The age of Reformation : the Tudor and Stewart realms, 1485-1603 / Alec Ryrie.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ryrie, Alec.

Series:

Religion, politics, and society in Britain series

Religion, politics and society in Britain

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Reformation.

Great Britain--Church history.

Great Britain.

Church history.

Great Britain--Church history--16th century.

Physical Description:

xx, 333 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Harlow, England ; New York : Pearson Longman, 2009.

Summary:

Throughout the history of Britain, religion has been a potent and influential force, permeating social and political life at many different levels. Yet it has often been written about in restricted institutional terms without accounting for the ways in which religious belief and practice have been bound up with wider social and political developments. Religion, Politics and Society in Britain shifts the focus on this complex and fluctuating relationship and investigates the changing role of religion in British life from 600 AD to the present.

The sixteenth century was an age of Reformation. There was religious reformation, as Protestantism came to England, Scotland and even Ireland, bringing liberation, chaos and bloodshed in its wake. And there was political reformation, as the Tudor and Stewart (later `Stuart') monarchs made their authority felt within and beyond their kingdoms more than any of their predecessors. Together, these two reformations produced not only a new religion, but a new politics - absolutist yet pluralist, populist yet law-bound - and a new society - controlled, fractured, yet more widely engaged and empowered than ever before.

In this book, Alec Ryrie provides an authoritative overview of these momentous events, showing how religion, politics and social change were always intimately interlinked, from the murderous politics of the Tudor court to the building and fragmentation of new religious and social identities in the parishes. Drawing on the most recent research, he explains why events took the course they did - and why that course was so often an unexpected and an unlikely one.

Contents:

1 The World of the Parish 1

Living in early modern Britain 1

A lost world 1

Plague and its aftermath 3

Diversions and hopes 6

The Church as an institution 7

The structure 8

The clergy 9

Beyond the parish 12

Parish Christianity 13

Inside the parish church 13

The Mass and its meaning 16

The living and the dead 19

Satisfaction and dissent 22

Heresy 22

`Anticlericalism' 26

2 Politics and Religion in Two Kingdoms, 1485-1513 30

Governing Britain 30

Kingship, lordship and elective monarchy 30

Structures of government 34

Church and state 40

The usurper's tale: Henry VII and the restoration of stability 44

Challenge and survival: the pretenders 44

Money and control 47

Kingship and legitimacy 50

`The lord of the world': James IV's Scotland and the theatre of kingship 55

3 The Renaissance 62

Out of Italy 62

The weight of history in the Middle Ages 62

The Italian Renaissance and what came of it 64

The Renaissance in Britain 67

Scotland 68

England 72

Renaissance and Reformation 75

Books and printing 77

4 Renaissance to Reformation 83

Henry VIII and the glamour of kingship, 1509-27 83

The performer king 83

The cardinal's king 87

The Lutheran heresy 90

A problem of theology 90

The arrival of heresy in England 95

Scotland: religion and politics under James V, 1513-42 102

5 Supreme Head: Henry VIII's Reformation, 1527-47 110

The break with Rome 110

Conscience and dispensation: two trials, 1527-29 112

A new approach: 1529-32 116

From Divorce to Reformation 120

The Henrician Reformation 129

Books and articles: the doctrinal Reformation 130

King Hezekiah: the Henrician Reformation in practice 132

Reactions and responses 138

Religious conservatives: active resistance, passive resistance 139

Evangelicals: from loyalty to frustration 141

The wider population: confusion and conformity 142

6 The English Revolution: Edward VI, 1547-53 147

Carnival: Protector Somerset's Reformation 147

From Henry VIII to Protector Somerset 147

The gospellers unleashed, 1547-49 150

Official Reformation: the first phase 155

1549-50: the hinge of the Edwardian regime 157

The end of Seymour's Protectorate 157

Religious opposition and its failure 161

Lent: the Duke of Northumberland's Reformation 167

Consolidation and division: the official Reformation 167

The future of the Edwardian Reformation 170

Elective monarchy revisited: the Jane Grey debacle 173

7 Two Restorations: Mary and Elizabeth, 1553-60 177

Mary 177

Religion, marriage and their consequences 178

Rebuilding the Church 183

The Protestant problem 187

The end of the regime and the transfer of power 192

Elizabeth 195

The path to the `Settlement' 195

Implementing the Reformation 201

8 Reformation on the Battlefield: Scotland, 1542-73 205

Regency, 1542-58 205

The crisis of 1543 205

The `Rough Wooing' 208

French Scotland, 1550-59 212

The Scottish Revolution, 1558-61 215

An unexpected war 215

An unexpected peace 218

A tragedy of errors: Mary and the Scots, 1561-73 221

Playing the queen, 1561-67 221

King's men and queen's men, 1567-73 227

9 Gaping Gulfs: Elizabethan England and the Politics of Fear 231

Marriage and the succession: the long crisis 232

From elective monarchy to monarchical republic 232

The marriage problem 233

`By halves and by petty invasions': war and rumours of war 238

Catholicism, `popery' and the enemy within 245

10 Reforming the World of the Parish 255

Protestant Scotland: from kirk session to presbytery 255

A disciplined Church 255

Bishops and presbyteries 260

Puritans and conformists in England 265

The long struggle against the Settlement 265

The resurgence of conformity 272

Building Puritanism in the parishes 275

Popular religion in Elizabethan England: a group portrait 283

11 Reformation and Empire 290

Securing peripheries, 1485-1560 290

The end of independent lordships: Ireland and Wales, 1485-1534 290

The Henrician settlements 293

Reformation in the uplands 297

The Celtic Reformations 1560-1603: success and failure 302

Wales and the Scottish Highlands: the path to Protestantism 302

Ireland in the balance 305

Ireland, England and Essex: the crisis of the 1590s 309.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [317]-325) and index.

ISBN:

9781405835572

1405835575

OCLC:

298112188