Popular Politics and the English Reformation
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Published:17th Oct '02
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
A study of popular responses to the English Reformation after Henry VIII's break from Rome.
This is a study of popular responses to the English Reformation, analysing how ordinary people received, interpreted, debated, and responded to religious change. It differs from other studies by arguing 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. 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.
'What impresses me especially about this work is the way it tackles the vast array of intractable and often obscure primary sources. Shagan has proved to have an extraordinary nose for investigation in manuscript material; he has come up with some gems of neglected sources and has exploited them to the full. He has also acquired a sense of context: that indispensable sense of the shape of the English landscape, and how one area relates to another. In sum, this study will become a central statement in our understanding of the English Reformation.' Diarmaid MacCulloch, University of Oxford
'This book deserves careful reading because it challenges many accepted views and offers us a new angle from which to understand these momentous changes in our island's history.' Contemporary Review
'Shagan has presented a refashioned study of the ever-engrossing interplay between the governed and the governors of the early English Reformation.' Susan Wabuda, H-Albion
'This is one of the most important books ever written in its field and a must-read for specialists and students alike.' History
'… an important book … consistently intriguing.' Journal of Ecclesiastical History
'Ethan Shagan's new study of the early years of the English Reformation is a tour de fource. What Popular Politics and the English Reformation attempts to do is to take on and defeat a number of the revisionist shibboleths that have become largely accepted within current historical thinking on the English Reformation. [This book] is an excellent volume, well written, polemical and persuasive - a real contribution to our understanding of the early English Reformation.' Reformation
'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
- Winner of Whitfield Prize 2002
ISBN: 9780521525558
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 19mm
Weight: 490g
364 pages