Operating principally from original sources, it revises the standard work of the Dodds and appraises the research produced in the subject over the last thirty years.

This book is a study of popular responses to the English Reformation. It takes as its subject not the conversion of English subjects to a new religion but rather their political responses to a Reformation perceived as an act of state and hence, like all early modern acts of state, negotiated between government and people. These responses included not only resistance but also significant levels of accommodation, co-operation and collaboration as people attempted to co-opt state power for their own purposes. This study argues, then, that the English Reformation was not done to people, it was done with them in a dynamic process of engagement between government and people. As such, it answers the twenty-year-old scholarly dilemma of how the English Reformation could have succeeded despite the inherent conservatism of the English people, and it presents a genuinely post-revisionist account of one of the central events of English history.

The dissolution of the monasteries was recalled by individuals and communities alike as a seismic rupture in the religious, cultural, and socio-economic fabric of early modern England. It was also profoundly important in shaping contemporary historical consciousness, the topographical imagination, and local tradition. Memory and the Dissolution is a book about the dissolution of the monasteries after the dissolution. Harriet Lyon argues that our understanding of this historical moment is enriched by taking a long chronological view of the suppression, by exploring how it was remembered to those who witnessed it and how this memory evolved in subsequent generations. Exposing and repudiating the assumptions of a conventional historiography that has long been coloured by Henrician narratives and sources, this book reveals that the fall of the religious houses was remembered as one of the most profound and controversial transformations of the entire English Reformation.

Britain has not been successfully invaded since 1066; nor, in nearly 1,000 years has it known a true revolution – one that brings radical, systemic and enduring change. The contrast with Britain’s European neighbours, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Russia, is dramatic – all have been convulsed by external warfare, revolution and civil war and experienced fundamental change to their ruling elites or social and economic structures. Frank McLynn takes seven occasions when Britain came closest to revolution: the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; the Jack Cade rebellion of 1450; the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536; the English Civil Wars of the 1640s; the Jacobite Rising of 1745-6; the Chartist Movement of 1838-48; and the General Strike of 1926. Why, at these dramatic turning points, did history finally fail to turn? McLynn examines Britain’s history and themes of social, religious and political change to explain why social turbulence stopped short of revolution on so many occasions.

Autumn 1536. Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn are dead. Henry VIII has married Jane Seymour, and still awaits his longed for male heir. Disaffected conservatives in England see an opportunity for a return to Rome and an end to religious experimentation, but Thomas Cromwell has other ideas.The Dissolution of the Monasteries has begun and the publication of the Lutheran influenced Ten Articles of the Anglican Church has followed. The obstinate monarch, enticed by monastic wealth, is determined not to change course. Fear and resentment is unleashed in northern England in the largest spontaneous uprising against a Tudor monarch – the Pilgrimage of Grace – in which 30,000 men take up arms against the king.This book examines the evidence for that opposition and the abundant examples of religiously motivated dissent. It also highlights the rhetoric, reward and retribution used by the Crown to enforce its policy and crush the opposition.

Civilization and madness; community and class; bureaucracy, corruption, and revolution—these essays range from social history to political history and the history of ideas. All take a strong interpretive stand in the manner of the man to whom they are dedicated. Together they make a major contribution to the scholarship on sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century Europe. In the presentation of these original essays, it is justly noted that J. H. Hexter served as the conscience of his fellow scholars for over thirty years—a distinguished tribute accompanied by the best work by the best people in the field. Former students are among the contributors, as are some of J. H. Hexter's colleagues and friends, including two that he frequently engaged in debate, Geoffrey Elton and Lawrence Stone. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, J. H. Hexter received his B.A. degree from the University of Cincinnati and his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University. From 1939 to 1957 he taught at Queens College, CUNY. He then spent seven years as a member of the faculty of Washington University, to which he returned on his retirement from Yale University; where he taught from 1964 to 1978. Among his numerous awards are two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellow­ship, a fellowship from the Ford Foundation and one from the Institute for Advanced Study.