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(Re)defining the English Reformation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2009

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References

1 See, among other works, Greenblatt, Stephen, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ, 2001)Google Scholar, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York, 2003); Dutton, Richard, Findlay, Alison, and Wilson, Richard, eds., Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester, 2003)Google Scholar; Wilson, Richard, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester, 2004)Google Scholar. See also Jackson, Ken and Marotti, Arthur F., “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies,” Criticism 46, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 167–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Duffy's, EamonThe Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT, 1992)Google Scholar built on the insights of Scarisbrick, J. J., The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar.

3 The following sentences represent an (only slighted simplified) summary of the main theses of Dickens, A. G., The English Reformation (London, 1964)Google Scholar, a book widely hailed upon its first publication as a definitive and unimpeachable study.

4 Elton, G. R., Reform and Reformation: England, 1508–1558 (London, 1977), 371Google Scholar.

5 “Revisionism” became firmly established as the appropriate term of art with the publication of a volume of essays edited by Haigh, Christopher: The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Explicitly recognized, for example, by one of the most influential postrevisionist studies, Shagan, Ethan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), 5Google Scholar, suggesting that in a straight contest between the interpretation of Dickens and that of Duffy and Haigh, the latter “win hands down.”

7 Haigh makes the suggestions that “we are (almost) all post-revisionists now” in a review of Walsham's, Alexandra Providence in Early Modern England in the English Historical Review 115, no. 463 (September 2000): 964–65Google Scholar. Duffy, claims the postrevisionist label for his The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, CT, 2001)Google Scholar in a survey essay, “The English Reformation after Revisionism,” Renaissance Quarterly 59, no. 3 (September 2006): 724.

8 See Heal, Felicity, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hazlett, Ian, The Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh, 2003)Google Scholar; and a forthcoming study by Alec Ryrie. The archipelagic paradigm more broadly was advocated by Pocock, J. G. A., “The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject,” American Historical Review 87, no. 2 (April 1982): 311–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Bradshaw, Brendan and Morrill, John, eds., The British Problem, c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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12 Collinson, Patrick, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke, 1988), ixGoogle Scholar. While extending the chronology of the Reformation (in order to emphasize the slow progress of reform) has from the outset been part of the revisionist project, in the hands of Collinson and others it has paradoxically also served to make the anti- or postrevisionist point that Protestantism was ultimately influential and transformative. See also MacCulloch's contention that by the very end of the sixteenth century the Reformation should be considered a “howling success” (“The Impact of the English Reformation,” Historical Journal 38, no. 1 [March 1995]: 152).

13 See Tyacke, Nicholas, ed., England's Long Reformation, 1500–1800 (London, 1998)Google Scholar, especially the chapters by Jonathan Barry, W. R. Ward, and Jeremy Gregory.

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17 For example, Watt, Tessa, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar; Carlson, Eric, ed., Religion and the English People, 1500–1640 (Kirksville, MO, 1998)Google Scholar; Walsham, Alexandra, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar; Marshall, Peter, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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19 Remarks to this effect were made by Collinson, Patrick in the closing plenary address to a conference on “Sites of Change in Reformation England,” held at the University of Warwick in February 2008. See also Haigh's review of my Reformation England, in The English Historical Review 121, no. 491 (April 2006): 604–5Google Scholar.

20 O’Malley, John W., Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA, 2000)Google Scholar.

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29 Collinson, “Sites of Change.”

30 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, “Protestantism in Mainland Europe: New Directions,” Renaissance Quarterly 59, no. 3 (September 2006): 704–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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32 “Focal Point: Post-confessional Reformation History,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 97 (2006): 276–306. The contributors, who offer a variety of perspectives on the issue, are Susan Karant-Nunn, Anne Jacobson Schutte, Philip Benedict, Scott Hendrix, Lyndal Roper, and Ethan Shagan.

33 Shagan, Ethan, “Introduction: English Catholic History in Context,” in his Catholics and the “Protestant Nation” (Manchester, 2005), 1Google Scholar.

34 Thomas F. Mayer, “Series Editor's Preface,” in all volumes of Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700 (Ashgate, 2004–).

35 Haigh, English Reformations, vii; Duffy, “English Reformation after Revisionism,” 723; Daniell, David, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, CT, 1994), 95, 398nGoogle Scholar; Wilson, Derek, Out of the Storm: The Life and Legacy of Martin Luther (London, 2007), xiGoogle Scholar. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Marius.

36 Duffy, “English Reformation after Revisionism,” 722–23.

37 Ryrie, Alec, “Britain and Ireland,” in his Palgrave Advances in the European Reformations (Basingstoke, 2006), 125–26Google Scholar.

38 Lake, Peter, “Anti-Puritanism: The Structure of a Prejudice,” in Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England, ed. Fincham, Kenneth and Lake, Peter (Woodbridge, 2006), 86Google Scholar.

39 ibid.; Peter Lake, “Puritanism, Arminianism and Nicholas Tyacke,” in Fincham and Lake, Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England, 13; Lake, Peter and Questier, Michael, The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT, 2002), 316–19Google Scholar, “Introduction,” in their Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), i–xx, and “Margaret Clitherow, Catholic Nonconformity, Martyrology and the Politics of Religious Change in Elizabethan England,” Past and Present, no. 185 (November 2004): 43–90, at 87.

40 A point made effectively by the (believing) historian Patrick Collinson, “Religion, Society, and the Historian,” Journal of Religious History 23, no. 2 (June 1999): 150–51.

41 For a powerfully polemic argument against reductionist approaches to early modern religion, see Gregory, Brad, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 342–52Google Scholar. See also the subtle reflections of Tracy, James D., “Believers, Non-believers, and the Historian's Unspoken Assumptions,” Catholic Historical Review 86, no. 3 (July 2000): 403–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Walsham, Alexandra, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 1993)Google Scholar; Marsh, Christopher W., The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge, 1994)Google Scholar; Pettegree, Andrew, “Nicodemism and the English Reformation,” in his Marian Protestantism: Six Studies (Aldershot, 1996), 86117Google Scholar. As an example of how believing historians can write empathetically and insightfully about traditions other than their own, see the study of the Calvinist and Puritan Richard Greenham by Kenneth Parker and Eric Carlson (a Roman Catholic and an Episcopalian): “Practical Divinity”: The Works and Life of Revd Richard Greenham (Aldershot, 1998).

43 Among contributors to the Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte “Focal Point,” Lyndal Roper is unusually discerning in this respect, remarking that she regards, for example, socialist and feminist history as types of “confessional history” (“Allegiance and Reformation History,” 294).

44 Peter Lake is an almost unique exception in this regard. An illuminating footnote in a 2006 essay reads: “In calling for others to let their assumptions show rather more explicitly, I should add that I am an adherent of the ideology known, in certain circles in the US, as ‘secular humanism’ and that, as the member of no ‘faith community,’ my aim is to produce an atheistically relativist account of the religious history of this period” (Lake, “Anti-Puritanism,” 86n).

45 Christopher Haigh, “The Recent Historiography of the English Reformation,” in his English Reformation Revised, 19–21.

46 Shagan, Popular Politics, 13–17, 257–69, 291, 295, 299.

47 A point also made by Pettegree, Andrew, “A. G. Dickens and His Critics: A New Narrative of the English Reformation,” Historical Research 77, no. 195 (February 2004): 44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An interesting exception is the work of my colleague Beat Kümin, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish c.1400–1560 (Aldershot, 1996), which applies the Swiss historian Peter Blickle's concepts of “communalism” and “communal Reformation” to developments at the parish level in England. See Blickle, , Gemeindereformation: Die Menschen des 16; Jahrhunderts auf dem Weg zum Heil (Munich, 1985)Google Scholar, and “Communal Reformation and Peasant Piety: The Peasant Reformation and Its Late Medieval Origins,” Central European History 20, nos. 3–4 (September 1987): 216–28. Kümin sees a local communalizing impulse as thwarted by the Reformation in England (Shaping of a Community, 260–64).

48 Schilling, Heinz, Konfessionskonflict und Staatsbildung (Gütersloh, 1981)Google Scholar, Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society (Leiden, 1992), and “Confessional Europe,” in Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, ed. Thomas A. Brady, Heiko O. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1995), 2:641–70; Reinhard, Wolfgang, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the Early Modern State: A Reassessment,” Catholic Historical Review 75, no. 3 (July 1989): 385403Google Scholar; Reinhard, and Schilling, , eds., Die Katholische Konfessionalisieung (Gütersloh, 1995)Google Scholar; Headley, John M., Hillerbrand, Hans J., and Papadas, Anthony J., eds., Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700 (Aldershot, 2004)Google Scholar.

49 The exceptions are an interesting short discussion by the literary critic Betteridge, Thomas, Literature and Politics in the English Reformation (Manchester, 2004), 14Google Scholar, and a quirky essay by Peter I. Kaufman, “Reconstructing the Context for Confessionalization in Late Tudor England: Perceptions of Reception, Then and Now,” in Headley et al., Confessionalization in Europe, 275–87. See also the recent, though qualified, contention of Collinson, Patrick that “Elizabethan England was a confessional state” (“The Politics of Religion and the Religion of Politics in Elizabethan England,” Historical Research 82, no. 215 [2009]: 7492)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Schilling, “Confessional Europe,” 641.

51 Delumeau, Jean, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation, trans. Jeremy Moiser (London, 1977)Google Scholar; Muchembled, Robert, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1700, trans. Lydia Cochrane (Baton Rouge, LA, 1985)Google Scholar, “Lay Judges and the Acculturation of the Masses (France and Southern Low Countries, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries),” trans. John Burke, in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz (London, 1984), 56–65.

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53 Nischan, Bodo, Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harm Klueting, “Problems of the Term and Concept ‘Second Reformation': Memories of a 1980s Debate,” in Headley et al., Confessionalization in Europe, 37–49.

54 Ryrie, Alec, “The Strange Death of Lutheran England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53, no. 1 (January 2002): 6492CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Collinson, Patrick, “From Iconoclam to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation,” in The Impact of the English Reformation, 1500–1640, ed. Marshall, Peter (London, 1997), 278308Google Scholar.

56 Watt, Cheap Print, 134–40; Walsham, Providence, 250–66.

57 Professor Anthony Milton of Sheffield University is currently working on a major project entitled “England's Second Reformation,” a phrase he is applying to the reshaping of the Church of England's identity between 1636 and 1666.

58 Gerald Strauss, “Success and Failure in the German Reformation,” Past and Present, no. 67 (May 1975): 30–63, Luther's House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore, 1978).

59 Haigh, Christopher, “Success and Failure in the English Reformation,” Past and Present, no. 173 (November 2001): 2849Google Scholar, “Communion and Community: Exclusion from Communion in Post-Reformation England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51, no. 4 (October 2000): 721–40, “The Taming of Reformation: Preachers, Pastors and Parishioners in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England,” History 85, no. 280 (October 2000): 572–88, and The Plain Man's Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England (Oxford, 2007), esp. chap. 3.

60 See Collinson, Patrick, “Shepherds, Sheepdogs, and Hirelings: The Pastoral Ministry in Post-Reformation England,” in The Ministry: Clerical and Lay, ed. Sheils, W. J. and Wood, Diana (Cambridge, 1989), 185220Google Scholar; Fincham, Kenneth, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar; Carlson, Eric J., “The Boring of the Ear: Shaping the Pastoral Vision of Preaching in England, 1540–1640,” in Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period, ed. Taylor, Larissa (Leiden, 2001), 221–48Google Scholar, “Good Pastors or Careless Shepherds? Parish Ministers and the English Reformation,” History 88, no. 291 (July 2003): 423–36.

61 MacCulloch, “Protestantism in Mainland Europe,” 699, “Putting the English Reformation on the Map,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 15 (2005): 76.

62 Haigh, English Reformations, 12–13.

63 Lake, “Puritanism, Arminianism and Nicholas Tyacke,” 10; MacCulloch, Diarmaid, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation [published in the United States as The Boy King] (London, 1999), 167–74Google Scholar; Euler, Carrie, Couriers of the Gospel: England and Zurich, 1531–1558 (Zurich, 2006)Google Scholar; Kirby, W. J. Torrance, The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology (Leiden, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Eamon Duffy, “The Shock of Change,” in Platten, Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition, 49.

65 Peter Lake, “The ‘Anglican Moment'? Richard Hooker and the Ideological Watershed of the 1590s,” in Platten, Anglicanism and the Western Christian Tradition, 92.

66 Diarmaid MacCulloch, “The Latitude of the Church of England,” in Fincham and Lake, Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England, 41–42. See, however, the polemical use of the cognate “Anglianisme” to describe the religious polity of England by the Catholic Harrab, Thomas, Tessaradelphus, or The four brothers (Lancashire, 1616), A2r–v, E2v ffGoogle Scholar. (a reference I owe to Alec Ryrie).

67 Jones, Norman, Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion, 1559 (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Hudson, Winthrop S., The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Durham, NC, 1980)Google Scholar. These studies have demonstrated that Elizabeth and her advisors were aiming in 1559 at an unambiguously Protestant settlement, the main opposition to which came not from Puritans but from Catholic resistance in the House of Lords.

68 MacCulloch, Diarmaid, “The Myth of the English Reformation,” Journal of British Studies 30, no. 1 (January 1991): 119CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Lake, Peter, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), 227–28Google Scholar.

70 Lake, Peter, “Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and Avant-garde Conformity at the Court of James I,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Peck, Linda Levy (Cambridge, 1991), 113–33Google Scholar; McCullough, Peter, ed., Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures (Oxford, 2005), and a forthcoming biographyGoogle Scholar.

71 Fincham, Kenneth and Tyacke, Nicholas, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700 (Oxford, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Merritt, Julia, “The Cradle of Laudianism? Westminster Abbey, 1558–1630,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52, no. 4 (October 2001): 623–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, 210–13.

73 Significant exceptions here include Shagan, Popular Politics; and Bernard, George, The King's Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (New Haven, CT, 2005)Google Scholar.

74 Rex, Richard, The Lollards (Basingstoke, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 MacCulloch, “Putting the English Reformation on the Map,” 80–81. Some of the most suggestive recent research in this field emphasizes the extent to which the boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy were malleable and permeable (Shannon McSheffrey, “Heresy, Orthodoxy, and English Vernacular Religion, 1480–1525,” Past and Present, no. 186 [February 2005]: 47–80).

76 Wabuda, Susan, Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar; Peters, Christine, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge, 2003)Google Scholar; Lutton, Robert, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion in Pre-Reformation England: Reconstructing Piety (London, 2006)Google Scholar.

77 Marshall, Peter and Ryrie, Alec, eds., The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar.

78 Simpson, James, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 The best starting point here is Eales, Jacqueline, “A Road to Revolution: The Continuity of Puritanism, 1559–1642,” in The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, ed. Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (Basingstoke, 1996), 184–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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81 An important lead here has been given by the researches of Michael Questier. See his Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996), and Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c.1550–1640 (Cambridge, 2006).

82 Mayer, Thomas F., Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge, 2000)Google Scholar, chaps. 6–8; Wooding, Lucy E. C., Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wizeman, William J., The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor's Church (Aldershot, 2006)Google Scholar.

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84 Bossy, John, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975)Google Scholar.

85 Marshall, Peter, “Religious Exiles and the Tudor State,” in Discipline and Diversity, ed. Cooper, Kate and Gregory, Jeremy (Suffolk, 2007), 263–84Google Scholar.

86 A phenomenon noted by Ronald Hutton, “The Local Impact of the Tudor Reformations,” in Haigh, English Reformation Revised, 134–35.

87 Still immensely valuable here is John Bossy's perception that the primary religious transformation in Europe in the early modern era was the process by which Christianity came to signify a body of beliefs rather than a body of people (Christianity in the West [Oxford, 1985], esp. 171).

88 The phrase is Diarmaid MacCulloch's (Reformation, 338).

89 An argument developed in my Religious Identities in Henry VIII's England (Aldershot, 2006).

90 Driedger, Michael, Obedient Heretics: Mennonite Identities in Lutheran Hamburg and Altona during the Confessional Age (Aldershot, 2002)Google Scholar.

91 For incisive discussion of these developments, see Walsham, Alexandra, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006), chap. 2Google Scholar.

92 As Patrick Collinson has acutely noted, this lack of strict religious uniformity, “far from making religion apolitical, as it might be in a liberal society, or in a secularized society indifferent to religion, made it the hottest of all political potatoes” (“Politics of Religion,” 24).

93 For a concise statement of this case, see Russell, Conrad, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990), chap. 5Google Scholar.

94 Litzenberger, Caroline, “Richard Cheyney, Bishop of Gloucester, an Infidel in Religion?Sixteenth Century Journal 25, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 567–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fincham and Tyacke, Altars Restored, 78–79; Patrick Collinson, “Windows into a Woman's Soul: Questions about the Religion of Queen Elizabeth I,” in his Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), 87–118; Doran, Susan, “Elizabeth I's Religion: The Evidence of Her Letters,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51, no. 4 (October 2000): 699720CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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96 Haigh, English Reformations, 295. An emphasis on essential continuities also characterizes the conclusion of Marsh, Christopher, Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England (Basingstoke, 1998), 217–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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