Product Description

This book is a study of popular responses to the English Reformation. It takes as its subject not the conversion of English subjects to a new religion but rather their political responses to a Reformation perceived as an act of state and hence, like all early modern acts of state, negotiated between government and people. These responses included not only resistance but also significant levels of accommodation, co-operation and collaboration as people attempted to co-opt state power for their own purposes. This study argues, then, that the English Reformation was not done to people, it was done with them in a dynamic process of engagement between government and people. As such, it answers the twenty-year-old scholarly dilemma of how the English Reformation could have succeeded despite the inherent conservatism of the English people, and it presents a genuinely post-revisionist account of one of the central events of English history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #572270 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 364 pages

Review
‘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

‘This book deserves careful reading because it challenges many accepted views and offers us a new angle from which to understand these momentous changes in our island’s history.’ Contemporary Review

‘Shagan has presented a refashioned study of the ever-engrossing interplay between the governed and the governors of the early English Reformation.’ Susan Wabuda, H-Albion

‘This is one of the most important books ever written in its field and a must-read for specialists and students alike.’ History

'… an important book … consistently intriguing.' Journal of Ecclesiastical History

'Ethan Shagan's new study of the early years of the English Reformation is a tour de fource. What Popular Politics and the English Reformation attempts to do is to take on and defeat a number of the revisionist shibboleths that have become largely accepted within current historical thinking on the English Reformation. [This book] is an excellent volume, well written, polemical and persuasive - a real contribution to our understanding of the early English Reformation.' Reformation

'This is unusually interesting, clever and learned book. … He must be congratulated on uncovering so much exciting and complicated detail on the huge canvas of sixteenth-century English religion.' Recusant History

About the Author
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.

Customer Reviews

An important and stimulating work.
Ethan Shagan is to be congratulated on writing the first book of post-revisionist Reformation history.

In a direct challenge to Haigh's view of the Tudor 'juggernaut' state imposing a 'political' reformation from above on an uninterested populace, this study teases out the degree of subtle interplay between the objectives of the state and the aspirations of the 'meaner sort'.

By using concepts such as collaboration and accomodation Shagan is able to reveal the Reformation as part of the dialogue between the interests of the central authority and those of the populace generally, revealing the greater participation of 'the people' in the political process than has often been allowed.

As such it is part of an important body of recent work by scholars such as Andy Wood, Tim Harris, Steve Hindle and Alistair Bellany which is helping to illuminate Early Modern politics and society in new and exciting ways.

Poorly researched and whiggish
Ethan Shagan makes great play of his revisionist position. However, this book stands firmly within the tradition that sees the success of reformation as inevitable.

Shagan does not even do his subjects (those engaged in any form of popular "politics", a problematic word) the justice of dealing with them on their own terms. Instead they are pulled along by his judgement that, whatever they believed, their external actions in not opposing the royal reformation reinforced it. He fails to deal with the pilgrimage of grace, and does not try to reconcile the apparent dichotomy between internal belief and external action inherant in his model. As for exploring the psychological trauma that such nicodemitism might have created, Shagan does not seem to acknowledge that it could even exist.

Theology is absent, as is any (perhaps I am being pedantic) concern for accuracy when talking of liturgical terms. His exploration of how secular or ecclesiastical patronage within regions may have affected "political" action is weak, and he makes little effort to acknowledge the vast regional variations in acceptance of the royal reformation. At one point (doubtless a proof-reading error) he refers to one of Henry VIII's wives by the name of another.