The degree to which the English Protestant Reformation was a reflection of genuine popular piety as opposed to a political necessity imposed by the country's rulers has been a source of lively historical debate in recent years. Whilst numerous arguments and documentary sources have been marshalled to explain how this most fundamental restructuring of English society came about, most historians have tended to divide the sixteenth century into pre and post-Reformation halves, reinforcing the inclination to view the Reformation as a watershed between two intellectually and culturally opposed periods. In contrast, this study takes a longer and more integrated approach. Through the prism of charity and lay piety, as expressed in the wills and testaments taken from selected London parishes, it charts the shifting religious ideas about salvation and the nature and causes of poverty in early modern London and England across a hundred and twenty year period. Studying the evolution of lay piety through the long stretch of the period 1500 to 1620, Claire Schen unites pre-Reformation England with that which followed, helping us understand how 'Reformations' or a 'Long Reformation' happened in London. Through the close study of wills and testaments she offers a convincing cultural and social history of sixteenth century Londoners and their responses to religious innovations and changing community policy.

On the Parish? is a study of the negotiations which took place over the allocation of poor relief in the rural communities of sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth century England. It analyses the relationships between the enduring systems of informal support through which the labouring poor made attempts to survive for themselves; the expanding range of endowed charity encouraged by the late sixteenth century statutes for charitable uses; and the developing system of parish relief co-ordinated under the Elizabethan poor laws. Based on exhaustive research in the archives of the trustees who administered endowments, of the overseers of the poor who assessed rates and distributed pensions, of the magistrates who audited and co-ordinated relief and of the royal judges who played such an important role in interpreting the Elizabethan statutes, the book reconstructs the hierarchy of provision of relief as it was experienced among the poor themselves. It argues that receipt of a parish pension was only the final (and by no means the inevitable) stage in a protracted process of negotiation between prospective pensioners (or 'collectioners', as they came to be called) and parish officers. This running theme is itself reflected in a series of chapters whose sequence seeks to mirror the experience of indigence, moving gradually (and by stages) from the networks of care provided by kin and neighbours into the bureaucracy of the parish relief system, emphasising in particular the importance of labour discipline in the thinking of parish officers. By illuminating the workings of a relief system in which notions of entitlement were both under-developed and contested, On the Parish? provides historical perspective for contemporary debates about the rights and obligations of the poor in a society where the dismantling of the welfare state implies that there is, once again, no right to relief from cradle to grave.

With a focus on England from the accession of Elizabeth I to the mid-1620s, this book examines the practice of direct, scholarly disputation between fundamentally opposing and oftentimes antagonistic Catholic, Protestant and nonconformist puritan divines. Introducing a form of discourse hitherto neglected in studies of religious controversy, the volume works to rehabilitate a body of material only previously examined as part of the great, subjective mass of polemic produced in the wake of the Reformation. In so doing, it argues that public religious disputation - debate between opposing clergymen, arranged according to strict academic formulae - can offer new insights into contemporary beliefs, thought processes and conceptions of religious identity, as well as an accessible and dramatic window into the major theological controversies of the age. Formal disputation crossed confessional lines, and here provides an opportunity for a broad, comparative analysis. More than any other type of interaction or material, these encounters - and the dialogic accounts they produced - displayed the shared methods underpinning religious divisions, allowing Catholic and reformed clergymen to meet on the same field. The present volume asserts the significance of public religious disputation (and accounts thereof) in this regard, and explores their use of formal logic, academic procedure and recorded dialogue form to bolster religious controversy. In this, it further demonstrates how we might begin to move from the surviving source material for these encounters to the events themselves, and how the disputations then offer a remarkable new glimpse into the construction, rationalization and expression of post-Reformation religious argument.

The belief that God eternally and unalterably decrees the election of one part of humankind and the reprobation of the rest has not aged well, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the doctrine of predestination was publicised and popularised to an extent unparalleled in the history of Christianity. Why was this? How successfully was the doctrine able to mix with other ideas, and to what effect? And did belief in predestination encourage confidence or despair? Practical Predestinarians is a study of the ways in which the doctrine of predestination was understood and communicated by churchmen in late Tudor and early Stuart England. It connects with debates about the 'popularity' of Protestantism during England's 'long reformation', as well as with the question of whether predestination tended toward inclusive or divisive, and conformist or subversive, applications. Intersecting with recent debates about the popular reception of Protestant preaching, this book focusses upon the pastoral message itself - it is therefore an investigation into the public face of English Calvinism.

Drawing on legal and literary sources, this work revises and expands understandings of female honesty, worth and credit by exploring how women from the middling and lower ranks of society fashioned positive identities as mothers, housewives, domestic managers, retailers and neighbours between 1550 and 1700.

This book examines the struggle for Protestant consensus and unity through the work of John a Lasco (1499-1560). It is only in recent years that scholars have begun to recognize the importance of Lasco as one of the leading figures of the European Reformation, and a pivotal figure between Lutheran and Reformed theologians. The Polish reformer was among the most dynamic church organizers of the sixteenth century, dedicated to healing the divisions among evangelicals and searching for the key to Protestant unity in the example of the Apostolic Church. It was to this end that he published the Forma ac ratio in 1555, a work that recorded the rites and practices of the London Strangers' Church (of which he had been the first superintendent) and to provide a model for uniting the disparate Protestant communities on the Continent. Although some recent works have focused on aspects of Lasco's early career in Germany and England, this is the first book to provide a comprehensive analysis of the Forma ac ratio, and the reformer's reasons for writing it. This study also puts Lasco's distinct model for Protestant churches into the wider European context and assesses his impact on the struggle for unity through an examination of his correspondence, the reaction to his writings, and his influence on Protestant congregations across Europe.