HST247: The Struggle for England's Soul: Politics, Religion and Cultural Conflict, 1560-1640
20 credits (semester 1)
Module Leader: Dr Gary Rivett, Dr George Newberry
| Pre-requisites |
Pass in at least two of the Level One modules offered by the Department of History.
| Module Summary |
The accession of Elizabeth I brought with it a church settlement that ensured that England became an officially Protestant country. Yet this settlement could not guarantee that all English people instantly assumed a uniform set of Protestant beliefs and practices. Furthermore, members of the Church, state and laypeople often disagreed about the very nature of changes needed to accommodate the new religion. This is the 'struggle' which we will be charting throughout this course: a contest over the direction of the Protestant Reformation in England, in an era when politics and culture were permeated with religious significance.
Lectures will trace the development of England's contested reformation over the period 1560-1640, whilst seminars consider in more detail how the English people experienced and interpreted these contests. Seminars deploy both secondary reading (generally available electronically) and sources to be made available on the MOLE courseware. We begin by considering the impact of the Reformation in a variety of contexts, considering the power of iconoclasm, changing relations between the laity and the clergy, and the extent to which Protestantism reshaped the culture and beliefs of English people. We examine popular literature and beliefs about the activities of God and the Devil in this world. The second half of the course moves on to consider changing religious identities in post-Reformation England. How did English Catholics refashion their identities now that they belonged to a minority sect, and how do their experiences compare to Protestant separatists who also rejected the mainstream Church of England? How far did anti-Catholicism and anti-separatism define the identity of the Church of England (and indeed the English nation)? What was the nature of Puritanism? And did the Church of England itself ever possess a stable or essential religious identity in this period? We conclude by considering the conflicts within the Church in the decades leading up to the outbreak of the English Civil War.
| Teaching |
One lecture and one seminar per week.
| Assessment |
The word limit for essays includes footnotes, but excludes the bibliography.
| Selected Reading |
- Peter Marshall, Reformation England, 1480-1642 (London, 2003) [recommended]
- Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants, rev ed. (Oxford, 1982)
- Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1988)
- Alexandra Walsham, Providence in early modern England (1999)
- Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1994)
| Intended Learning Outcomes |
Students completing this module will have developed:
- An understanding of how religion, culture and politics interacted in the early modern period.
- A familiarity with a wide range of literary, visual and documentary sources for the period.
- Skills in handling primary source material and an ability to debate and discuss primary and secondary material in a group setting.
- An ability to recognise different schools of historical interpretation.
- An ability to explore a selected topic in detail, form independent judgements and present these in essay form.