The English “Post‐Reformation”?

Abstract

A new term is infiltrating the lexicon of historians of early modern English religion. What was once neutral shorthand for an indeterminate period after the English Reformation is acquiring greater significance. Its initial uses were adjectival: “the patchwork of beliefs” to be found in England by 1600 “may be described as distinctively ‘post-Reformation,’ but not thoroughly ‘Protestant,’” concluded Tessa Watt; “we are beginning to see the outlines of a religious culture which if not thoroughly protestant by exacting clerical standards, was distinctively post-Reformation,” agrees Alexandra Walsham. But occasionally this quality of English religious culture has hardened into a noun—as in the title of John Bossy’s Peace in the Post-Reformation—for in Bossy’s view this term has the “benefit of putting due weight on the state of affairs, on both sides of the confessional fence, as the seismic upheavals of the sixteenth century settled down into everyday continuity.”1 The Post-Reformation, then, is all about living with the Reformation; it is a label to describe the quotidian business of rubbing along with Protestantism. We are, however, still living with the effects of the Reformation. So when did the “PostReformation” end? And when, for that matter, did it begin? When was England “post” the Reformation? Those who favor the term tend to work on the decades