Haigh's English Reformations: Religion, Politics, And Society Under The Tudors?

English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors

Christopher Haigh

Christopher Haigh’s English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors is a thorough and compelling monograph of the English Reformation as not one, but three, political reformations and a parallel evangelical movement that haltingly altered the English religious landscape. Haigh rejects the inclination to view the English Reformation as caused by exemplary events that transformed a once Catholic country into a staunchly Protestant stronghold. Instead, Haigh utilizes sources such as Privy Council proceedings, parish and churchwarden records, personal accounts, and scholarly works of the period to masterfully reconstruct the Reformation

Part I, “A Church Unchallenged,” critically assesses Roman Catholic entrenchment in early Tudor England to establish politics, rather than a decline in Catholicism’s popularity, as the catalyst for the fissure with Rome. By considering the emergence of heretical groups in the 1528 London courts of the bishop trials, the consequences of Cardinal Wolsey’s political downfall, and the attempts of the king’s lawyers to justify royal supremacy, Haigh establishes that 1529 was not the beginning of a premeditated theological attack on the Church. From the onset Haigh establishes a pattern of careful attention to sources that is maintained throughout his work. In his attention to Catholicism’s popularity among laymen, Haigh balances the popularity of orthodox manuals such as Richards Whitford’s A Work for Householders among the “book-buying minority” with the more inclusive participation of laymen in religious guilds and the practice o donating to the Church in wills to present the entrenchment of Catholicism from an array of