Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British 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. Frontmatter Acknowledgements (page ix) List of abbreviations (page xi) Note on the text (page xiii) Introduction (page 1) 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 (page 29) 2 The anatomy of opposition in early Reformation England: the case of Elizabeth Barton, the holy maid of Kent (page 61) 3 Politics and the Pilgrimage of Grace revisited (page 89) PART II Points of contact: the Henrician Reformation and the English people 4 Anticlericalism, popular politics and the Henrician Reformation (page 131) 5 Selling the sacred: Reformation and dissolution at the Abbey of Hailes (page 162) 6 'Open disputation was in alehouses': religious debate in the diocese of Canterbury, c. 1543 (page 197) PART III Sites of Reformation: collaboration and popular politics under Edward VI 7 Resistance and collaboration in the dissolution of the chantries (page 235) 8 The English people and the Edwardian Reformation (page 270) Conclusion (page 305) Bibliography (page 311) Index (page 327)

This study of popular responses to the English Reformation analyzes how ordinary people received, interpreted, debated, and responded to religious change. It differs from other studies by arguing that the subject cannot be understood simply by asking theological questions about people's beliefs, but must be understood by asking political questions about how they negotiated with state power. Therefore, it concerns political as well as religious history, since it asserts that, even at the popular level, political and theological processes were inseparable in the sixteenth century.

"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."--Jacket Ethan H. Shagan. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 311-326) And Index.