Tudor Church Reform

Tudor Church Reform
Author: Gerald Lewis Bray
Publisher: Boydell Press
Total Pages: 1060
Release: 2000
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780851158099

First critical edition and translation of documents crucial to our understanding of the English Reformation. The English Reformation began as a dispute over questions of canon law, and reforming the existing system was one of the state's earliest objectives. A draft proposal for this, known as the Henrician canons, has survived, revealing the state of English canon law at the time of the break with Rome, and providing a basis for Cranmer's subsequent, and much better known, attempt to revise the canon law, which was published by John Foxe under the title `Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum' in 1571. Although it never became law, it was highly esteemed by later canon lawyers and enjoyed an unofficial authority in ecclesiastical courts. The Henrician canons and the `Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum' are thus crucial for an understanding of Reformation church discipline, revealing the problems and opportunities facing those who wanted to reform the Church of England's institutional structure in the mid-Tudor period, an age which was to determine the course of the church for centuries to come.This volume makes available for the first time full scholarly editions and translations of the whole text, taking all the available evidence into consideration, and setting the `Reformatio' firmly in both its historical and contemporary context. GERALD BRAY is Anglican Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University.

Religion and Reformation in the Tudor Diocese of Meath

Religion and Reformation in the Tudor Diocese of Meath
Author: Brendan Scott
Publisher:
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN:

'Religion and Reform in the Diocese of Meath, 1536-1622' charts the attempts made to introduce religious reforms into the diocese of Meath during the 16th century. The study opens with an investigation of the towns of Meath and a discussion of religion in the pre-reformation period.

English Reformations

English Reformations
Author: Christopher Haigh
Publisher:
Total Pages: 381
Release: 1993
Genre: England
ISBN: 0198221622

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.

The English Reformation

The English Reformation
Author: Alec Ryrie
Publisher: SPCK
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2020-02-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0281076537

'Masterly' - Eric Metaxas 'Mould-breaking' - John Guy 'A little gem of a book' - Suzannah Lipscomb From the Introduction: ‘There is no such thing as “the English Reformation”. A "Reformation" is a composite event which is only made visible by being framed the right way. It is like a “war”: a label we put onto a particular set of events, while we decide that other – equally violent – acts are not part of that or of any "war". Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English people knew that they were living through an age of religious upheaval, but they did not know that it was "the English Reformation", any more than the soldiers at the battle of Agincourt knew that they were fighting in “the Hundred Years’ War”. . . . ‘Plainly these religious upheavals permanently changed England and, by extension, the many other countries on which English culture has made its mark. There is not, however, a single master narrative of all this turmoil. How could there be? . . . The way you choose to tell the story is governed by what you think is important and what is trivial, by whether there are heroes or villains you want to celebrate or condemn, and by the legacies and lessons which you think matter. Once you have chosen your frame, it will give you the story you want. ‘So this book does not tell "the story" of “the English Reformation”. It tells the stories of six English Reformations, or rather six stories of religious change in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The stories are parallel and overlapping, but each has a somewhat different chronological frame, cast of characters and set of pivotal events, and has left a different legacy.’

Heretics and Believers

Heretics and Believers
Author: Peter Marshall
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 689
Release: 2017-05-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0300226330

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.

Theatre and Reformation

Theatre and Reformation
Author: Paul Whitfield White
Publisher:
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1993-01-01
Genre: English drama
ISBN: 9780521418171

Argues that England's earliest Protestants were involved in drama as patrons, playwrights, performers and spectators.

The English Reformation Revised

The English Reformation Revised
Author: Christopher Haigh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1987-05-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521336314

Twenty years ago, historians thought they understood the Reformation in England. Professor A. G. Dickens's elegant The English Reformation was then new, and highly influential: it seemed to show how national policy and developing reformist allegiance interacted to produce an acceptable and successful Protestant Reformation. But, since then, the evidence of the statute book, of Protestant propagandists and of heresy trials has come to seem less convincing, Neglected documents, especially the records of diocesan administration and parish life, have been explored, new questions have been asked - and many of the answers have been surprising. Some of the old certainties have been demolished, and many of the assumptions of the old interpretation of the Reformation have been undermined, in a wide-ranging process of revision. But the fruits of the new 'revisionism' are still buried in technical academic journals, difficult for students and teachers to find and to use. There is no up-to-date textbook, no comprehensive new survey, to challenge the orthodoxies enshrined in older works. This volume seeks to fulfill two crucial needs for students of Tudor England. First, it brings together some of the most readable of the recent innovative essays and articles into a single book. Second, it seeks to show how a new 'revisionist' interpretation of the English Reformation can be constructed, and examines its strengths and weaknesses. In short, it is an alternative to a new textbook survey - until someone has time (and courage) to write one. The new Introduction sets out the framework for a new understanding of the Reformation, and shows how already published work can be fitted into it. The nine essays (one printed here for the first time) provide detailed studies of particular problems in Reformation history, and general surveys of the progress of religious change. The new Conclusion tries to plug some of the remaining gaps, and suggests how the Reformation came to divide the English nation. It is a deliberately controversial collection, to be used alongside existing textbooks and to promote rethinking and debate.

Documents of the English Reformation

Documents of the English Reformation
Author: Gerald Bray
Publisher: James Clarke & Company
Total Pages: 688
Release: 2019-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0227906896

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

Commonwealth and the English Reformation

Commonwealth and the English Reformation
Author: Ben Lowe
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 135195038X

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.

The Voices of Morebath

The Voices of Morebath
Author: Eamon Duffy
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2003-08-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300175027

In the fifty years between 1530 and 1580, England moved from being one of the most lavishly Catholic countries in Europe to being a Protestant nation, a land of whitewashed churches and antipapal preaching. What was the impact of this religious change in the countryside? And how did country people feel about the revolutionary upheavals that transformed their mental and material worlds under Henry VIII and his three children? In this book a reformation historian takes us inside the mind and heart of Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep farming village on the southern edge of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebath’s conventional archives have long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all the drama of the English Reformation, Morebath’s only priest, Sir Christopher Trychay, kept the parish accounts on behalf of the churchwardens. Opinionated, eccentric, and talkative, Sir Christopher filled these vivid scripts for parish meetings with the names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes we catch a rare glimpse of the life and pre-Reformation piety of a sixteenth-century English village. The book also offers a unique window into a rural world in crisis as the Reformation progressed. Sir Christopher Trychay’s accounts provide direct evidence of the motives which drove the hitherto law-abiding West-Country communities to participate in the doomed Prayer-Book Rebellion of 1549 culminating in the siege of Exeter that ended in bloody defeat and a wave of executions. Its church bells confiscated and silenced, Morebath shared in the punishment imposed on all the towns and villages of Devon and Cornwall. Sir Christopher documents the changes in the community, reluctantly Protestant and increasingly preoccupied with the secular demands of the Elizabethan state, the equipping of armies, and the payment of taxes. Morebath’s priest, garrulous to the end of his days, describes a rural world irrevocably altered and enables us to hear the voices of his villagers after four hundred years of silence.