The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaption - Paperback

by Norman L. Jones (Author)

This history tells the story of how the English, over three generations, adapted to the religious changes forced upon them by the Reformation and, in doing so, radically reconstructed their culture.

Back Jacket

Recent debate over the English Reformation has turned around how Catholic the nation was before the Reformation. Most scholars now believe that there was little popular support for the change in religion imposed by Henry VIII. And yet, by the end of Elizabeth's reign England was clearly Protestant. It had abandoned much of its late Medieval culture and replaced it with a new formulation. The book explores how the English, over three generations, adapted to the religious changes and, in the process, radically reconstructed their culture.

Using personal histories, the author explores how individuals and the institutions in which they lived and worked, such as families, universities, towns, guilds, and Inns of Court, refashioned themselves in the face of the rapid social, ideological, political and economic changes brought about by the Reformation. Tracing these responses across three generations, the author emphasizes the way generational interaction and self interest interrelated to adapt to new circumstances, creating, by the late sixteenth century, a multi-theological culture that exalted nationalism and valued the individual conscience.

Author Biography

Norman Jones is Professor and Chair of History at Utah State University. His previous publications include Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion, 1559 (1982), God and the Moneylenders (Blackwell Publishers, 1989), The Birth of the Elizabethan Age: England in the 1560s (Blackwell Publishers, 1992) and The Parliaments of Elizabethan English (Blackwell Publishers, 1993).