4. The English Reformation after Revisionism

Abstract

For a generation, writing about the English Reformation has been dominated by debates about the character, pace, and popularity of the transition from Catholic to Protestant belief and practice in England. These “revisionist” debates have had a regrettable tendency to produce artificial polarities from a complex set of processes, and some recent studies, such as Norman Jones’sThe English Reformation, Eamon Duffy’sVoices of Morebath, and Ethan Shagan’sPopular Politics and the English Reformation, have attempted to move beyond these polarities to consider the processes by which England became Protestant. This paper surveys some of these studies and attempts an overview of the state of English Reformation historiography.