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This book is a response to a demand for a history which is no less social than political, investigating what it meant to be a citizen of England living through the 1570s and 1580s. It examines the growing conviction of ‘Englishness’ in the sixteenth century, through the rapidly developing English language; the reinforcement of cultural nationalism as a result of the Protestant Reformation; the national and international situation of England at a time of acute national catastrophe; and through Queen Elizabeth I, the last of her line, who remained unmarried throughout her reign, refusing to even discuss the succession to her throne. The book explores the conviction among leading Elizabethans that they were citizens and subjects, also responsible for the safety of their commonwealth. The tensions between this conviction, born from a childhood spent in the Renaissance classics and in the subjection to the Old Testament of the English Bible, and the dynastic claims of the Tudor monarchy, are all explored at length. Studies of a number of writers who fixed the image of sixteenth-century England for some time to come; Foxe, Camden and other pioneers of the discovery of England are also included.
Difficult pasts combines book history, reception history and theories of cultural memory to explore how Reformation-era audiences used medieval literary texts to construct their own national and religious identities. It argues that the medieval romance book became a flexible site of memory for readers after the Protestant Reformation, allowing them to both connect with and distance themselves from the recent ‘difficult past’. Central characters in this study range from canonical authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to less studied figures, such as printer William Copland, Elizabethan scribe Edward Banister and seventeenth-century poet and romance enthusiast, John Lane. In uniting a wide range of romance readers’ perspectives, Difficult pasts complicates clear ruptures between manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant, or medieval and Renaissance. It concludes that the romance book offers a new way to understand the simultaneous change and continuity that defines post-Reformation England. Overall, Difficult pasts offers an interdisciplinary framework for better understanding the role of physical books and imaginative forms in grappling with the complexities of representing and engaging with the past.
This article addresses three topics. It describes Chartisms creation of a ‘peoples history’ as an alternative to middle-class history, whether Whig or Tory. It locates the sources, most of which have not been noticed before, for the Chartist narrative of the English Reformation. William Cobbetts reinterpretation of the English Reformation is well known as a source for the working-class narrative; William Howitts much less familiar but more important source, antedating Cobbetts History of the Protestant Reformation in England, is used for the first time. The article reconstructs that narrative using printed and manuscript lectures and published interpretations dating from the first discussions of the Peoples Charter in 1836 to the last Chartist Convention in 1858. The manuscript lectures of Thomas Cooper are an essential but little-used source. The article contributes to historical understanding of the intellectual life of the English working class.
Founded in 1421, the Collegiate Church of Manchester, which became a cathedral in 1847, is of outstanding historical and architectural importance. But until now it has not been the subject of a comprehensive study. Appearing on the 600th anniversary of the Cathedral’s inception by Henry V, this book explores the building’s past and its place at the heart of the world's first industrial city, touching on everything from architecture and music to misericords and stained glass. Written by a team of renowned experts and beautifully illustrated with more than 100 photographs, this history of the ‘Collegiate Church’ is at the same time a history of the English church in miniature.
-Reformation Scotland was not static. Lay devotional practice in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries changed in a number of ways, and for the most part these changes were not early Protestant or crypto-Protestant or even proto-Protestant, but Catholic; Scotland’s religious changes in the early sixteenth century were not part of the Protestant Reformation, but part of Catholic reform. They were brought
‘palimpsestuous’ because while they seek to preserve a story or an artefact from time’s oblivion, documenting the medieval world from which romance narratives emerged, they also reflect the imaginations of later readers, poets and antiquarians. Romances layer ‘now’ onto ‘then’, and in doing so they allow readers in the ‘now’ to navigate a difficult ‘then’. Overall in Difficult pasts , we have seen that that while moments of cultural change – moments like the events of the Protestant Reformation – might engender a need to
subjects Derricke’s poem makes ready recourse to apocalyptic rhetoric, casting the Irish as papist satanic rebels and the English as godly Protestant heroes. Vincent Carey notes ‘Derricke’s Protestant and apocalyptic Image of divine retribution against the native population’ which ‘precedes the extreme views of tracts like Spenser’s View [ of the Present State of Ireland ] by almost twenty years’. 20 Moreover, Derricke’s anti-Catholic bile followed Protestant reformation writing from the generation previous
of traditional devotional activities by an increasingly confident and militant Catholic Church. 8 Shrines contributed to the building of religious identity in regions where conflict occurred. For example, at Altötting, a medieval Marian shrine in Bavaria, pilgrim numbers declined after the Protestant Reformation. However, in 1570, the Jesuit Peter Canisius drew attention to
Protestant family, the blood of heroes, evil enemies, and divine victory. Drawing on the logic of Orange conspiracism, described in Chapter 2 , many of my informants went further and actively inverted the case for independence, contending that, far from liberating Scotland from the yoke of oppression, a ‘Yes’ vote would instead plunge Scotland into a deeper (and more formal) bondage to ‘Rome’. The result, I suggest, was that Orangemen in Scotland came to regard the independence referendum as a referendum on the Protestant Reformation, as well as a referendum on Protestant
As a disciplinary formation, medieval studies has long been structured by authoritative hierarchies and conservative scholarly decorums; the associated fear of error in medieval studies dates back to the Renaissance and the Protestant reformation. In contrast, medievalism increasingly celebrates creative play and imaginative invention. Such invention inevitably produces anxiety about historical accuracy. Popular scholarship and journalism in turn are often attracted to the abject otherness of the Middle Ages, especially the torture practices associated with its judicial systems. Such practices are designed to solicit the truth, and so, like illness, mortality and death, they are a useful double trope through which to analyse the relationship between medieval and medievalist approaches to the past.