Tudor Religious Cultures in Practice: The Piety and Politics of Grace Mildmay and Her Circle

Abstract

AbstractThis essay explores the diversities, complexities, and ambiguities of English religious cultures during the period of religious and political turmoil that constituted the Tudor era. An examination of the religious practices and writings of Grace Sharington Mildmay, members of her natal and conjugal families, and her Northamptonshire neighbors provides a snapshot of the diverse, complex range of Catholicisms and Protestantisms in existence from the beginning of the reign of the first Tudor monarch Henry VII through the end of the Elizabethan regime. The essay emphasizes continuity as well as change, providing an overview of competing versions of the historiography of Tudor religion and underlining the need to reconsider overly simplified understandings of such terms as “Calvinist,”“Puritan,”“recusant,” and “church papist.” It also highlights, through a comparative reading of texts written by Grace Mildmay and the medieval mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich, the need to rethink the binaries of “medieval” and “early modern” as well as “Catholic” and “Protestant.”