Women, Reform and Community in Early Modern England

Katherine Willoughby, duchess of Suffolk, has long deserved greater scholarly attention. Renowned by contemporaries for her religious zeal, Willoughby's reputation was set by the Protestant apologist, John Foxe. He characterised the duchess as a fearless evangelical, even recording her orchestration of a mock parade to humiliate her religious opponent, Stephen Gardiner, in which Willoughby's dog played the prelate, complete with episcopal rochet. Melissa Franklin Harkrider's monograph goes beyond such uncompromising depictions of the duchess's confessional identity to add complexity to our understanding of both Willoughby and the emergence of Protestantism in sixteenth-century England. This is therefore not intended as a standard biography. Rather than focusing narrowly on Willoughby as an individual, Harkrider places her within the context of her kinship and patronage networks, looking at how membership of these circles influenced the duchess's complex process of religious development. Harkrider is keen throughout to move beyond static categorisations of belief as either Protestant or Catholic, arguing for the fluidity of spiritual development in this period of religious change. The monograph thus explores chronologically the alterations in Willoughby's theological convictions, starting with her early devotion to Catholicism. Despite the duchess's later reputation, Harkrider argues that her evangelical beliefs developed intermittently through the 1530s and 1540s, shaped by changes in her personal networks; an inheritance dispute served to weaken Willoughby's attachment to religious conservatives, while she was gradually exposed to evangelical thinking at court and in the household of her first husband, Charles Brandon. The wider focus on Willoughby's circle is here immensely valuable, particularly the consideration of her female co-religionists. The importance of female networks in the evangelical community of the 1540s and 1550s, both in England and during Willoughby's Continental exile under Mary, is convincingly argued. This was a network that stretched across social divisions, from the duchess to the wives of merchants. While in many cases the networks formed around a male reformer, these women are revealed as being far from passive associates; they often clashed with both male reformers and other female sustainers, threatening the unity of the church they were working so hard to uphold

Archaeology · Aristocracy (class · Art · Confessional · Context (archaeology · Divine Providence · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Sociology · Theology · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies · Religious Studies

• A ‘conservative’ family? The Howard women and responses to religious change during the early Reformation, c .1530-1558

  Open Access•Nicola Clark•Historical Research•2017

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