The Post-Reformation

ONE of the greatest changes in the writing of history during the past twenty years has been the acceptance of ideas as forces of change in their own right. Until the 1980s, it was still common for textbooks to commence an account of a particular period by laying down a foundation of economics and demographics. Now ideology in general, and (in a time of resurgent Islamic and Christian fundamentalism) religious ideology in particular, is treated as a free-standing agent in political and social affairs. Pearson Longman, always a firm with its finger on the current educational pulse, has marked this development by commissioning a series of broad-brush studies of British history during the ‘Christian centuries’ from 600 to 2000, intended to integrate religious, political and social developments more thoroughly than has been done before. John Spurr's is the third to be published. Professor Spurr supplies three components to his task—an overarching concept, a section of narrative and another of analysis—and each of these needs to be considered in turn. His bonding concept is to declare that the sixteenth century in Britain was the period of Reformation, as an act of state and a coherent evangelical campaign, whereas the seventeenth can now be rebranded ‘the post-Reformation’. By this he means that it was concerned with the meaning and legacy of the Reformation itself, and in particular with the issue of religious diversity: in essence, it was a struggle between different sorts of religion. As a useful additional insight, he points out that this was not primarily a matter for the individual conscience, as the period did not readily think in such terms, but of a choice between kinds of religious community

Aesthetics · Diversity (politics · Epistemology · Ideology · Islam · Meaning (existential · Narrative · Period (music · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies

• The Reception of a Science of Texts in England, 1658–1740

  Open Access•S J Gerard Reedy•Harvard Theological Review•2012

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• On the Idea of a National Church

  Open Access•Matthew C Bingham•Church History•2019

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• The Universality of Discipline

  Marcus Harmes•Renaissance and Reformation•1969

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• Jane Grey, 'Manful' Combat, and the Female Reader in Early Modern England

  Edith Snook•Renaissance and Reformation•2009

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• Between Revolutions

  Open Access•Gary S De Krey•History Compass•2008

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• The Occasional Conformity Controversy, Moderation, and the Anglican Critique of Modernity, 1700–1714

  Open Access•Brent S Sirota•The Historical Journal•2014

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