This book examines the effects of the English Reformation on the full spectrum of lay religion from 1540 to 1580 through an investigation of individuals and parishes in Gloucestershire. Rather than focusing on either the acceptance of Protestantism or the demise of the traditional Catholic religion, as other historians have done, it considers all shades of belief against the backdrop of shifting official religious policy. The result is the story of responses ranging from stiff resistance to eager acceptance, creating a picture of the religion of the laity which is diverse and complex, but also layered as parishes and individuals expressed their faith in ways which reflected the institutional or personal nature of their piety. Finally, while the book focuses on Gloucestershire, it reveals broad patterns of beliefs and practices which could probably be found all over England.

This engaging book provides a gateway to larger themes in modern British history through a set of fascinating portraits of individuals that explore important events and movements from the perspective of the people involved. Political developments are illuminated through chapters on John Locke, Charles Townshend, popular radicalism, and Margaret Thatcher. Religion and education are considered through essays on evangelicalism, the Oxford Movement, Charles Bradlaugh, and Sir James Kay Shuttleworth. Industrial and imperial questions are explored through pieces on the Great Exhibition, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and post-colonial Nigeria. National identity and wartime experience come to life in the lives of G. K. Chesterton and of Barbara Nixon, an Airraid Warden during the Blitz. Many of the chapters examine the experiences of women, including single women in early modern England, suffragettes, and Irish nationalist Mary Butler. As a rich and humanized approach to history, this book offers readers a deeper understanding of key facets of British life in the early modern and modern periods.

This engaging book provides a gateway to larger themes in modern British history through a set of fascinating portraits of individuals that explore important events and movements from the perspective of the people involved. Political developments are illuminated through chapters on John Locke, Charles Townshend, popular radicalism, and Margaret Thatcher. Religion and education are considered through essays on evangelicalism, the Oxford Movement, Charles Bradlaugh, and Sir James Kay Shuttleworth. Industrial and imperial questions are explored through pieces on the Great Exhibition, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and post-colonial Nigeria. National identity and wartime experience come to life in the lives of G. K. Chesterton and of Barbara Nixon, an Airraid Warden during the Blitz. Many of the chapters examine the experiences of women, including single women in early modern England, suffragettes, and Irish nationalist Mary Butler. As a rich and humanized approach to history, this book offers readers a deeper understanding of key facets of British life in the early modern and modern periods.

This book tells the story of the English Reformation from the viewpoint of ordinary people and their parishes. It discusses official policy and policymakers, as well as local bishops and priests, but the emphasis is on the laity in all its diversity, not just Catholic or Protestant. The book shows that while some individuals and parishes may have welcomed the new religion, people generally resisted change and then gradually created their own idiosyncratic sets of beliefs and practices.