Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The recent historiography of the English Reformation
- 2 Church courts and the Reformation in the diocese of Chichester, 1500–58
- 3 Anticlericalism and the English Reformation
- 4 The Henrician Reformation and the parish clergy
- 5 Popular reactions to the Reformation during the years of uncertainty, 1530–70
- 6 The local impact of the Tudor Reformations
- 7 Revival and reform in Mary Tudor's Church: a question of money
- 8 Bonner and the Marian persecutions
- 9 The continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation
- Conclusion
- Index
9 - The continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The recent historiography of the English Reformation
- 2 Church courts and the Reformation in the diocese of Chichester, 1500–58
- 3 Anticlericalism and the English Reformation
- 4 The Henrician Reformation and the parish clergy
- 5 Popular reactions to the Reformation during the years of uncertainty, 1530–70
- 6 The local impact of the Tudor Reformations
- 7 Revival and reform in Mary Tudor's Church: a question of money
- 8 Bonner and the Marian persecutions
- 9 The continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation
- Conclusion
- Index
Summary
When rebuked for her recusancy by judges at Oxford in 1581, Cecily Stonor retorted:
I was born in such a time when holy mass was in great reverence, and brought up in the same faith. In King Edward's time this reverence was neglected and reproved by such as governed. In Queen Mary's time, it was restored with much applause; and now in this time it pleaseth the state to question them, as now they do me, who continue in this Catholic profession. The state would have these several changes, which I have seen with mine eyes, good and laudable. Whether it can be so, I refer it to your Lordships' consideration. I hold me still to that wherein I was born and bred; and so by the grace of God I will live and die in it.
Cecily Stonor was one of the large number of Catholics who claimed consistency in the religion, who claimed continuity in their own persons with an earlier Catholic tradition, and who accused the Protestants of mutability and dangerous innovation.
But such a view of post-Reformation English Catholicism as a survival through the sixteenth century of traditional religion has been ably challenged by modern historians. The evidence of Elizabethan visitations prompted A. G. Dickens to formulate an influential distinction between ‘survivalism’ and ‘seminarism’: conservative attachment to old traditions soon declined, and later there arrived a new brand of post-Reformation Catholicism, a dynamic foreign importation brought by missionary priests.
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- The English Reformation Revised , pp. 176 - 208Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987
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