This is a literary study of the seventeenth-century pamphlets and sermons delivered to the Long Parliament by Stephen Marshall, a leading English Puritan. Marshall was known as preacher to the Long Parliament and for his participation in the further reformation of the English Church in the 1640s. His understanding of the role of civil magistracy was deeply rooted in his concept of the English Reformation. He was convinced that the constitutional changes during the sixteenth-century English Reformation defined the role of civil magistrates. The King became the Supreme Head of the English Church, and the civil magistracy consisting of King-or-Queen-in Parliament had the responsibility to spearhead the reformation of the English Church. He also insisted that restoring godly preaching and teaching in every local church would eventually complete the English Reformation. Marshall also argued that the Henrician schism paved the way for England to become a Christian Commonwealth where the Church is lodged, whose characteristic was the unity among the people of God. This implied that in England, Presbyterians, Independents, and Erastians all belonged to one body of Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church. In a Christian Commonwealth, civil magistracy was a divine institution and had the highest power of ordering and governing the church, according to Marshall. It was the civil magistracys responsibility to protect and to take care of Gods people in all godliness. And in order to do so, magistrates should be rightly informed from the Word of God. Though Marshall showed his opposition to King Charles Is political innovation that precipitated an unfortunate war in 1642, his vision of a Christian Commonwealth where English magistracy consisting of the King-or-Queen-in-Parliament did not change. If the king could be persuaded to agree with the ecclesiastical reform Puritans proposed through Parliament, he would still be an instrument of reform.

English Reformations takes a refreshing new approach to the study of the Reformation in England. Christopher Haigh's lively and readable study disproves any facile assumption that the triumph of Protestantism was inevitable, and goes beyond the surface of official political policy to explorethe religious views and practices of ordinary English people. With the benefit of hindsight, other historians have traced the course of the Reformation as a series of events inescapably culminating in the creation of the English Protestant establishment. Dr Haigh sets out to recreate the sixteenthcentury as a time of excitement and insecurity, with each new policy or ruler causing the reversal of earlier religious changes. This is a scholarly and stimulating book, which challenges traditional ideas about the Reformation and offers a powerful and convincing alternative analysis.

Whilst much recent research has dealt with the popular response to the religious change ushered in during the mid-Tudor period, this book focuses not just on the response to broad liturgical and doctrinal change, but also looks at how theological and reform messages could be utilized among local leaders and civic elites. It is this cohort that has often been neglected in previous efforts to ascertain the often elusive position of the common woman or man. Using the Vale of Gloucester as a case study, the book refocuses attention onto the concept of "commonwealth" and links it to a gradual, but long-standing dissatisfaction with local religious houses. It shows how monasteries, endowed initially out of the charitable impulses of elites, increasingly came to depend on lay stewards to remain viable. During the economic downturn of the mid-Tudor period, when urban and landed elites refocused their attention on restoring the commonwealth which they believed had broken down, they increasingly viewed the charity offered by religious houses as insufficient to meet the local needs. In such a climate the Protestant social gospel seemed to provide a valid alternative to which many people gravitated. Holding to scrutiny the revisionist revolution of the past twenty years, the book reopens debate and challenges conventional thinking about the ways the traditional church lost influence in the late middle ages, positing the idea that the problems with the religious houses were not just the creation of the reformers but had rather a long history. In so doing it offers a more complete picture of reform that goes beyond head-counting by looking at the political relationships and how they were affected by religious ideas to bring about change.

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.

This text examines the efforts of the Tudor regime to implement the English Reformation in Ireland during the sixteenth century.

A sumptuously written people’s history and a major retelling and reinterpretation of the story of the English Reformation Centuries on, what the Reformation was and what it accomplished remain deeply contentious. Peter Marshall’s sweeping new history—the first major overview for general readers in a generation—argues that sixteenth-century England was a society neither desperate for nor allergic to change, but one open to ideas of “reform” in various competing guises. King Henry VIII wanted an orderly, uniform Reformation, but his actions opened a Pandora’s Box from which pluralism and diversity flowed and rooted themselves in English life. With sensitivity to individual experience as well as masterfully synthesizing historical and institutional developments, Marshall frames the perceptions and actions of people great and small, from monarchs and bishops to ordinary families and ecclesiastics, against a backdrop of profound change that altered the meanings of “religion” itself. This engaging history reveals what was really at stake in the overthrow of Catholic culture and the reshaping of the English Church.

Acts and Monuments by John Foxe, popularly abridged as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, is a celebrated work of church history and martyrology, first published in English in 1563 by John Day. Published early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and only five years after the death of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary I, Foxe's Acts and Monuments was an affirmation of the Protestant Reformation in England during a period of religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Foxe's account of church history asserted a historical justification that was intended to establish the Church of England as a continuation of the true Christian church rather than as a modern innovation, and it contributed significantly to a nationalistic repudiation of the Roman Catholic Church. The sequence of the work, initially in five books, covered first early Christian martyrs, a brief history of the medieval church, including the Inquisitions, and a history of the Wycliffite or Lollard movement. It then dealt with the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, during which the dispute with Rome had led to the separation of the English Church from papal authority and the issuance of the Book of Common Prayer. The final book treated the reign of Queen Mary and the Marian Persecutions. (courtesy of wikipedia.com)

The Reformation era has long been seen as crucial in developing the institutions and society of the English-speaking peoples, and study of the Tudor and Stuart era is at the heart of most courses in English history. The influence of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James version of the Bible created the modern English language, but until the publication of Gerald Bray's Documents of the English Reformation there had been no collection of contemporary documents available to show how these momentous social and political changes took place. This comprehensive collection covers the period from 1526 to 1700 and contains many texts previously relatively inaccessible, along with others more widely known. The book also provides informative appendixes, including comparative tables of the different articles and confessions, showing their mutual relationships and dependence. With fifty-eight documents covering all the main Statutes, Injunctions and Orders, Prefaces to prayer books, Biblical translations and other relevant texts, this third edition of Documents of the English R

A study of conversion and its implications during the English Reformation.

Published to mark the 500th anniversary of the events of 1517, Reformation Divided explores the impact in England of the cataclysmic transformations of European Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The religious revolution initiated by Martin Luther is usually referred to as 'The Reformation', a tendentious description implying that the shattering of the medieval religious foundations of Europe was a single process, in which a defective form of Christianity was replaced by one that was unequivocally benign, 'the midwife of the modern world'. The book challenges these assumptions by tracing the ways in which the project of reforming Christendom from within, initiated by Christian 'humanists' like Erasmus and Thomas More, broke apart into conflicting and often murderous energies and ideologies, dividing not only Catholic from Protestant, but creating deep internal rifts within all the churches which emerged from Europe's religious conflicts. The book is in three parts: In 'Thomas More and Heresy', Duffy examines how and why England's greatest humanist apparently abandoned the tolerant humanism of his youthful masterpiece Utopia, and became the bitterest opponent of the early Protestant movement. 'Counter-Reformation England' explores the ways in which post-Reformation English Catholics accommodated themselves to a complex new identity as persecuted religious dissidents within their own country, but in a European context, active participants in the global renewal of the Catholic Church. The book's final section 'The Godly and the Conversion of England' considers the ideals and difficulties of radical reformers attempting to transform the conventional Protestantism of post-Reformation England into something more ardent and committed. In addressing these subjects, Duffy shines new light on the fratricidal ideological conflicts which lasted for more than a century, and whose legacy continues to shape the modern world.