Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- INTRODUCTION
- 1 The Godly, their Opponents and Stuart England's ‘Wars of Religion’
- 2 Norwich's Reformation History Revisited
- PART I THE MAKING OF A PROTESTANT CITY, c.1560–1619
- PART II RELIGIOUS CHANGE AND GODLY REACTION IN THE 1620s
- PART III CONFESSIONAL DISCORD AND THE IMPACT OF LAUDIANISM IN THE 1630s
- PART IV TRACING THE PURITAN REVOLUTION IN NORWICH
- CONCLUSION
- Select Bibliography
- Index
2 - Norwich's Reformation History Revisited
from INTRODUCTION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- INTRODUCTION
- 1 The Godly, their Opponents and Stuart England's ‘Wars of Religion’
- 2 Norwich's Reformation History Revisited
- PART I THE MAKING OF A PROTESTANT CITY, c.1560–1619
- PART II RELIGIOUS CHANGE AND GODLY REACTION IN THE 1620s
- PART III CONFESSIONAL DISCORD AND THE IMPACT OF LAUDIANISM IN THE 1630s
- PART IV TRACING THE PURITAN REVOLUTION IN NORWICH
- CONCLUSION
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
We know, or at least think we know, how the Reformation fared in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Norwich. Generally the transition from a Catholic to a Protestant city is seen as having carried on apace under the Tudors, with Norwich swiftly emerging as a noted centre of radical puritanism thereafter. Moreover, the grassroots of religious dissent were somehow deeply enmeshed in the fabric of urban life. Turning to the secondary literature, we find a classic statement of this idea within John Browne's History of Congregationalism and Memorials of the Churches in Norfolk and Suffolk, published in 1877. Browne was, from 1849, the Congregationalist minister at Wrentham, Suffolk, and later secretary of the Suffolk Congregational Union. His published work was intended as a hagiography of the puritan movement in East Anglia: his heroes were the select band of saints who followed his namesake Robert Browne along the path of separation from the episcopalian church. The ‘little Brownist rivulet’ became ‘the broader and stronger stream of Congregationalism, and flows on to the present day’.
However, Brownism belonged very much to the East Anglian environment, Norfolk and Suffolk having ‘long been distinguished by the zeal for Protestantism cherished and manifested in their towns and villages’. After all ‘one of the first victims of the writ de heretico comburendo was a Norfolk man’. A regional religious mythology was born, and came to be embellished twenty years later by Alfred Kingston's account of East Anglia during the Civil War.
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- Information
- Godly Reformers and their Opponents in Early Modern EnglandReligion in Norwich, c.1560–1643, pp. 20 - 36Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005