Commonwealth And The English Reformation

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 study considers sixteenth century evangelicals' vision of a ›godly‹ commonwealth within the broader context of political, religious, social, and intellectual changes in Tudor England. Using the clergyman and bestselling author, Thomas Becon (1512–1567), as a case study, Brian L. Hanson argues that evangelical views of the commonwealth were situation-dependent rather than uniform, fluctuating from individual to individual. His study examines the ways commonwealth rhetoric was used by evangelicals and how that rhetoric developed and changed. While this study draws from English Reformation historiography by acknowledging the chronology of reform, it engages with interdisciplinary texts on poverty, gender, and the economy in order to demonstrate the intersection of commonwealth rhetoric with Renaissance humanism. Furthermore, the experience of exile and the languages of prophecy and companionship directly influenced commonwealth rhetoric and dictated the priorities, vocabulary, and political expression of the evangelicals. As sixteenth-century England vacillated in its religious direction and priorities, the evangelicals were faced with a political conundrum and the tension between obedience and ›lawful‹ disobedience. There was ultimately a fundamental disagreement on the nature and criteria of obedience. Hanson's study makes a further contribution to the emerging conversation about English commonwealth politics by examining the important issues of obedience and disobedience within the evangelical community. A correct assessment of the issues surrounding the relationship between evangelicals and the commonwealth government will lead to a rediscovery of both the complexities of evangelical commonwealth rhetoric and the tension between the biblical command to submit to civil authorities and the injunction to ›obey God rather than man‹.

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.

Literature and politics in the English Reformation is a study of the English Reformation as a political and literary event. Focusing on an eclectic group of texts, unified by their articulation of the key elements of the cultural history of the period 1510-80, the book unravels the political, poetic and religious themes of the era. --book jacket.

"Bibliographical notes": pages 419-443.

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.

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