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The first century of English protestantism and the growth of national identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Anthony Fletcher
Anthony Fletcher*
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
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Extract

Their sense of national identity is not something that men have been in the habit of directly recording. Its strength or weakness, in relation to commitment to international causes or to localist sentiment, can often only be inferred by examining political and religious attitudes and personal behaviour. So far as the early modern period is concerned, the subject is hazardous because groups and individuals must have varied enormously in the extent to which national identity meant something to them or influenced their lives. The temptation to generalise must be resisted. It is all too easy to suppose that national identity became well established in England in the Tudor century, when a national culture, based on widespread literacy among gentry, yeomen and townsmen, flowered as it had never done before, when the bible was first generally available in English, when John Foxe produced his celebrated Acts and Monuments, better known as the Book of Martyrs. Recent work reassessing the significance of Foxe’s account of the English reformation and other Elizabethan polemical writings provdes a convenient starting point for this brief investigation of some of the connections between religious zeal and national consciousness between 1558 and 1642.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 18: Religion and National Identity , 1982 , pp. 309 - 317
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1982

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References

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21 Lake p 178.

22 Russell pp 379-80.

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26 BL Harleian MS 163, fol 330r; Bodleian, Rawlinson MS D 1099: 23 June.