MO3039 England’s Long Reformation: The Politics of Religion, > c.1500-c.1700
   
Lecturer Dr John McCallum   (St John's House, room 13 )
   
Credits 30
   
Availability 2010-2011 - semester 1
   
Class Hour view timetable
   
Description This course will investigate the dramatic religious changes within England over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and place these shifts within their political contexts. Having been a loyal and comparatively well-administered part of the Holy, Roman, and Apostolic Church in 1500, England was by 1600 an overwhelmingly Protestant country whose people shared a deep-seated anti-Catholicism. But English Protestants also became bitterly divided over time, with momentous consequences for the stability of the Stuart monarchy, as well as chronic problems for the developing Church of England. Although England, unlike France and the Low Countries, had avoided serious armed confessional conflict in the sixteenth century, the civil wars of the 1640s were in many respects England’s wars of religion. The aftermath of war saw the temporary abolition of the national Church of England, and a period of radical reformation during the ‘rule of the saints’. The return of the Stuart monarchy heralded the return of the national church, but also powerful ongoing conflicts about the nature of the Church, and its relations to political life. In 1700 England was both Europe’s leading Protestant power and a permanently divided nation.
   
Basic Reading Alec Ryrie, The Age of Reformations: The Tudor and Stewart Realms, 1485-1603 (2009)
John Spurr, The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603-1714 (2006)
Peter Marshall, Reformation England 1480-1642 (2003)
Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (1993)
David L. Smith, A History of the Modern British Isles, 1603-1707: The Double Crown (1998)
   

Course Structure

Weekly seminars of 2 hours’ duration, organized as follows:

  1. Introduction: Historians and the English Reformation
  2. Henrician Reform I: Background and Break with Rome
  3. Henrician Reform II: Reform and Resistance
  4. Mid-Tudor Revolutions
  5. Elizabethan Reformation
  6. Popular Religion
  7. Post-Reformation Catholicism
  8. Early Stuart Crisis
  9. Commonwealth Radicalism
  10. Restoration Recovery
  11. James II & the Godly Revolution
   
Assessment 60% examination - 3-hour paper
40% coursework
   

Learning Outcomes
  • Awareness of historiographical disputes and trends
  • Understanding the importance of religious ideas in pre-modern political history
  • Understanding early modern society and government
  • Developing powers of analysing complex literature
  • Displaying understanding through clearly argued essays and class presentations
  
   
Restrictions None