Popular Politics and the English Reformation

Abstract

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.

Recycling the Sacred: Material Culture and Cultural Memory after the English Reformation

“…62 As Ethan Shagan has commented, "we should not underestimate the spiritual significance of seeing the local poor sleeping in the streets under albs and altar cloths." 63 This was a type of recycling that was consistent with Protestant values: insistent that the sick and indigent were the true images of Christ, the reformers constantly called for the wealth lavished on decorating churches to be diverted to social welfare. 64 In the 1630s, the Laudian campaign to restore the beauty of holiness pushed back against Calvinist austerity and may have created new opportunities for the reuse of medieval ecclesiastical embroideries that had gone underground or found asylum in private homes.…”

“…As a consequence, they were obliged to forge "new consciences to navigate the unprecedented circumstances in which they found themselves." 114 My aim here is not to adjudicate in this debate. What I wish to highlight instead is the manner in which these developments overlaid material objects with fresh layers of meaning.…”

Religion, Political Thought and the English Civil War

“…A prominent theme in recent scholarship is defined by 'reformation politics', and proceeds from the premise that the English Reformation produced a 'fundamental restructuring of power within the realm'. 5 The assumption of ecclesiastical supremacy by the Crown raised a number of important questions about how sovereignty in the religious sphere related to various branches of civil power. While the rhetoric of supremacy referred to the realm as a co-extensive body politic of spiritual and temporal people, the relationship between church and state was widely debated, and emerged as one of the key problems in discussions of public power in post-Reformation England.…”

‘Revisionism’ in Tudor reformation studies

“…In an earlier avowedly 'post-revisionist' work Ethan A. Shagan accepted that the reformation in England was 'an act of state', 33 but he highlighted the willingness of many otherwise conservative people to 'collaborate' with the crown's attacks on Catholic institutions because of 'varying combinations of loyalism, greed, strategy and conviction'. 34 He stated that even by 1553 'there were few conversions to Protestantism', 35 but argued that the changes in religious outlook and beliefs that occurred by then were 'impossible to reverse'.…”