Popular Politics and the English Reformation

Ethan H. Shagan is Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2000 and was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows. He has published articles in The English Historical Review, The Journal of British Studies, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, and in numerous edited collections. This is his first book.

• Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Note on the text; Introduction; Part I. The Break with Rome and the Crisis of Conservatism: 1. 'Schismatics be now plain heretics': debating the royal supremacy over the Church of England; 2. The anatomy of opposition in early Reformation England: the case of Elizabeth Barton, the holy maid of Kent; 3. Politics and the Pilgrimage of Grace revisited; Part II. Points of Contact: The Henrician Reformation and the English People: 4. Anticlericalism, popular politics and the Henrician Reformation; 5. Selling the sacred: Reformation and dissolution at the Abbey of Hailes; 6. 'Open disputation was in alehouses': religious debate in the diocese of Canterbury, c. 1543; Part III. Sites of Reformation: Collaboration and Popular Politics under Edward VI: 7. Resistance and collaboration in the dissolution of the chantries; 8. The English people and the Edwardian Reformation; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

'What impresses me especially about this work is the way it tackles the vast array of intractable and often obscure primary sources. Shagan has proved to have an extraordinary nose for investigation in manuscript material; he has come up with some gems of neglected sources and has exploited them to the full. He has also acquired a sense of context: that indispensable sense of the shape of the English landscape, and how one area relates to another. In sum, this study will become a central statement in our understanding of the English Reformation.' Diarmaid MacCulloch, University of Oxford