The Naming of Protestant England

Bibliographic Data

ID3187553
AuthorsP Marshall (0000-0002-1949-7702, University of Warwick, corresponding author)
Year2012
Volume214
Issue1
Pages87-128
Publication date2012-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePast & Present (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-2746 • E-ISSN: 1477-464X
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/pastj/gtr030
OpenAlexW1982700512
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited3

The writer Daniel Defoe, surveying two centuries during which his country had \ntravelled 'from the Romish Religion to Reform'd, from Reform'd back again to \nRomish, and then to Reform'd again', could note with satisfaction that 'the Name of \nProtestant is now the common Title of an Englishman'. How, and how quickly, \nEngland became Protestant, and English people became Protestants, in the course of \nthe sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is a longstanding and contentious \nhistorical question. In the late 1970s, Britain's leading Tudor historian, G. R. Elton, \ncould confidently assert that by the end of the reign of Edward VI 'England was \nalmost certainly nearer to being a Protestant country than to anything else'. But it \nwas already becoming clear that what Patrick Collinson has christened 'the birthpangs \nof Protestant England' were a more protracted and painful process. Revisionist \nscholarship of the 1980s and 90s stressed the slow and uncertain pace of reform, and \nthe difficulty in securing conversions, with Christopher Haigh proposing, in an \nintriguing formulation, that even by the middle of Elizabeth's reign, the Reformation \nhad succeeded in creating 'a Protestant nation, but not a nation of Protestants'. More \nrecently, attention has shifted from measuring patterns of conversion to investigating \npolitical accommodations and negotiations on the part of rulers and ruled. Other studies of a broadly 'post-revisionist' character draw attention to transitions and continuities in religious culture across the putative Reformation divide. The 'Protestantism' of the English Church and its people is assumed, but the degree to which common understandings of it were shared by clergy and laity, and across social classes, remains deeply problematic.

Media studies · New england · Political science · Protestantism · Sociology · Classics · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Scottish History and National Identity

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