The dissolution of the monasteries has always been overshadowed by the political and popular dramas of the European Reformation. Indeed, the perceived ease of the suppressions – which began in Saxony and Hesse in the 1520s and ended (for the sixteenth century at least) in the States of Holland in 1584 – has encouraged the view that the experience of the religious orders represented only a brief epilogue to a story that ended long before 1517, one that could be connected only coincidentally with the sixteenth-century spirit of reform. Successive waves of revisionism have reinforced this view, recasting Europe's Reformation on the one hand as a highly regional and popular process of community reorganisation, and on the other as a wholly political enterprise. There can be little doubt that after a century and more of religious change in Europe, the balance between church and state had shifted, and even in Catholic polities much of the energy in religious life was now generated outside the institutional church; but it would be a mistake to leave either the regular (or, indeed, the secular) clergy at the margins of this Reformation. From the turn of the fifteenth century the convents of the reinvigorated orders of monks and friars, among them the Benedictine congregations of Bursfeld and Padua, proved to be seed-beds of reform. The values of both Erasmus (an erstwhile Augustinian canon) and Martin Luther (an Augustinian friar) were formed at least in part through their exchanges with monastic divines. The early fervour of the populace was fuelled – on both sides of the confessional battle lines – by the spiritual and seigniorial power of the monasteries. The first stirrings of Counter-Reformation strategy can also be traced to both British and Continental monasteries of Benedictines. Later, after much of the infrastructure of traditional religion had been dismantled, the monasteries continued to draw the interest of (particularly) Continental reformers in search of a plausible prototype for the Protestant seminary.

The prevailing perceptions of the Dissolution have stifled its study for many years. In his exposition of the English experience, David Knowles sensed the need to explain why an account of the ‘Tudor Age’ of the monasteries was necessary at all. The diverse and protracted processes of dissolution have barely registered in discussions of reformation in mainland Europe; only the swift suppressions of Vasan Sweden have been the subject of systematic study.