This significant and innovative collection explores the changing piety of townspeople and villagers before, during and after the Reformation. It brings together leading and new scholars from England and the Netherlands to present new research on a subject of importance to historians of society and religion in late medieval and early modern Europe. Contributors examine the diverse evidence for transitions in piety and the processes of these changes. The volume incorporates a range of approaches including social, cultural and religious history, literary and manuscript studies, social anthropology and archaeology. This is, therefore, an interdisciplinary volume that constitutes a cultural history of changing pieties in the period c. 1400-1640. Contributors focus on a number of specific themes using a range of types of evidence and theoretical approaches. Some chapters make detailed reconstructions of specific communities, groups and individuals; some offer perceptive and useful analyses of theoretical and comparative approaches to transition and to piety; and others closely examine cultural practices, ideas and tastes. Through this range of detailed work, which brings to light previously unknown sources as well as new approaches to more familiar sources, contributors address a number of questions arising from recent published work on late medieval and early modern piety and reformation. Individually and collectively, the chapters in this volume offer an important contribution to the field of late medieval and early modern piety. They highlight, for the first time, the centrality of processes of transition in the experience and practice of religion. Offering a refreshingly new approach to the subject, this volume raises timely theoretical and methodological questions that will be of interest to a broad audience.

The English Renaissance is frequently defined in the context of the Elizabethans and early-Stuarts, but here we focus on the early Renaissance, and the important cultural transitions of the late-medieval/early-Tudor period. In this innovative study, Elisabeth Salter reconstructs the lives and experiences of six men and women of the early Renaissance and leads us on a quest to reconstruct their lost cultural worlds. The six men and women are all figures from the margins of the royal courts during the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII: Gilbert Banaster, present at the court of Henry VII in the guise of writer and musician; The Anonymous Witness, spectator to the marriage of Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon; William Cornish, playwright and musician at Henry VIII's household; Elizabeth Philip, silk trader to the royal court; Dame Katherine Styles, whose biography is recreated through her will; and William Buckley, Educator and Schoolmaster to King Edward VI. Salter presents an exemplary model of how it is possible to reconstruct biography from sometimes fragmentary sources. The connections drawn between these six individuals display ample evidence for the cultural innovation and sophistication of these courts in terms of pageantry, music, the visual arts, fashions in luxury consumption, scientific discovery and literary invention. When all six lives are added together as a whole, the book will lead the reader to a richer understanding of the cultural context of the early English Renaissance.

This 1988 volume, collected here are the principal essays of Elizabeth Salter published between 1966 and her death in 1980, together with three chapters of a book on the literary culture of England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on which she was working in the last years of her life, and a version of her brilliant lectures on the theme of the Annuciation to the Shepherds in literature, drama and art given during those years. Elizabeth Salter is recognised as one of the most distinguished medieval scholars of her generation, particularly noted for her work on Langland and Chaucer, and on the relationship of literature and the visual arts. The strength and consistency of her views, the persistent and urgent nature of her preoccupations, and the depth of scholarship and skill of presentation, all emerge more clearly than ever in this volume.