This is a collection of the most important and interesting recent articles on the impact of religious change in England in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. An introduction and sectional commentaries help to guide the reader through the maze of current scholarly debates.
The English Reformation remains deeply controversial. While there is a growing perception that the English experienced a "long Reformation, that it was a protracted process rather than an "event", very significant historiographical differences remain over the pace of change, the means ofimplementation, and the degree of enthusiasm with which the English people experienced the dismantling of their medieval Catholic culture. How widespread was the appeal of early Protestantism in England, and what, if anything, did it owe to native roots? How effectively was religious change enactedin the localities, and how did local communities react to the swings of official policy? In what sense was England a "Protestant nation" by the early seventeenth century? How much continuity remained with the Catholic past?The contributions in this book identify and, in different and sometimes contradictory ways, attempt to resolve these and other questions. It is structured in three sections that combine a themat
These essays examine the long-term impact of the Protestant reformation in England. This text should be of interest to historians of early modern England and reformation studies.
This book is a study of popular responses to the English Reformation. It takes as its subject not the conversion of English subjects to a new religion but rather their political responses to a Reformation perceived as an act of state and hence, like all early modern acts of state, negotiated between government and people. These responses included not only resistance but also significant levels of accommodation, co-operation and collaboration as people attempted to co-opt state power for their own purposes. This study argues, then, that the English Reformation was not done to people, it was done with them in a dynamic process of engagement between government and people. As such, it answers the twenty-year-old scholarly dilemma of how the English Reformation could have succeeded despite the inherent conservatism of the English people, and it presents a genuinely post-revisionist account of one of the central events of English history.
This book is a study of the English Reformation as a political and literary event. Focusing on an eclectic group of texts, unified by their explication of the key elements of the cultural history of the period 1510-1580 the book unravels the political, poetic and religious themes of the era. Through readings of work by Edmund Spenser, William Tyndale, Sir Thomas More and John Skelton, as well as less celebrated Tudor writers, Betteridge surveys pre-Henrician literature as well as Henrician Reformation texts, and delineates the literature of the reigns of Edward VI, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I. Ultimately, the book argues that this literature, and the era, should not be understood simply on the basis of conflicts between Protestantism and Catholicism but rather that Tudor culture must be seen as fractured between emerging confessional identities and marked by a conflict between those who embraced confessionalism and those who rejected it. This important study will be fascinating reading for students and researchers in early modern English literature and history.
Patricia Crawford explores how the study of gender can enhance our understanding of religious history, in this study of women and their apprehensions of God in early modern England. The book has three broad themes: the role of women in the religious upheaval in the period from the Reformation to the Restoration; the significance of religion to contemporary women, focusing on the range of practices and beliefs; and the role of gender in the period. The author argues that religion in the early modern period cannot be understood without a perception of the gendered nature of its beliefs, institutions and language. Contemporary religious ideology reinforced women's inferior position, but, as the author shows, it was possible for some women to transcend these beliefs and profoundly influence history.
This book considers the ideological development of English Catholicism in the sixteenth century, from the complementary perspectives of history, theology, and literature. Lucy Wooding argues that Erasmian humanism had laid the foundations for Catholic reformation in England, but that it was Henry VIII who turned an intellectual trend into an actual reform programme, reshaping English Catholicism in the process. The reformist strand within Catholic thought remained influential during the reign of Mary I, and in the early Elizabethan period, but was then reconfigured by the experience of exile and the onset of the drive for Counter-Reformation uniformity. Dr Wooding shows that Catholicism in this period was neither a defunct tradition, nor one merely reacting to Protestantism, but a vigorous intellectual movement responding to the reformist impulse of the age. Its development illustrates the English Reformation in microcosm: scholarly, humanist, didactic, and preserving its own peculiarities independent of European trends. Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England makes an important contribution to the intellectual history of the Reformation.