| This dissertation analyzes popular responses to the English Reformation, seeing ordinary English people neither as passive recipients of new ideas nor simply as resistors against them but as active participants in the process of religious change. Research in court records and State Papers has revealed that every step of the English Reformation was met in the countryside by complex and multifaceted debates. While some participants in these debates chose to resist the Reformation, others chose differing degrees of compromise and collaboration, intermingling official religion with their own biases and predilections. The forms of religious practice that evolved from these compromises did not necessarily satisfy either Romanists, Protestants, or the regime, but they were nonetheless vastly different by the end of Edward VI's reign than they had been a quarter century before.; This dissertation breaks new ground by focusing not on “popular piety” but on “popular politics.” Previous studies have assumed that the success or failure of the Reformation could be measured by counting the numbers of Catholics and Protestants in England at any given time. Yet this schema presumes static categories of theological certainty rather than the fluid categories of political ambiguity that in fact resulted from a Reformation promulgated by the royal government and enforced locally by civil and ecclesiastical officials with their own agendas. In this context, responses to change were necessarily political, conditioned by people's attitudes towards the government and their positions in local power structures. The examination of popular politics reveals forces that encouraged many people, even those who considered themselves conventionally pious Catholics, to embrace large portions of the Reformations of Henry VIII and Edward VI, “performing” obedience and utilizing evangelical language as negotiating strategies in their dealings with both local adversaries and the Tudor regime. None of this suggests that the Reformation was somehow not about religion, but rather that religious ideas could insinuate themselves into English culture, and fundamentally change the religious complexion of that culture and its people, without the sort of widespread conversions that we imagine at the heart of the great ideological rupture of the early modern era. |
