The Beginnings of English Protestantism

by Edited by Peter Marshall , Alec Ryrie

• ISBN13: 9780521802741
• ISBN10: 0521802741
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-06-17
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Studies of the English Reformation have tended either to emphasise the vitality of traditional religious culture, or to shift the focus to the reigns of Elizabeth and the early Stuarts. As a result the men and women who once seemed central to the story, those who became Protestants in the early and middle decades of the sixteenth century, have tended to be marginalised. These essays draw attention to those critical early years, and to the importance of the evangelical movement in the making of England's religious revolution. By considering themes such as conversion and martyrdom, gender and authority, printing and propaganda, and the long shadow of medieval religious culture, the authors show early English Protestantism to have been a complex and many-headed movement. Rather than assuming the onward march of Protestantism, the essays reveal the unpredictable and deeply-contested process by which an English Protestant identity came to be formed.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	ix
Notes on contributors	x
List of abbreviations	xi
Introduction: Protestantisms and their beginnings	1	(13)
Peter Marshall
Alec Ryrie
Evangelical conversion in the reign of Henry VIII	14	(24)
Peter Marshall
The friars in the English Reformation	38	(22)
Richard Rex
Clement Armstrong and the godly commonwealth: radical religion in early Tudor England	60	(24)
Ethan H. Shagan
Counting sheep, counting shepherds: the problem of allegiance in the English Reformation	84	(27)
Alec Ryrie
Sanctified by the believing spouse: women, men and the marital yoke in the early Reformation	111	(18)
Susan Wabuda
Dissenters from a dissenting Church: the challenge of the Freewillers 1550-1558	129	(28)
Thomas Freeman
Printing and the Reformation: the English exception	157	(23)
Andrew Pettegree
John Day: master printer of the English Reformation	180	(29)
John N. King
Night schools, conventicles and churches: continuities and discontinuities in early Protestant ecclesiology	209	(27)
Patrick Collinson
Index	236