Alexandra Walsham
Biographic Data
| ID | 972266 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexandra Walsham |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexandra |
| FAMILY NAME | Walsham |
| SIGNATURE | WALSHAM A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9926-2582 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 76 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 200 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 74 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Snapshots from a Fast‐Moving Train: Religious History 1960–2025
The Journal of Religious History began life in Australia and New Zealand in 1960. In the Foreword to its first issue, the editors stressed the broad remit of its field of enquiry and hoped that it would be ‘a meeting place’ for all who recognised ‘the pervasive role of religion in history’. Announcing that it was not the organ of any particular party or school, their aim was to create a forum in which believers and non-believers, Christians and n…
Catholic Survival in the Dutch Republic: Agency in Coexistence and the Public Sphere in Utrecht, 1620–1672, by Genji Yasuhira
The Witnessings of the Spirit: Experimental Religion and Heart Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Britain
Fervent Protestants validated their individual and collective status as God's elect children by recalling the spiritual “experiments” he had wrought within their hearts and souls. By investigating their written testimonies of the emotional and corporeal effects which the Holy Spirit worked in the bodies of visible saints, this article illuminates the interconnections between introspection and community, private belief and public performance, reli…
Heirloom Books: Family Memory, Genealogy, and English Archives , c. 1450–1850
This article examines English primers, bibles and prayer books which were passed down within families and preserved as heirlooms between c.1450 and 1850. Such books attest to the evolution of memorial practices before and after the Reformation, and to the continuities which enabled people to navigate the theological, ecclesiastical and cultural upheavals that fundamentally reconstituted the function and meaning of these texts. Used to record birt…
Amnesia and Oblivion in England’s Long Reformation
This essay explores aspects of the history of forgetting in the context of England’s long Reformation stretching from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It considers official strategies for expunging the medieval religious past, through iconoclasm, sanctioned amnesia, and censorship, alongside attempts to counteract and combat this campaign of oblivion. It examines anxieties about forgetting in Protestant culture and the circumstances in …
Stephanie E. Koscak. Monarchy, Print Culture, and Reverence in Early Modern England: Picturing Royal Subjects
Coming of Age in Faith: The Rite of Confirmation after the English Reformation
This article explores confirmation as a ritual of Christian initiation in the context of the English Reformation. It examines how this rite of passage, which was demoted from its traditional status as a sacrament, survived and evolved in the wake of the theological, liturgical and ecclesiological changes associated with the advent of Protestantism. It traces the permutations of the practice of laying on of hands that both united and fractured peo…
The Godly and Their Neighbours: Puritanism and Religious Pluralism in Early Modern England
This essay surveys the relationship between puritanism and religious pluralism between 1559 and 1642. It examines the contradictory instincts towards inclusion and exclusion that were central to its dynamic throughout this period, as well as the tension between its commitment to reforming the Church of England from within and the emphasis on social separatism that pulled it in the direction of congregationalism. It also explores puritan attitudes…
Générations d'Adam: Théologie Et Race Dans La Pensée Protestante Anglaise
Cet essai examine le fonctionnement de la race dans l'imaginaire généalogique anglais aux xvi e et xvii e siècles. À travers une étude de la pensée réformée sur le péché originel et le salut, il examine le lien entre la théologie protestante et les conceptions du lignage et fait ressortir les ambivalences et les tensions intrinsèques à ce lien entre c. 1560 et 1660. Il explore les traces linguistiques et conceptuelles de la race dans une série de…
Remembering the Reformation
Memory and the English Reformation
The dramatic religious revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved a battle over social memory. On one side, the Reformation repudiated key aspects of medieval commemorative culture; on the other, traditional religion claimed that Protestantism was a religion without memory. This volume shows how religious memory was sometimes attacked and extinguished, while at other times rehabilitated in a modified guise. It investigates ho…
Eating the Forbidden Fruit: Pottery and Protestant Theology in Early Modern England
This article offers insight into Protestant attitudes towards food by exploring seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English delftware dishes and chargers decorated with the biblical motif of the Temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It investigates the biblical story and doctrinal assumptions that underpinned this iconography and considers how objects decorated with it illuminate the ethics of eating in the godly household and reforme…
Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation by Peter Marshall
Review Article| January 01 2020 Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation by Peter Marshall Marshall, Peter, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 652 pp. Alexandra Walsham Alexandra Walsham Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2020) 26 (1): 158–159. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-7899808 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Shar…
Memory in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, by Judith Pollmann
The central insight that lies at the heart of Judith Pollmann’s concise and stimulating book is that because memory is ‘a form of cognition that interacts with social processes’ it ‘also has a history’ (p. 3). By contrast with the attention that scholars of the Middle Ages and the twentieth century have lavished on this topic, early modernists have been surprisingly slow to place it under the microscope. But questions about how, what and why peop…
Nature and Nurture in the Early Quaker Movement: Creating the Next Generation of Friends
This article explores the place of education within the early Quaker movement in England. It examines how Quaker attitudes towards human nature shaped their views on the role of nurture in the creation of a community of believers, and probes the theological assumptions that underpinned this, notably their repudiation of conventional Protestant ideas about original sin and predestination. It also traces the evolution of Quaker views on spiritual d…
Relics, writing, and memory in the English Counter Reformation: Thomas Maxfield and his afterlives
This article explores the multiple and competing afterlives of the Jacobean martyr, Thomas Maxfield, who was executed at Tyburn in July 1616. It traces the evolution of his cult between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries by exploring the migration of his relics alongside the movements of the written and printed texts recounting his life and death. It investigates the domestic and international politics in which these textual and material …
Chronicles, memory and autobiography in Reformation England
This article argues that reports of ‘the death of the chronicle’ in the early modern period have been exaggerated. Through a close analysis of three manuscript chronicles from Worcester, Chester and Shrewsbury, it underscores the vitality and creative evolution of the genre against the backdrop of religious, cultural and technological changes that seriously challenged traditional modes and patterns of memory and commemoration. It explores their r…
AHR Conversation: Each Generation Writes Its Own History of Generations
Since 2006, the AHR has published ten "Conversations" on a wide range of topics.By now, we have a standard format: the Editor convenes a group of scholars with an interest in the topic who, via e-mail over the course of several months, conduct a conversation that is then lightly edited and footnoted, finally appearing in the December issue.The goal has been to provide readers with a wide-ranging and accessible consideration of a topic at a high l…
Toleration, Pluralism, and Coexistence: The Ambivalent Legacies of the Reformation
Article Toleration, Pluralism, and Coexistence: The Ambivalent Legacies of the Reformation was published on October 26, 2017 in the journal Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte - Archive for Reformation History (volume 108, issue 1).
Multievent Project: Remembering the Reformation , Universities of Cambridge and York, United Kingdom
The Holy Maid of Wales: Visions, Imposture and Catholicism in Elizabethan Britain
This article explores the case of Elizabeth Orton of Overton in Flintshire, a young girl who experienced two ecstatic visions in February and March 1581 and was later exposed as a fraud. First, it uses this intriguing incident to illuminate the precarious stability of the Elizabethan polity at a moment of acute political crisis, when the fate of the Reformation itself seemed to be balanced on a knife-edge. It contends that religious developments …
Rough Music and Charivari: Letters Between Natalie Zemon Davis and Edward Thompson, 1970-1972
In 1971 Natalie Zemon Davis published a seminal article in the pages of Past and Present, entitled 'The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France'.1 A study of the carnivalesque rituals of mockery through which communities displayed disapproval of moral and social infractions, the essay opened a revealing window onto the festive customs through which unmarried young men publicly humiliated and regulated the sexua…
Recycling the Sacred: Material Culture and Cultural Memory after the English Reformation
This article examines medieval liturgical artifacts that survived the English Reformation by being converted to alternative religious and secular purposes. Exploiting both textual and material evidence, it explores how sacred objects were adapted and altered for a range of domestic and ecclesiastical uses, together with the underlying theological assumptions about adiaphora or "things indifferent" that legitimized such acts of "recycling." These …
Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain
The survival and revival of Roman Catholicism in post-Reformation Britain remains the subject of lively debate. This volume examines key aspects of the evolution and experience of the Catholic communities of these Protestant kingdoms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rejecting an earlier preoccupation with recusants and martyrs, it highlights the importance of those who exhibited varying degrees of conformity with the ecclesiastical…
Dowting of ye Cupp’: Disbelief about the Eucharist and a Catholic Miracle in Reformation England
This essay is inspired by an intriguing late sixteenth-century Catholic liturgical object, the Bosworth Hall burse. It commemorates a vision of the crucified Christ seen by the missionary priest (and later martyr) John Payne in Douai in 1575, which apparently dispelled a moment of doubt about the real presence in the consecrated eucharist. The incident is situated in the context of the heated Catholic and Protestant controversies about the doctri…
The Reformation and 'The Disenchantment of the World' Reassessed
This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the ongoing debate about the role of the Protestant Reformation in the process of 'the disenchantment of the world'. It considers the development of this thesis in the work of Max Weber and subsequent scholars, its links with wider claims about the origins of modernity, and the challenges to this influential paradigm that have emerged in the last twenty-five years. Setting the literature on E…
Introduction: Relics and Remains
Depicted in this compelling early eighteenth-century print (Fig. 1), St Veronica's veil is among the most renowned examples of the cultural phenomenon that is the subject of this volume: a relic.According to the tradition that has crystallized around it over two millennia, the vernicle is the cloth with which a pious Jerusalem woman compassionately dried the face of the suffering Christ on the road to his crucifixion at Calvary, and upon which hi…
Frantick Hacket: Prophecy, Sorcery, Insanity, and the Elizabethan Puritan Movement
This essay reconsiders the career of the most famous of Elizabethan false prophets, William Hacket, the illiterate pseudo-messiah who, together with two gentleman disciples, plotted a civil and ecclesiastical coup, and was executed for treason in July 1591. It explores the significance of autonomous lay activity on the fringes of the mainstream puritan movement, demonstrating links between the dissident trio and key clerical figures who later pru…
Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission to England
This article explores the way in which the Counter Reformation priests sent to England after 1574 cultivated and harnessed the culture of the miraculous in their efforts to reform and evangelize the populace and to defend doctrines and practices assaulted by Protestant polemicists. Drawing on the insights emerging from recent research on Catholic renewal on the Continent, it shows how the seminary clergy and especially the Jesuits fostered tradit…
History, Memory, and the English Reformation
This article is a revised and expanded version of my inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, delivered on 20 Oct. 2011. It explores how the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reshaped perceptions of the past, stimulated shifts in historical method, and transformed the culture of memory, before turning to the interrelated question of when and why contemporaries began to remember …
Unclasping the Book? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Vernacular Bible
In November 1589, news of a provocative act of vandalism reached the ears of the Elizabethan authorities. Robert Goldesborowe, an outspoken recusant who christened his children ''in corners'' and openly affirmed that all Protestant ministers were knaves, had maliciously defaced an English Bible in three distinct places. One of the passages he chose to mutilate apparently concerned the translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular. Goldesborow…
Introduction: Past and … Presentism
What place does ‘presentism’ have in modern historical scholarship? Can students of the past avoid seeing it through the prism of the present? Should our research be undertaken with an eye to its current relevance and with the aim of transforming the future? Past and Present invited seven historians to reflect critically on these questions with reference to their own periods and specialisms. The results of this experiment are published below. It …
The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe
The Parochial Roots of Laudianism Revisited: Catholics, Anti-Calvinists and ‘Parish Anglicans’ in Early Stuart England
There is no end in sight to historical squabbles about the speed, impact and enduring cultural and ecclesiastical legacies of the English Reformation. The past two decades have witnessed a lively and stimulating debate about the reception and entrenchment of Protestant belief and practice in local contexts. Over the same period we have seen a series of heated and animated exchanges about the developments taking place within the early Stuart Churc…
Domesticating the Reformation: Material Culture, Memory, and Confessional Identity in Early Modern England
This article explores domestic artifacts that testify to the afterlife of the European Reformation in the British Isles. Focusing especially on decorated and commemorative delftware, it investigates how the memory of the Protestant past was appropriated and altered in the English context and how it infiltrated the household in the guise of consumer goods in which taste, piety, politics, and private sentiment were intertwined. It analyzes their ch…
Miracles in Post-Reformation England
To speak of miracles in post-Reformation England may seem like something of an oxymoron. The sense of internal contradiction in my title springs from the fact that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant ministers consistently maintained that this category of extraordinary events had long since ceased. They did not deny that supernatural acts of this kind had taken place in biblical times. As set down in the books of the Old Testament, God …
Domme Preachers'? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print
‘DOMME PREACHERS’? POST-REFORMATION ENGLISH CATHOLICISM AND THE CULTURE OF PRINT Get access Alexandra Walsham Alexandra Walsham University of Exeter Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 168, Issue 1, August 2000, Pages 72–123, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/168.1.72 Published: 01 August 2000
The Fatall Vesper: Providentialism and Anti-Popery in Late Jacobean London
Journal Article “THE FATALL VESPER”: PROVIDENTIALISM AND ANTI-POPERY IN LATE JACOBEAN LONDON Get access Alexandra Walsham Alexandra Walsham Emmanuel CollegeCambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 144, Issue 1, August 1994, Pages 36–87, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/144.1.36 Published: 01 August 1994
Recycling the Sacred: Material Culture and Cultural Memory after the English Reformation
This article examines medieval liturgical artifacts that survived the English Reformation by being converted to alternative religious and secular purposes. Exploiting both textual and material evidence, it explores how sacred objects were adapted and altered for a range of domestic and ecclesiastical uses, together with the underlying theological assumptions about adiaphora or "things indifferent" that legitimized such acts of "recycling." These …
Rough Music and Charivari: Letters Between Natalie Zemon Davis and Edward Thompson, 1970-1972
In 1971 Natalie Zemon Davis published a seminal article in the pages of Past and Present, entitled 'The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France'.1 A study of the carnivalesque rituals of mockery through which communities displayed disapproval of moral and social infractions, the essay opened a revealing window onto the festive customs through which unmarried young men publicly humiliated and regulated the sexua…
Skeletons in the Cupboard: Relics after the English Reformation
Devotion to relics, declared the Genevan reformer Jean Calvin in an unusually scurrilous tract translated into English in 1561, was a most ‘execrable sacrilege’, a ‘filthy polution the which ought in no wise to be suffered in the church’. He spared not an ounce of withering contempt and acerbic wit in cataloguing the vast reservoir of counterfeit bones, blood, shirts, caps, and assorted other ‘baggage’ and ‘geare’ that filled the churches of Euro…
Holy Families: The Spiritualization of the Early Modern Household Revisited
The household has been a compelling metaphor for the Christian Church since biblical times. In his epistle to the Ephesians (3: 15), St Paul wrote of ‘the whole family’ of Christ’s followers ‘in heaven and earth’; in Galatians 6: 10, he equated the congregation of the elect with ‘the household of faith’. But these were merely variations on a more ancient theme. In the Old Testament too the language of kinship is deployed to describe the community…
The Reformation of the Generations: Youth, Age and Religious Change in England, C . 1500–1700
This exploratory essay adopts the life-cycle as a tool with which to investigate religious change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines how inherited tropes about youth and age were deployed and the ways in which the notion of generational strife was invoked at various stages of England's long Reformation. These provide insight into how contemporaries understood and experienced the theological and cultural upheavals of the era a…
Chronicles, memory and autobiography in Reformation England
This article argues that reports of ‘the death of the chronicle’ in the early modern period have been exaggerated. Through a close analysis of three manuscript chronicles from Worcester, Chester and Shrewsbury, it underscores the vitality and creative evolution of the genre against the backdrop of religious, cultural and technological changes that seriously challenged traditional modes and patterns of memory and commemoration. It explores their r…
AHR Conversation: Each Generation Writes Its Own History of Generations
Since 2006, the AHR has published ten "Conversations" on a wide range of topics.By now, we have a standard format: the Editor convenes a group of scholars with an interest in the topic who, via e-mail over the course of several months, conduct a conversation that is then lightly edited and footnoted, finally appearing in the December issue.The goal has been to provide readers with a wide-ranging and accessible consideration of a topic at a high l…
Migrations of the Holy: Explaining Religious Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
This reflective essay focuses upon the theoretical problem of explaining religious change in medieval and early modern Europe without perpetuating inherited paradigms of progress and modernization. First, it assesses and challenges prevailing models of periodization through an analytical overview of recent historiographical interpretations of four interconnected processes: conversion and Christianization, reform and reformation, “disenchantment” …
The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485-1603
Journal Article The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485–1603 Get access The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485–1603, by Alec Ryrie (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2009; pp. xx + 333. Pb. £18.99). Alexandra Walsham Alexandra Walsham Trinity College, Cambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume CXXV, Issue 516, October 2010, Pages 1237–1239, h…
Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Colonization in the Early Modern World
Thinking with demons: the idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe . By Stuart Clark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xvii+827. ISBN 0–19–820001–3. £75.00. The darker side of the Renaissance: literacy, territoriality, and colonization . By Walter D. Mignolo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. xxii+426. ISBN 0–472–10327. $39.50. Oedipus and the devil: witchcraft, sexuality, and religion in early modern Europe . By Lynda…
Cultures of Coexistence in Early Modern England: History, Literature and Religious Toleration
This synoptic essay explores trends in historical research and literary criticism on the theme of toleration. It surveys the current state of this lively field of enquiry and demonstrates how far the subject remains coloured by assumptions and narratives of change forged in the early modern era itself. It explores how tolerance and intolerance have been approached by intellectual and social historians and the implications of the recent growth of …
Sacred Topography and Social Memory: Religious Change and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain and Ireland 1
This article analyses the relationship between the tumultuous religious changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the landscape of the British Isles. It examines the immediate impact and long‐term cultural repercussions of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations on perceptions of and practices associated with the natural world and physical environment, as well as the influence exerted by intellectual and cultural trends associated w…
Out of the Mouths of Babes and Sucklings’: Prophecy, Puritanism, and Childhood in Elizabethan Suffolk
In January 1581 a short black-letter tract in the tiny octavo format favoured by many Elizabethan publishers of sensational news appeared from the press of a London printing house based just outside the City in the Strand. Like other ‘three-halfpenny’ pamphlets of its ilk, this particular piece of ephemera was a pious tale of the prodigious and strange, but true. It described the ‘wonderfull worke of God shewed upon a chylde’ by the name of Willi…
The Fatall Vesper: Providentialism and Anti-Popery in Late Jacobean London
Journal Article “THE FATALL VESPER”: PROVIDENTIALISM AND ANTI-POPERY IN LATE JACOBEAN LONDON Get access Alexandra Walsham Alexandra Walsham Emmanuel CollegeCambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 144, Issue 1, August 1994, Pages 36–87, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/144.1.36 Published: 01 August 1994
Impolitic pictures: Providence, history, and the iconography of Protestant nationhood in early Stuart England
This paper explores the religious politics of remembering and visually depicting the recent past in early modern England. In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the commemoration of a series of critical moments in the reigns of the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth, and her Stuart successor, King James I, became a powerful bulwark of both Church and State. The story of the nation’s providential rescues from Catholic treachery and oppression…
The Parochial Roots of Laudianism Revisited: Catholics, Anti-Calvinists and ‘Parish Anglicans’ in Early Stuart England
There is no end in sight to historical squabbles about the speed, impact and enduring cultural and ecclesiastical legacies of the English Reformation. The past two decades have witnessed a lively and stimulating debate about the reception and entrenchment of Protestant belief and practice in local contexts. Over the same period we have seen a series of heated and animated exchanges about the developments taking place within the early Stuart Churc…
Frantick Hacket: Prophecy, Sorcery, Insanity, and the Elizabethan Puritan Movement
This essay reconsiders the career of the most famous of Elizabethan false prophets, William Hacket, the illiterate pseudo-messiah who, together with two gentleman disciples, plotted a civil and ecclesiastical coup, and was executed for treason in July 1591. It explores the significance of autonomous lay activity on the fringes of the mainstream puritan movement, demonstrating links between the dissident trio and key clerical figures who later pru…
Shorter notice. Beyond the Persecuting Society. Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment. JC Laursen, CJ Nederman [eds]
Journal Article Beyond the Persecuting Society. Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment. JC Laursen, CJ Nederman [eds] Get access A Walsham A Walsham University of Exeter, UK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 114, Issue 459, November 1999, Pages 1308–1309, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/114.459.1308 Published: 01 November 1999
Article. Vox Piscis: Or The Book-Fish: providence and the uses of the reformation past in Caroline Cambridge
Journal Article Article. Vox Piscis: or The Book-Fish: providence and the uses of the reformation past in Caroline Cambridge Get access A Walsham A Walsham University of Exeter, UK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 114, Issue 457, June 1999, Pages 574–606, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/114.457.574 Published: 01 June 1999
Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Colonization in the Early Modern World
Thinking with demons: the idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe . By Stuart Clark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xvii+827. ISBN 0–19–820001–3. £75.00. The darker side of the Renaissance: literacy, territoriality, and colonization . By Walter D. Mignolo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. xxii+426. ISBN 0–472–10327. $39.50. Oedipus and the devil: witchcraft, sexuality, and religion in early modern Europe . By Lynda…
Domme Preachers'? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print
‘DOMME PREACHERS’? POST-REFORMATION ENGLISH CATHOLICISM AND THE CULTURE OF PRINT Get access Alexandra Walsham Alexandra Walsham University of Exeter Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 168, Issue 1, August 2000, Pages 72–123, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/168.1.72 Published: 01 August 2000
‘Tongues of Heaven’: Prodigies, Portents, and Prophets
Providence in Early Modern England
This is a study of the 16th- and 17th-century belief that God actively intervened in human affairs to punish, reward, warn, try, and chastise. Providentialism has often been seen as a distinctive hallmark of puritan piety. However, the book argues that it was a cluster of assumptions which penetrated every sector of English society, cutting across the boundaries created by status and creed, education and wealth. It explores a range of dramatic ev…
Religious publishing in England 1557–1640
Religious books, in conventional terms, are found to have been the single most important component of the publishing trade. In England, apart from oral communication, there was a mass of both polemical and devotional material which, if published, was published scribally, surviving only in manuscript. Some of the most active preachers of the age never appeared in print, or never in their lifetimes. A large part of the story of indoctrination conce…
John Craig, Reformation, politics and polemics: The growth of Protestantism in East Anglian market towns, 1500–1610 . (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.) Pages xv+284. £49.50
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Unclasping the Book? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Vernacular Bible
In November 1589, news of a provocative act of vandalism reached the ears of the Elizabethan authorities. Robert Goldesborowe, an outspoken recusant who christened his children ''in corners'' and openly affirmed that all Protestant ministers were knaves, had maliciously defaced an English Bible in three distinct places. One of the passages he chose to mutilate apparently concerned the translation of the Scriptures into the vernacular. Goldesborow…
Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission to England
This article explores the way in which the Counter Reformation priests sent to England after 1574 cultivated and harnessed the culture of the miraculous in their efforts to reform and evangelize the populace and to defend doctrines and practices assaulted by Protestant polemicists. Drawing on the insights emerging from recent research on Catholic renewal on the Continent, it shows how the seminary clergy and especially the Jesuits fostered tradit…
Jewels for Gentlewomen: Religious Books as Artefacts in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
Historians tend to approach books primarily as vehicles for ideas, sources for the thought of the individuals and groups who wrote and read the words on the pages inside. They rarely pause to consider their significance as physical artefacts and items of material culture. This paper brings the format, appearance, and practical function of Bibles, prayer books, and other small devotional works to the very centre of our attention. It suggests that …
The Anatomie of Abuses
Philip Stubbes. The Anatomie of Abuses. Ed. Margaret J. Kidnie. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 245. Renaissance English Text Society, 7th ser., 27. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002. xiv + 444 pp. index, append, illus. bibl. $45. ISBN: 0-86698-287-6. - Volume 57 Issue 2
Miracles in Post-Reformation England
To speak of miracles in post-Reformation England may seem like something of an oxymoron. The sense of internal contradiction in my title springs from the fact that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant ministers consistently maintained that this category of extraordinary events had long since ceased. They did not deny that supernatural acts of this kind had taken place in biblical times. As set down in the books of the Old Testament, God …
Westminster Abbey Reformed, 1540–1640
Westminster Abbey Reformed, 1540–1640, ed. C.S. Knighton and Richard Mortimer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003; pp. xvi + 293. £59.95). Despite the extraordinary riches of its muniments, a scholarly official history of Westminster Abbey in the post-Reformation era remains to be written. In anticipation of the possible commissioning of a new book to commemorate the millennium of the Abbey's foundation by Edward the Confessor in 1065, the editors of the p…
Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation
This article offers a series of reflections on some aspects of the historiography of English Catholicism, set within the context of recent developments in research on the Continental Counter Reformation. Focusing on the question of how far the reforms ordered by the Council of Trent could be pursued and implemented by a missionary priesthood against the backdrop of Protestant persecution, it suggests that the relationship between post-Reformation…
Inventing the Lollard Past: The Afterlife of a Medieval Sermon in Early Modern England
This essay explores the evolving significance of a famous fourteenth-century Paul's Cross sermon by Thomas Wimbledon in late medieval and early modern England and its transmission from manuscript to print. It highlights the ideological ambiguity of the text against the backdrop of the academic Wycliffite challenge and shows how it illuminates the permeability of the boundary between heterodoxy and orthodoxy in the fifteenth century. It then exami…
The godly and popular culture
The task of delineating the relationship between Puritanism and popular culture may be compared with walking into a minefield that contains not merely hidden explosive devices but also treacherous pockets of quicksand. The hapless scholar is simultaneously confronted by two conceptual and definitional hazards. Both the subjects of enquiry are slippery, contentious and intractable; both have been the focus of prolonged and inconclusive debates abo…
The Reformation and 'The Disenchantment of the World' Reassessed
This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the ongoing debate about the role of the Protestant Reformation in the process of 'the disenchantment of the world'. It considers the development of this thesis in the work of Max Weber and subsequent scholars, its links with wider claims about the origins of modernity, and the challenges to this influential paradigm that have emerged in the last twenty-five years. Setting the literature on E…
Recording Superstition in Early Modern Britain: The Origins of Folklore
In Victorian and Edwardian Britain, the task of recording ‘superstitions’ was nothing less than an intellectual and cultural obsession. Scholars, ministers, and educated gentlemen and women dedicated themselves to collecting quaint remnants of a way of life they were convinced was fading rapidly into oblivion. The many anthologies of popular ‘antiquities’ prepared and published in this period are a monument to their determination to preserve thes…
Footprints and Faith: Religion and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain and Ireland
The idea that divine beings, holy people and magical creatures leave behind permanent marks of their immortality on the surface of the earth is common to many cultures and spiritual systems. Throughout history curious hollows, cavities, and coloured stains on stone and rock have been explained as tangible evidence of the presence and intervention of deities, saints, prophets, angels and demons. The folk motif of the miraculous impression of a foo…
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