The Reformation Era · 1530s-1650 · England
The English Reformation & Elizabethan Settlement
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About This Movement
England's Reformation began as a king's quarrel — Henry VIII's break with Rome in the 1530s. And only afterwards became a change in what people believed, swinging hard toward Protestantism under Edward VI, back to Rome under Mary I, and settling under Elizabeth I into a church that kept bishops and cathedrals while preaching a Protestant gospel. What actually altered English religion was less a confession of faith than a book. The Book of Common Prayer, first issued in 1549 and revised in 1552, 1559 and 1662, which fixed the words the whole country was required to say together, week after week. The change can be watched from below in churchwardens' accounts and in the wills of ordinary people, whose formulas about the soul and the dead shift decade by decade. And the settlement held, uneasily, until the civil wars of the 1640s broke it open again.
Sources
- The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (ed. Cummings, Oxford World's Classics, 2011), with the primers and Books of Homilies (primary) — These are the texts ordinary England actually prayed, and the homilies show what parishioners actually heard from the pulpit.
- John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1563+; online variorum TAMO edition) (primary) — Worth reading with care: this is martyrology — real documentary content (examinations of ordinary believers, many women) inside an openly polemical frame that shifted across editions; it also digests the Marian regime's own hostile records.
- Visitation articles and injunctions (Frere & Kennedy, Alcuin Club, 1910) with churchwardens' accounts spanning the changes (Morebath and neighboring parishes) (primary) — This parish paperwork carries the story of Morebath and its neighbors across the religious changes of the period, showing continuity on the ground.
- Wills tracking belief-change across decades (soul-bequest preamble series), with Jewel's Apology (1562) and Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593-) (primary)
- Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (Yale, 1992/2005), part II, with Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers (Yale, 2017) (secondary) — Duffy's revisionist frame is carried here as one interpretive lens, not a final verdict.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 6 (reference)