We use cookies to make your experience better. To comply with the new e-Privacy directive, we need to ask for your consent to set the cookies. Learn more.
Publication Date: 20 Feb 2020 |
---|
Series: Very Brief Histories |
Publisher: SPCK Publishing |
Page Count: 128 |
Author: Alec Ryrie |
ISBN-13: 9780281076529, 9780281076536, 9780281082407 |
The English Reformation
Summary of The English Reformation
A mould-breaking little book. Ryrie persuades us that how we describe and interpret the English Reformation can owe almost as much to who is telling the story and what we want to hear as to the facts. It's a message that's long overdue, a wake-up call to anyone interested in the topic.
Alec Ryrie here performs an extraordinary feat: his deep knowledge and fresh, original understanding of the period are packed into every line but in such delicious, efficient prose that one barely notices what great draughts of learning are being gulped down. A little gem of a book.
This brief but masterly account illuminates our understanding of what happened, why it happened, and why it still matters, by showing us how many different perspectives there are on this world-changing event. It's not just Henry VIII and his wives: as this book shows, the spiritual and political consequences of the English Reformation, good and bad, are still very much part of our world today.
'Mould-breaking' - John Guy
'A little gem of a book' - Suzannah Lipscomb
From the Introduction:
‘There is no such thing as “the English Reformation”. A "Reformation" is a composite event which is only made visible by being framed the right way. It is like a “war”: a label we put onto a particular set of events, while we decide that other – equally violent – acts are not part of that or of any "war". Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English people knew that they were living through an age of religious upheaval, but they did not know that it was "the English Reformation", any more than the soldiers at the battle of Agincourt knew that they were fighting in “the Hundred Years’ War”. . . .
‘Plainly these religious upheavals permanently changed England and, by extension, the many other countries on which English culture has made its mark. There is not, however, a single master narrative of all this turmoil. How could there be? . . . The way you choose to tell the story is governed by what you think is important and what is trivial, by whether there are heroes or villains you want to celebrate or condemn, and by the legacies and lessons which you think matter. Once you have chosen your frame, it will give you the story you want.
‘So this book does not tell "the story" of “the English Reformation”. It tells the stories of six English Reformations, or rather six stories of religious change in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The stories are parallel and overlapping, but each has a somewhat different chronological frame, cast of characters and set of pivotal events, and has left a different legacy.’