The subject of atheism in the Reformation era is caught awkwardly between two ill-fitting facts. First, ‘atheism’, strictly defined, was rare if not actively impossible in this period. Second, accusations of atheism, and moral panic about its spread, were nevertheless ubiquitous. It is in trying to reconcile these two facts that we can reach some understanding of how the Reformation era proved to be a decisive phase in the history of unbelief.

The claim that atheism was inconceivable in the Reformation age is usually associated with the great French literary scholar Lucien Febvre, and it is conventional for modern historians of the subject to begin by ridiculing this claim as overblown, but in fact Febvre’s position was subtler than is usually allowed.

This chapter considers how the English Reformation was, or, mostly, was not recalled in official liturgical documents. The first section surveys the evolution of calendars of saints from the 1530s to the version that became fixed in the Book of Common Prayer from 1562 onwards, which included a great many ancient and medieval commemorations but none from later than the thirteenth century, and cites alternative commemorative models which Tudor regimes could have embraced but chose not to. It then discusses why the Book of Common Prayer so pointedly ignored the upheavals of the Reformation, unlike the Scottish Book of Common Order, arguing that this reflects the need to unite a bitterly divided nation through ‘common prayer’ which was also an act of oblivion. The final section traces how a new myth of the English Reformation was created by occasional services of national prayer during Elizabeth I’s reign, a myth in which the Reformation’s central event was Elizabeth’s own accession, providentially delivering her people from Mary Tudor’s tyranny. This myth faded from the liturgy with the queen’s death, to be replaced by a new liturgical emphasis on popish cruelty based around a new commemoration.

The Reformations of the 1530s and thereafter were the most significant extrinsic shock experienced by English society between the Black Death and the Civil Wars of the 1640s. The magnitude of the shock has never been in doubt. What is now clear, however, is the extent to which it was genuinely extrinsic. England's religious life until the late 1520s was remarkably stable. Naturally there were points of stress, and when the earthquake came, they were where the cracks first appeared. Yet they did not cause it. This crisis came on England unawares, and it came in two distinct forms: a political and an intellectual assault, often but not always in alliance. Between them, they remade English society. This chapter will survey how they did so, and how the English responded to, adapted to and resisted the new world in which they found themselves.

Pre-Reformation English religion has been a playground for modern prejudices. It is easily caricatured either as a swamp of superstitious corruption or as a bucolic paradise of communal faith. We do not need to accept either view to recognise that, in its own terms, it was working fairly well. By European standards, the English Church was unusually well disciplined and well led. Its sacramental, pastoral and practical service to its people was generally adequate. There were frictions over predictable matters of land, money and law, but they did not coalesce into the sort of more widespread anticlerical prejudice that was common in contemporary Germany, Scotland or elsewhere. Instead, the Church drew on – and replenished – a deep well of legitimacy and affection. The signs of this cycle of loyalty can be seen in the consistent support that the living and the dying of all classes provided for all manner of local ecclesiastical services, whether in money, in kind or in effort.

It is hard to gauge the balance among love for this establishment, contented conformity to it, disgruntled compliance with it and alienated withdrawal from it. Clearly, however, open dissent was rare. Since the expulsion of the English Jews in 1291, England had been religiously uniform in law, and nearly so in fact. A few foreign Jews apparently found a discreet home in London at times. There were isolated sceptics, scoffers and freethinkers.