Religion and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern England: Introduction

Abstract

Pp. 553–555. ©2008 by Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. issn 0018-7895 | e-issn 1544-399x. All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce article content, consult the University of California Press Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/hlq.2008.71.4.553. what was transformed or transformative in early modern English religion? In what ways did religion provoke or reflect cultural transformations? To answer these questions, the contributors of the eight essays collected here not only explore significant changes, but they also suggest that English culture was transformed less extensively or less predictably than we might expect. For several decades, various revisionist views of “the” Reformation have been posited, and scholars have limned nuances and differences. Nevertheless, like many narratives of great change that culminate in an apparently inevitable supersession, the transformation from Catholic to Protestant England assumed long ago the significance of a myth whose heuristic appeal endures, even when its triumphalist aspects are regarded with salutary skepticism. Our ability to detect contradictory, even chaotic facets of this change has long been inhibited; we are liable to overestimate the extent to which matters were settled during the entire early modern period. Discussion of “the” Enlightenment may reductively define the Reformation as a welcome stage in England’s gradual but inexorable transformation from superstitious belief to reason, from religious faith to scientific knowledge, from natural theology to nature, from coercive institutionalized ritual to a self-governing, liberated individualism. The reverse of this widely circulating coin is a nostalgic, even elegiac, tribute to preReformation society for its supposedly successful integration of what was later fractured: the living and the dead, individual and community. Binary distinctions, such as sacred/secular or even good works/faith, may be anachronistic impositions if made too sharply. In any case, such distinctions were likely perceived quite differently by early modern cultures from the way we may see them from a postmodern, even postreligious, perspective. A number of effective studies have investigated the profound heterogeneity of post-Reformation Protestant culture. This special issue follows suit by exploring some of the ways in which the Reformation did not mark a comprehensive or inevitable Religion and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern England: Introduction