Ruin and Reformation explores writerly responses to the religious violence of the long reformation in England and Wales, spanning over a century of literature and history, from the establishment of the national church under Henry VIII (1534), to its disestablishment under Oliver Cromwell (1653). It focuses on representations of ruined churches, monasteries, and cathedrals in the works of a range of English protestant writers, including Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, Denham, and Marvell, reading literature alongside episodes in English reformation history: from the dissolution of the monasteries and destruction of church icons and images, to the puritan reforms of the 1640s. The study departs from previous responses to literature’s ‘bare ruined choirs’, which tend to read writerly ambivalence towards the dissolution of the monasteries as evidence of traditionalist, catholic, or Laudian nostalgia for the pre-reformation church. Instead, Ruin and Reformation shows how English protestants of all varieties—from Laudians to presbyterians—could, and did, feel ambivalence towards, and anxiety about, the violence that accompanied the dissolution of the monasteries and the other acts of protestant reform. The study therefore demonstrates that writerly misgivings about ruin and reformation need not necessarily signal an author’s opposition towards England’s reformation project. In so doing, Ruin and Reformation makes an important contribution to cross-disciplinary debates about the character of English protestantism in its formative century, revealing that doubts about religious destruction were as much a part of the grammar of English protestantism as expressions of popular support for iconoclasm in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The 'British Problem', or new British history, began in the 1970s as a reaction to a sort of cultural myopia that reduced all British to purely English history. To identify a 'British Problem', then, was to encourage historians of England to view England in relation to its British neighbours, and to explore how far England's British relations have affected English political and cultural history. Recent years have seen the application of this new British history to the study of English literature, with early modernists approaching texts from a British perspective, arguing that England's colonial interests in Wales, Scotland and Ireland affected writing by Spenser and Shakespeare in particular. This article surveys recent critical interest in England's 'British Problem' as it applies to Tudor English literature, but it also asks that we do not forget England amid all this talk of England's burgeoning 'British' empire. Colonial interests apart, England also saw itself in the sixteenth century as 'postcolonial', as independent from Catholic Europe and the influence of Rome. The word 'empire' was used to describe England's postcolonial independence, even as it was used to encode England's colonial ambitions over Britain. The article, then, goes on to survey England's self-image in the sixteenth century as an 'empire', or independent nation-state, exploring how England came to be written at this time in relation to concepts of empire and exile associated with the Roman poet Virgil. It ends by focusing on recent critical interest in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender as both a colonial and postcolonial text, a text about England's relations to Britain as well as about England's relations to Rome.For Willy Maley, England in the sixteenth century was a nation 'nasty, British, and short', its identity as England confined to the seventy-year period between the promulgation of the Appeals Act in 1533 and the accession of James I in 1603 (Nation, State and Empire 35). The Appeals Act announced England's independence from foreign powers, notably the Church of Rome; the accession of James I saw yet another foreign power -James VI of Scotland -take up rule in England. Maley's England is the meat in the sandwich, the fragile nation-state caught between a rock and a hard place, between the shadow of Rome and the spectre of Britain. Perhaps even seventy years is too generous a time frame for England's fleeting cultural

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This article seeks to redress a contemporary critical trend amongst social historians concerned to date the dawn of nationalism on our Western political horizons from the twilight period of empire at the end of the eighteenth century. It does so by examining the interplay between empire and nationhood in the rhetoric of royalist pamphlets written by Richard Morison in 1536 and Nicholas Bodrugan in 1548. Both these writers respond to crises in the English body politic under the absolute headship of the Tudor imperial crown. Both uphold Tudor pretensions to empire – and the precedents of the ‘old authentic histories and chronicles’ upon which these pretensions were originally based – through the use of rhetorical tropes that attempt to instil a sense of national identity in the members of the divided political communities for which they write. The rhetoric of these two Reformation pamphlets demands that we revise the commonplace critical exclusion of the nation from the imperial age of Reformation. (pp. 523–540)

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