1 - A Counter-Reformation?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2009
Summary
The heauen is hye, the earth is depe, and the kynges herte is vnsearcheable.
Proverbs 25:3.INTERPRETING THE ‘HENRICIAN REACTION’
Historians aspire to follow our evidence impartially and fearlessly, over whatever terrain it may lead us; but in practice we often find ourselves being drawn along the paths beaten by our predecessors. This is particularly so when negotiating a landscape as scarred by passage as the English Reformation. Christopher Haigh, for example, judged that A. G. Dickens' influential account of the English Reformation had followed the deepest of these channels, cut by John Foxe in the sixteenth century. The period 1539–47, however, contains its own distinct set of historiographical tiger traps. Dickens' view is best summed up by the title of the relevant chapter in his survey: ‘A balance of forces’. On this interpretation, the forward march of Protestantism was hindered in the early 1540s, as religious conservatives vied with evangelicals for the ear of the king, and scored some successes. However, the most striking aspect of the treatment of this period by the whole ‘Whig-Protestant’ tradition was the extent to which it was ignored altogether. Patrick Collinson has suggested that the approach taken by Dickens and his contemporaries
confined the essential history of the English Reformation to the thirty years from 1529 to 1559, a manageable three-course meal preceded by a few late medieval apéritifs and rounded off with a small cup of Elizabethan coffee.
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- The Gospel and Henry VIIIEvangelicals in the Early English Reformation, pp. 13 - 57Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003