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9 - Tales of the Unexpected

The Reformation in England and France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2024

Henry A. Jefferies
Affiliation:
Ulster University
Richard Rex
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

The diametrically opposed outcomes of the Reformation in England and France have led historians to presume that there were significant differences in their religious situations before the Reformation that help account for that ultimate divergence. This chapter argues that any such presumption is wide of the mark. Not only were the supposed ‘preconditions’ for the success of the Reformation in England (such as Renaissance humanism, anticlericalism and church-state tension) more evident in France, but the early diffusion of Reformation teachings was swifter and more widespread there as well. Although in the second quarter of the sixteenth century the Reformation received increasing royal support in England but not in France, that early progress was insecure and was briefly reversed. Decisive divergence between the two realms in this regard began only around 1560, and in each of them the outcome might still have been different under other circumstances. The ultimate outcomes reflected the interplay of political contingency with pre-existing differences not in religious experience but in political structures and political culture, which put the English monarchy in a position to impose its will upon the English nation, but left the French monarchy less able not only to impose change but also to suppress it.

Type
Chapter
Information
Reformations Compared
Religious Transformations across Early Modern Europe
, pp. 190 - 213
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Benedict, Philip, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism, New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Benedict, Philip, Season of Conspiracy: Calvin, the French Reformed Churches, and Protestant Plotting in the Reign of Francis II (1559–60), Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Brigden, Susan, London and the Reformation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Crouzet, Denis, La genèse de la réforme française, 1520–1560, Paris: Armand Colin, 1996.Google Scholar
Daussy, Hugues, Le parti huguenot: chronique d’une désillusion (1557–1572), Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2014.Google Scholar
Diefendorf, Barbara B., Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Haigh, Christopher (ed.), The English Reformation Revised, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marshall, Peter, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation, New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Monter, William, Judging the French Reformation: Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-Century Parlements, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Roelker, Nancy L., One King, One Faith: The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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