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Whilst much recent research has dealt with the popular response to the religious change ushered in during the mid-Tudor period, this book focuses not just on the response to broad liturgical and doctrinal change, but also looks at how theological and reform messages could be utilized among local leaders and civic elites. It is this cohort that has often been neglected in previous efforts to ascertain the often elusive position of the common woman or man. Using the Vale of Gloucester as a case study, the book refocuses attention onto the concept of "commonwealth" and links it to a gradual, but long-standing dissatisfaction with local religious houses. It shows how monasteries, endowed initially out of the charitable impulses of elites, increasingly came to depend on lay stewards to remain viable. During the economic downturn of the mid-Tudor period, when urban and landed elites refocused their attention on restoring the commonwealth which they believed had broken down, they increasingly viewed the charity offered by religious houses as insufficient to meet the local needs. In such a climate the Protestant social gospel seemed to provide a valid alternative to which many people gravitated. Holding to scrutiny the revisionist revolution of the past twenty years, the book reopens debate and challenges conventional thinking about the ways the traditional church lost influence in the late middle ages, positing the idea that the problems with the religious houses were not just the creation of the reformers but had rather a long history. In so doing it offers a more complete picture of reform that goes beyond head-counting by looking at the political relationships and how they were affected by religious ideas to bring about change.
This study considers sixteenth century evangelicals' vision of a ›godly‹ commonwealth within the broader context of political, religious, social, and intellectual changes in Tudor England. Using the clergyman and bestselling author, Thomas Becon (1512–1567), as a case study, Brian L. Hanson argues that evangelical views of the commonwealth were situation-dependent rather than uniform, fluctuating from individual to individual. His study examines the ways commonwealth rhetoric was used by evangelicals and how that rhetoric developed and changed. While this study draws from English Reformation historiography by acknowledging the chronology of reform, it engages with interdisciplinary texts on poverty, gender, and the economy in order to demonstrate the intersection of commonwealth rhetoric with Renaissance humanism. Furthermore, the experience of exile and the languages of prophecy and companionship directly influenced commonwealth rhetoric and dictated the priorities, vocabulary, and political expression of the evangelicals. As sixteenth-century England vacillated in its religious direction and priorities, the evangelicals were faced with a political conundrum and the tension between obedience and ›lawful‹ disobedience. There was ultimately a fundamental disagreement on the nature and criteria of obedience. Hanson's study makes a further contribution to the emerging conversation about English commonwealth politics by examining the important issues of obedience and disobedience within the evangelical community. A correct assessment of the issues surrounding the relationship between evangelicals and the commonwealth government will lead to a rediscovery of both the complexities of evangelical commonwealth rhetoric and the tension between the biblical command to submit to civil authorities and the injunction to ›obey God rather than man‹.
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 examines the afterlife of the lollard movement, demonstrating how it was shaped and used by evangelicals and seventeenth-century Protestants. It focuses on the work of John Foxe, whose influential Acts and Monuments (1563) reoriented the lollards from heretics and traitors to martyrs and model subjects, portraying them as Protestants’ ideological forebears. It is a scholarly mainstay that Foxe edited radical lollard views to bring them in line with a mainstream monarchical church. But this book offers a strong corrective to the argument, revealing that the subversive material present in Foxe’s text allowed seventeenth-century religious radicals to appropriate the lollards as historical validation of their own theological and political positions. The book argues that the same lollards who were used to strengthen the English church in the sixteenth century would play a role in its fragmentation in the seventeenth.
This compelling new history situates the religious upheavals of the civil war years within the broader history of the Church of England and demonstrates how, rather than a destructive aberration, this period is integral to (and indeed the climax of) England's post-Reformation history.
Scholarship on religious printed images during the English Reformation (1535-1603) has generally focused on a few illustrated works and has portrayed this period in England as a predominantly non-visual religious culture. The combination of iconoclasm and Calvinist doctrine have led to a misunderstanding as to the unique ways that English Protestants used religious printed images. Building on recent work in the history of the book and print studies, this book analyzes the widespread body of religious illustration, such as images of God the Father and Christ, in Reformation England, assessing what religious beliefs they communicated and how their use evolved during the period. The result is a unique analysis of how the Reformation in England both destroyed certain aspects of traditional imagery as well as embraced and reformulated others into expressions of its own character and identity.
Recasts the Reformation as a battleground over memory, in which new identities were formed through acts of commemoration, invention and repression.
"Bibliographical notes": pages 419-443.
This book offers an in-depth history of Calvinism in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1548-1648. It traces the development of polity, liturgy, piety and church discipline. Bem questions the prevailing narrative of decline post 1570 and argues that the three Reformed Churches in fact continued to develop and flourish until the 1630s.
Extensively revised and updated, this new edition of The debate on the English Reformation combines a discussion of successive historical approaches to the English Reformation with a critical review of recent debates in the area, offering a major contribution to modern historiography as well as to Reformation studies. It explores the way in which successive generations have found the Reformation relevant to their own times and have in the process rediscovered, redefined and rewritten its story. It shows that not only people who called themselves historians but also politicians, ecclesiastics, journalists and campaigners argued about interpretations of the Reformation and the motivations of its principal agents. The author also shows how, in the twentieth century, the debate was influenced by the development of history as a subject and, in the twenty-first century, by state control of the academy. Undergraduates, researchers and lecturers alike will find this an invaluable and essential companion to their studies.