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Exploring what the early English Protestants came to believe about the afterlife, and how they arrived at their positions, this much-needed book fills a gap in the scholarly literature. In surveying the authorised doctrinal works of the English church through the Reformation period, the progress of eschatological thinking is traced from the earliest days of change to the solidification of the formularies which remain binding across the worldwide Anglican Church today.Fresh observations are made on some well-known texts such as the Books of Common Prayer, Articles of Religion and official Tudor homilies, and these are complemented by commentary on surprisingly understudied documents of the period including primers, catechisms, and the paratexts of the early printed English Bibles. The result is a fascinating study of the English reformers'navigation past both Roman Catholic and radical anabaptist beliefs, and it shows that their arrival at a relatively barren destination was due in part to a complete switch in theological priorities and in part to a fear of the implications of formally adopting some of the highly contested views.Establishment Eschatology will prove to be an important resource for students and scholars of England's early modern religious and cultural history.

Were mid-Tudor evangelicals roaring lions or meek lambs? Did they struggle with a minority complex, or were they comfortable with their position of political ascendancy under Edward VI? How did their theological blueprint of the ‘True Church'fit their temporal realities? By relocating the Book of Common Prayer at the centre of the English Reformation, Stephen Tong gives new significance to two underacknowledged drivers of reform: ecclesiology and liturgy. Edwardian reformers caused a sensation in England by engaging with these questions, which spilled over into Ireland, and continued to cast a shadow over subsequent generations of the English Protestants.

The first extensive examination of Robert Barnes, his career, misconstrued theology and wide-ranging influence beyond England.By the time of his death at the stake in 1540, Robert Barnes was recognized as one of the most influential evangelical reformers in Henrician England. Friend and foe alike judged him the most popular and persuasive preacher of the'new learning'. He enjoyed the patronage of King, Archbishop, and Vicegerent at home, and the praise of evangelical princes and theologians abroad. He wrote what would be the closest the Henrician reformers came to a systematic theology, as well as the first Protestant history of the papacy. Then his dramatic, and not entirely explicable, execution quickly ensured his lasting place in the century's popular propaganda. In this first extensive examination of Robert Barnes and his reformation significance the author provides a comprehensive survey of the reformer's stormy career, a clear and convincing analysis of his often misconstrued theology, and a persuasive argument that the influence of Barnes and his novel polemical programme extended not only into the century following his death, but was as prominent on the continent as it was in his native England. KOREY MAAS is Associate Professor of Church History, Concordia University, Irvine, California

Should students of Tudor political thought be interested in a feisty Swiss republican who hardly set foot outside his home canton of Zurich, and a Florentine aristocrat who spent just five years of his career in England? This book presents the case for including two leading lights of the Schola Tigurina—Heinrich Bullinger and Peter Martyr Vermigli—among the chief architects of the protestant religious and political settlement constructed under Edward VI and consolidated under Elizabeth I. Through study of selected texts of their political theology, this book explores crucial intellectual links between England and Zurich which came to exert a significant influence on the institutions of the Tudor church and commonwealth.

Covering the period from 1547 to 1558, The Mid Tudors explores the reigns of Edward VI and Mary. Stephen J. Lee examines all the key issues debated by historians, including the question as to whether there was a mid-Tudor crisis. Using a wide variety of sources and historiography, Lee also looks at the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, as well as discussing government and foreign policy. The book starts with a chapter on Henry VIII to establish the overall perspective over the following two reigns – thereby providing a basis to examine their positive as well as negative features.Including both a chronology and glossary of key terms, this essential A Level book provides a vital resource for all students of this fascinating period of British history.

This examination of the fate of lost ideas after the Protestant reformation explores what might be called the pathology of the Renaissance.The first part of the book treats Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost, concentrating on vacant cultural spaces and abandoned icons to trace the gap between sacred and secular life, between poetry and belief. The second part focuses on Shakespeare's Hamlet and Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam to investigate the eschatological implications of this gap, the ways that history is disentangled from memory and nostalgia severed from experience.The book challenges readings of Renaissance culture as an increasingly secular one, proposing that sacred symbols and practices still powerfully organized the English moral imagination, oriented behaviors and arranged perceptions, and specified the limits of the known world.