women.
Twenty years ago, historians thought they understood the Reformation in England. Professor A. G. Dickens's elegant The English Reformation was then new, and highly influential: it seemed to show how national policy and developing reformist allegiance interacted to produce an acceptable and successful Protestant Reformation. But, since then, the evidence of the statute book, of Protestant propagandists and of heresy trials has come to seem less convincing, Neglected documents, especially the records of diocesan administration and parish life, have been explored, new questions have been asked - and many of the answers have been surprising. Some of the old certainties have been demolished, and many of the assumptions of the old interpretation of the Reformation have been undermined, in a wide-ranging process of revision. But the fruits of the new 'revisionism' are still buried in technical academic journals, difficult for students and teachers to find and to use. There is no up-to-date textbook, no comprehensive new survey, to challenge the orthodoxies enshrined in older works. This volume seeks to fulfill two crucial needs for students of Tudor England. First, it brings together some of the most readable of the recent innovative essays and articles into a single book. Second, it seeks to show how a new 'revisionist' interpretation of the English Reformation can be constructed, and examines its strengths and weaknesses. In short, it is an alternative to a new textbook survey - until someone has time (and courage) to write one. The new Introduction sets out the framework for a new understanding of the Reformation, and shows how already published work can be fitted into it. The nine essays (one printed here for the first time) provide detailed studies of particular problems in Reformation history, and general surveys of the progress of religious change. The new Conclusion tries to plug some of the remaining gaps, and suggests how the Reformation came to divide the English nation. It is a deliberately controversial collection, to be used alongside existing textbooks and to promote rethinking and debate.
The interrelated demographic, economic, religious, and cultural transformations that England experienced in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were most pronounced in larger towns in the south and east, such as Colchester in Essex. The effects produced by these changes led to an effort at social and sexual regulation by the town's more prosperous residents, in order to control and modify the negative impact on the local population, especially the poor. This book provides an in-depth portrait of an urban setting, discussing both wrongdoers themselves and the motivations of the craftsmen and tradesmen - the «middling sorts» - who enforced local standards of conduct.
The Reformation of the Subject is a study of the cultural contradictions that gave birth to the English Protestant epic. In lucid and theoretically sophisticated language, Linda Gregerson examines the fraught ideological, political and gender conflicts that are woven into the texture of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost. She reminds us that Reformation iconoclasts viewed verbal images with the same aversion as visual images, because they too were capable of waylaying the human imagination. Through a series of detailed readings, Gregerson examines the different strategies adopted by Spenser and Milton as they sought to distinguish their poems from idols yet preserve the shaping power that iconoclasts have long attributed to icons. Tracing the transformation of the epic poem into an instrument for the reformation of the political subject, Gregerson thus provides an illuminating contribution to our understanding of the ways in which subjectivities are historically produced.
This title was first published in 2002. This work invests the post-Shakespearean history plays of the Jacobean era - including among others Shakespeare's "Henry VIII" (1613), Dekker's "The Whore of Babylon" (1606), and Heywood's "If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody" (1604-5)-with new significance by recognizing the role they played in popularizing and re-appropriating Foxe's "Book of Martyrs", one of the most formative and culturally significant Reformation texts. This study presents the historical stage as a site of a continuing Reformation debate over the nature of political authority, the validity of conscience and the challenge to social and gender hierarchies implicit in Protestant doctrine. Relating each play to contemporary political events, the book demonstrates the role of the Jacobean stage in promoting reformation and informing with providential meaning the events unfolding outside the theatre.
Few periods of English history have been so subject to `revisionism' as the Tudors and Stuarts. This volume offers a full introduction to the complex historiographical debates currently raging about politics and religion in early modern England. It * draws together thirteen articles culled from familiar and also less accessible sources * embraces revisionist and counter-revisionist viewpoints * combines controversial works on both politics and religion * covers Tudor as well as early Stuart England * includes helpful glossary, explanatory headnotes and suggestions for further reading. These carefully edited and introduced essays draw on the new evidence of newsletters and ballads and ritual, as well as the more traditional sources, to offer a new and broader understanding of this transformative era of English history.
