Popular Politics and the English Reformation

A study of popular responses to the English Reformation after Henry VIII's break from Rome.

Ethan H. Shagan (Author)

9780521525558, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 17 October 2002

364 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.49 kg

'This is unusually interesting, clever and learned book. … He must be congratulated on uncovering so much exciting and complicated detail on the huge canvas of sixteenth-century English religion.' Recusant History

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.

Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Note on the text
Introduction
Part I. The Break with Rome and the Crisis of Conservatism: 1. 'Schismatics be now plain heretics': debating the royal supremacy over the Church of England
2. The anatomy of opposition in early Reformation England: the case of Elizabeth Barton, the holy maid of Kent
3. Politics and the Pilgrimage of Grace revisited
Part II. Points of Contact: The Henrician Reformation and the English People: 4. Anticlericalism, popular politics and the Henrician Reformation
5. Selling the sacred: Reformation and dissolution at the Abbey of Hailes
6. 'Open disputation was in alehouses': religious debate in the diocese of Canterbury, c. 1543
Part III. Sites of Reformation: Collaboration and Popular Politics under Edward VI: 7. Resistance and collaboration in the dissolution of the chantries
8. The English people and the Edwardian Reformation
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Political structure & processes [JPH], Christian theology [HRCM], History of religion [HRAX], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1]