Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England

by Judith Maltby

• ISBN13: 9780521453134
• ISBN10: 0521453135
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-08-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book explores the culture of conformity to the Church of England and its liturgy in the period after the Reformation and before the outbreak of the Civil War. It provides a necessary corrective to our view of religion in the period by a serious exploration of the laity who conformed, out of conviction, to the Book of Common Prayer. Through the use of church court records and parliamentary petitions, the views of lay people are examined - those who were neither 'puritan' nor 'Laudian', yet were committed to the reformed liturgy and episcopacy out of sincere belief, and not as a matter of political expediency.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	xi
List of tables	xiii
Acknowledgements	xiv
Abbreviations	xvi
Introduction: the good, the bad, and the godly? The laity and the established church	1	(30)
The study of conformity and its problems	1	(4)
Historiographical issues	5	(14)
Church courts and petitions for the church	19	(5)
How `common' was Common Prayer?	24	(7)
Conformity and the church courts, c. 1570-1642	31	(52)
Church courts	31	(5)
Going to church	36	(34)
Mixed motives	70	(6)
Evidence of support for the conforming clergy	76	(4)
The social spread of conformity	80	(1)
Conclusion: conformity and the church courts	81	(2)
The rhetoric of conformity, c. 1640-1642	83	(47)
Provincial petitions for the national church	83	(5)
Campaigning in the provinces	88	(10)
Social spread	98	(1)
Episcopalianism and anti-Laudianism	99	(14)
Worship according to the Book of Common Prayer	113	(11)
`The common enemy of Rome'	124	(2)
Issues of authority and power	126	(4)
Sir Thomas Aston and the campaign for the established church, c. 1640-1642	130	(51)
The worldly concerns of a Cheshire conformist	130	(7)
An activist for the Church of England	137	(19)
An apologist for the Church of England	156	(19)
From local concerns to a national cause	175	(3)
War and death	178	(3)
Parishioners, petitions, and the Prayer Book in the 1640s	181	(47)
Issues and sources	181	(18)
Tilston	199	(5)
Frodsham	204	(6)
Wilmslow	210	(7)
Marbury	217	(3)
Middlewich	220	(4)
Conformity and its characteristics	224	(4)
Conclusion: laity, clergy, and conformity in post-Reformation England	228	(10)
Conformity and `anti-clericalism'	228	(4)
Conformity and the `godly'	232	(1)
A Restoration postscript: conformity and `Anglicanism'	233	(5)
Appendix 1 Petitions for the Book of Common Prayer and episcopacy, 1640-1642	238	(10)
Appendix 2 Subscribing Cheshire parishes and townships, 1641	248	(6)
Appendix 3 Five subscribing Cheshire communities	254	(22)
Bibliography	276	(19)
Index	295