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THE REFORMATION OF THE GENERATIONS: YOUTH, AGE AND RELIGIOUS CHANGE IN ENGLAND, c. 1500–1700

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2011

Abstract

This exploratory essay adopts the life-cycle as a tool with which to investigate religious change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines how inherited tropes about youth and age were deployed and the ways in which the notion of generational strife was invoked at various stages of England's long Reformation. These provide insight into how contemporaries understood and experienced the theological and cultural upheavals of the era and the process by which Protestantism ‘aged’ as it progressed beyond its unruly protest phase and became institutionalised as the official faith.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2011

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References

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56 See Michelle Wolfe, ‘The Tribe of Levi: Gender, Family and Vocation in English Clerical Households, Circa 1590–1714’ (Ph.D. thesis, Ohio State University, 2004).

57 See Patrick Collinson, ‘“A Magazine of Religious Patterns”: An Erasmian Topic Transposed in English Protestantism’, in his Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (1983), 499–525.

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60 Ibid., 264.

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82 Anthony Kenny, ed., The Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome, 1598–1685 (2 vols., Catholic Record Society 54–5, 1962–3). Lucy Underwood has studied these extensively as part of her forthcoming Cambridge Ph.D. on post-Reformation Catholicism and childhood.

83 For the rhetoric of casting off the old man and becoming a ‘babe’ through a new ‘spiritual birth’, see Robert Barclay, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity, as the Same is Held Forth, and Preached by the People, Called, in Scorn, Quakers (1678), 37, 154, 169.

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88 A Relation of the Last Words and Departure of that Antient and Honourable Woman Loveday Hambly of Trigangeeves, in the Parish of Austell in the County of Cornwal ([1683]).

89 Cf. Thomas, ‘Age and Authority’, 248 and passim.