Lucy Kaufman
Dissertation Prospectus Summary
Settling the Elizabethan Settlement:
Reformation in the Parishes of Late Tudor England
It is impossible to divorce religion from the life of early modern England.
Communities were built around parishes, church courts regulated social order, church
councils collected taxes and distributed poor relief, and religion influenced patronage,
politics and protest. The reformations of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary in the midsixteenth century left the patterns and the structures of everyday life uncertain. When
Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, she immediately began a process of Protestant
religious settlement that left great scope for personal belief but little room for
disobedience or nonconformity. In the relative stability of the forty years that followed
the Acts of Uniformity and Supremacy—generally known as the Elizabethan
Settlement—Englishmen and women had to mediate new patterns of religious authority,
subordination and power. This negotiation of the everyday, the settling of the Settlement,
has yet to be closely examined in and of itself, and I propose to make this the subject of
my dissertation. Such a study will allow me to ask why England was able to become a
post-Reformation nation, a question essential to our understanding of early modern
English history.
Strikingly, little work has been done which carefully examines the influence of
the Elizabethan settlement on the lives of early modern Englishmen and women. The
Elizabethan period is generally treated either as epilogue to the initial rifts of the
Reformation or as prologue to the religious upheavals of the early Stuart Church.1 Those
1
Some of the most influential works of the former type include A.G. Dickens The English Reformation
(1964); Christopher Haigh Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (1975); J.J. Scarisbrick The
Reformation and the English People (1984); Eamon Duffy, Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in
England 1400-1580 (1992); Beat Kümin, The Shaping of a Community: the Rise and Reformation of the
English Parish, c. 1400-1560 (1996); Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (2003).
It should be noted that the revisionist historians (Haigh, Scarisbrick and Duffy) posit a slow Reformation
that lasted into the Elizabethan period; nevertheless, England post-1560 often seems like a sort of inevitable
1
who do study the Elizabethan Reformation have generally focused on the experience of
the minority: Catholics, puritans, separatists or high officials.2 A few historians have tried
to examine the popular religion and religious culture of the age—and yet, their studies
emphasize continuity with the longer history of the Reformation, rather than providing a
specific and particular contextual analysis of Elizabethan religious practices.3 In essence,
we have remarkably little understanding of how the reforms of the Elizabethan
Settlement—reforms that, to this day, are the foundation of the Church of England—were
understood, experienced and negotiated at a parochial level. Without a grasp of this
process, we cannot properly understand the foundations of English Protestantism, as well
as the great religious debates and influence of religious ideology over the course of the
next centuries.
Thus this is no mere historiographical gap, but rather a fundamental problem in
understanding the religious, social and political life of early modern England. My work
will address this problem by examining the intersection of social structure, religion and
twilight. (This is perhaps clearest in Duffy’s Voices of Morebath). Some of the most influential works of
the latter type include Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: the rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590-1640
(1987); Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (2000); Peter
Lake with Michael Questier, The Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in PostReformation England (2002); and Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of
Nicholas Tyacke, ed. Peter Lake and Kenneth Fincham (2006).
2
Especially important works on Catholics in Elizabethan England include John Bossy, The English
Catholic Community, 1570-1850 (1975); Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity
and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England. (1993); Michael Questier, Catholicism and
Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550-1640 (2006).
Much of the work on Elizabethan religion focuses on the influence of Calvinism on the church, especially
amongst prominent churchmen and theologians; this has figured most prominently in a kind of Elizabethan
identity politics (cf. John New, Anglican and Puritan: the Basis of Their Opposition, 1558-1640 (1964);
Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967); Peter Lake Moderate Puritans and the
Elizabethan Church (1982); and Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English
Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (1988)). Finally, an influential subfield of the literature
focuses on Parliamentary influences on the Elizabethan Church. For the former, cf. William Haugaard,
Elizabeth and the English Reformation: the Struggle for a Stable Settlement of Religion (1968); W.S.
Hudson, The Cambridge Connection and the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (1980); Norman Jones, Faith
by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion, 1559 (1982).
3
These historians tend to focus on continuity of cultural and social touchstones in the longer sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Excellent works, these nevertheless approach the topic from a firmly consensusbased view that can, at times, depoliticize the changes of the Reformation; as I will discuss in a moment,
this can prove quite dangerous. Tessa Watt. Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (1991); Christopher
Marsh. Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England: Holding Their Peace (1998); Norman Jones, The
English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (2001).
2
popular politics in the Elizabethan period. Central to this question is the issue of
authority: the ways in which the early modern parishioner was shaped by this settlement,
and, in turn, helped to shape it. The forty-five years of Elizabeth’s reign provided an
unparalleled central religious stability, and by the time of her death England had become
a post-Reformation nation. While religious conflict continued to smolder for decades—if
not centuries—the religious and social fabric of the country had permanently changed. I
aim to investigate this process through a close, intimate and precise analysis of the ways
in which the Elizabethan Settlement was negotiated in the parishes of late sixteenthcentury England.
In order to do this rigorously and successfully, I will call upon a synthesis of
several historiographical and methodological approaches. I plan to draw on the work of
the social historians writing over the past thirty years, particularly those who concentrate
on popular politics and power.4 This is especially important when examining religion in
the parishes, a space most often explored by those analyzing a depoliticized popular
religion.5 However, it is important to examine not only structures but also ideologies,
ensuring that I discern the motivation for both resistance and negotiation.6 As such, my
source base will focus on ecclesiastical records (especially consistory court records,
visitations, and churchwardens’ records); secular court records; popular proscriptive
literature (especially catechisms, printed sermons, and religious tracts); private
correspondence and family papers; and records of state. Of special interest to me are the
records of the 1580s, since I find this decade to be a crucial hinge in the long Elizabethan
4
I have been particularly influenced by the work of John Walter, Steve Hindle, Andy Wood, Ethan Shagan,
and Keith Wrightson (though each has a different perspective and focus on popular politics in their work).
5
As Ethan Shagan reminds us, there is a great danger in “a decontextualized notion of ‘popular piety’ in
which religious beliefs and practices are disassociated from notions of authority, legitimacy, and power.”
(Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation, p. 11.)
6
Avoiding ideology—and, it is assumed, not taking religious motivation seriously—underpins Christopher
Marsh’s “View from the Pew” trilogy. While I think Marsh may overstate his case, or perhaps simply
underestimates the sensitivities of social historians, I do agree that we must seek to understand not only
action but also ideology.
3
settlement, a late Elizabethan watershed that signaled the advent of a post-Reformation
England.7
I plan to visit archives in London (especially the National Archives, the British
Library, Dr. Williams’ Library, and the archives of Lambeth Palace), Norwich (the
Norfolk Records Office and the Norwich Cathedral archives), and York (the North
Riding Records Office and the Borthwick Institute). I have picked these two latter regions
in part due to their rich records and in part due to their inherent differences: Norfolk had
the reputation of being a hotbed of evangelical activity, while York was known for its
strong conservative tendencies.8 Here I navigate a tricky tightrope: I am keen to avoid an
over-localized project, but I also want to avoid simple, stark comparison. At the moment,
I am exploring some of the work on histoire croisée and histoire multiscopique to help
me nail down my methodological approach.
By better understanding the process of Settlement; by examining not only how
people react to change, but also how they react to stability; by viewing both religion
through a social historian’s lens and social structures through a religious historian’s lens,
my dissertation will carefully parse the processes of negotiation, resistance, and religious
evolution in Elizabethan England. This project will not only allow a new, important
perspective on Reformation history, but it will also give us a new framework for
understanding relationships of faith, power, law, persuation, and the necessities of
everyday life in the early modern world.
7
I am not alone in identifying the mid-Elizabethan period as a sort of religious hinge—this has found
perhaps the strongest suggestion in the work of Patrick Collinson
(especially in Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries and the 1985 Stenton Lecture, “From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: the Cultural
Impact of the Second English Reformation”). Nevertheless, a clearer articulation of the import and impact
of the 1580s has yet to be made.
8
It should be noted, though, that each had a strong core of dissenters: Norfolk had a tightly-knit recusant
community, while a small but determined band of evangelicals made their home in the North.
4