God’s Time, Rome’s Time, and the Calendar of the English Protestant Regime

Abstract

“God’s Time, Rome’s Time, and the Calendar of the English Protestant Regime.” This paper examines calendar compulsion and calendar contest in English religious culture in the century following the Reformation. Using legal, liturgical, literary, and folkloric sources, it exposes the tensions between authority and custom, power and choice, as governments regulated the year for religious and political purposes. It shows how the liturgical calendar remained a work in progress in Protestant England, how saints’ days suppressed under the Tudors had a vestigial half-life under the Stuarts, and how the national Protestant dynastic state created time-markers of its own providential deliverances and political anniversaries. The calendar provided prompts to memory, aids to devotion, and stimuli to expressions of allegiance. Involving clergy and laity, traditionalists and reformers, governors and governed, England’s early modern calendar remained a zone of controversy and enduring contest over the marking and management of time. Traditional, official, and reformed calendars narrated nuanced stories of divine intervention, with varying shadings of confessional, national, and political significance.