Chapter 6 revisits the sixteenth-century plays in the Towneley Manuscript (Huntington MS HM 1), notable for their northern regionalist character. Critics have long debated the plays’ dating, but this chapter proposes to read the manuscript as a compilation emerging from the northern rebellion of 1536–37 known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, which opposed the reformed Protestantism of Henry VIII for old Catholicism and proved, arguably, the largest civil rebellion in English history. The late Barbara Palmer’s work on the plays and on drama in general in the West Riding suggest that the manuscript is a compilation born of the drama centers that included major sites of activity during the 1536–37 rebellion. This chapter asks, then, to what extent religious drama of this sort was provocative of rebellion in the North of England, or to what extent the turmoil of the Reformation in England, and the subsequent rebellions of 1536–37, resonate in the plays? Chapter 6 suggests that the Towneley Plays be read as protest literature emerging from the Pilgrimage of Grace, finding further links between the plays and other prophecy and protest poems written during the rebellion.

On a cultural level, the Italian Renaissance lifted Europe into a new era of humanism that glorified humanity and shifted attention to the present needs and desires of people. Erasmus translated this humanistic attitude into scholarly pursuits that revealed the frailties and needs of the human authors of Scripture. All of these forces eroded the authority of the Church, leading to dramatic confrontation, both from inside and outside the Church. The Protestant Reformation took advantage of the rift between Christian monarchs and the papacy, successfully fragmenting the unity of Western Christendom. However, it was Copernicus who used the strategy and tools of reasoned arguments to arrive at his heliocentric theory of planetary motion. This bold assertion successfully demonstrated a truth arrived at through reason that differed from the conclusion supported by the authority of the Church. As a result, reason triumphed over faith, and the age of science began. While psychology remained obscured within philosophy and religion during this time, the enduring questions still perplexed scholars and were about to be addressed directly over two centuries of philosophical inquiries prior to psychology’s formal definition as a distinct science.

Shakespeare inherited from the Middle Ages a long-standing association between debt and death. As a consequence of the Reformation’s elimination of purgatory, however, the relationship between debt and death had recently undergone a sea change. This chapter aims to show how a repeated pun of Shakespeare’s, one binding ‘debt’ to ‘death’, signals a shift in the relation between the living and the dead in early modern England: one brought about by the Reformation, and specifically its denial of purgatory. The reconfiguring of relations between the dead and their survivors turned largely on the idea of debt, especially that of a spiritual debt accrued over a lifetime as the commission of sins exceeded their remission. For the people of pre-Reformation England, purgatory was a debtor’s prison in which souls would suffer a temporal punishment for sins that had been forgiven, but for which they still owed a debt. Central to a post-Reformation understanding of the relation between debt and death was the growing practice of double-entry bookkeeping. Double-entry’s key idea of ‘balance’ bore heavy theological implications, evoking the scales of justice and the symmetry of a divine plan.

The first principal part of this chapter explores sacred music in Wales from the Roman period to the English conquest. Christian observance in Wales may have been unbroken from the time of the Roman invasion onwards, and the four medieval cathedrals existed as sacred sites before Augustine’s mission of 578. Wales was part of the western Latin Church within the province of Canterbury. From the thirteenth century it was strongly influenced by the liturgical Use of Salisbury. However, only two substantial notated musical sources survive, both from the earlier fourteenth century: the Anian of Bangor Pontifical (with stronger provenance in East Anglia than Wales) and the Penpont antiphonal from the diocese of St Davids. This chapter considers their implications for our understanding of the repertoire and practice of sacred music in medieval Wales and also explores the role of the organ in the liturgy, drawing on the evidence of the pre-Reformation organ case at Old Radnor in Powys. The latter part of the chapter considers the effects of the Reformation on worship in Wales up to 1650. It examines compositions by John Lloyd, Philip ap Rhys and Elway Bevin, all of likely Welsh descent, and explains the significance of sources associated with Chirk Castle Chapel for understanding liturgical music in this period. After the Reformation, the English Book of Common Prayer was as alien as the Latin books it replaced in much of Wales. The Welsh translations of the Book of Common Prayer and the Bible were therefore crucial; the chapter concludes with an examination of Edmwnd Prys’ Welsh metrical psalter, Llyfr y Psalmau (1621).

This chapter explores structural differences between the 1667 ten-book edition and the revised twelve-book version of 1674, not only to continue a reconsideration of Eve, but to revive attention to the implications of the formal properties of the revision, and to argue that this reformation formally embodies the narrative’s claims about how to adjust to modernity. The drama created by the final, reconfigured two books highlights how Adam and Eve and their relationship change and grow during the poem. At the end, the poem’s profound linguistic tensions are instantiated by Eve, while Adam’s reaction and the narrator’s description emphasize the pleasures of pluralistic readings. In short, the reformation of Paradise Lost rebalances the poem, by countering the scale of the consequences from the War in Heaven with a proportional rearrangement of the invocations. Its twelve-book shape mitigates against loss and creates a space to emphasize the continued growth of the two human characters, particularly Adam. Perhaps most importantly, the new, concluding pair of books provide a space of non-domination in which Eve can emerge and be recognized as the poet she is.

This chapter pushes the book’s argument beyond the traditional medieval/modern dividing line around the year 1500 by examining advocates’ corrupt practices of justice and protection in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While acknowledging that the volume of administrative evidence grows exponentially in this period and regional administrations became better developed, it nevertheless shows that various abuses that had been happening for centuries continued into this period. These abuses included local acts of violence that provide clear evidence for the ongoing difficulties that met attempts by imperial and princely authorities to govern effectively on the ground in their territories. This chapter, therefore, calls attention to the flaws in traditional historical narratives about a sharp dividing line between a medieval period of feudalism and lordship and a modern period of government, bureaucracy and strong states.

The conclusion summarizes the book’s interpretive synthesis, highlighting the major features of the Reformation in the Low Countries. It also offers a short comparative section in which the Netherlandish Reformation is placed in a wider European context and compared to other experiences of religious change in the sixteenth century.

The introduction describes the book’s major themes, including the distinctive features of reformation in the Low Countries: a reformation from below, the sustained judicial persecution it underwent, its entanglement with the political contest between the Habsburg government and local powers, the wars it helped spark, and its contribution to the emergence of two separate Netherlandish states by the end of the sixteenth century. It also includes a brief discussion of the historiography of the Netherlandish Reformation since the nineteenth century.

Martin Luther’s infamous writings against the Jews are brought into focus, examining both their impact from the 16th through the 20th centuries and the different scholarly approaches toward interpreting them. Luther’s treatises are placed into the historical context in which they were written, and the significance of the response to his writings by his Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish contemporaries is highlighted.

offers canonical and non-canonical examples of early seventeenth-century female voices that call for freedom of speech and resistance to tyranny. Drawn from drama and print culture, authored by men and women, such voices figure the connection between women and political dissent. If Othello’s Emilia and Desdemona use free speech to express their virtue and contest male authority, Paulina in The Winter’s Tale plays the shrew to call out domestic and political tyranny, while Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and Vittoria speak truth to power and Elizabeth Caldwell’s Letter denounces her husband in a display of Protestant religious zeal. Rooting these voices in sixteenth-century female-voiced political and religious dissent, the chapter suggests that representations of the woman as resistant subject could take on a particularly acute political inflection during the early Stuart period.

This chapter argues that Swiftian irony functions in a way similar to the Whiggish model of political revolution: both function “to preserve and to reform,” and both create new commitments based on challenging, revising, and criticizing existing institutions. Swift’s satire functions first and foremost, of course, to highlight weaknesses, defects, and corruptions in its objects; but, in a gesture reminiscent of Burkean conservatism and Rorty’s irony, his parody also serves as a means of preserving while reforming the satirized object, coopting its genuinely admirable qualities and opening up new spaces for indulgence and play. Burke makes explicit a model of ironic politics implicit in Swift’s Tale: political institutions are contestable primarily because they are an ongoing, unfinished project. Each generation must recognize this limitation and adapt institutions to their own needs.

Characteristic of the early modern period was the idea of a new start for philosophy and the sciences. In the period, those who advocated for such a program were collectively called the novatores or “innovators.” This chapter traces the emergence and the complex posterity of this term. Though now considered positive, it was much contested in the period, and the novatores were involved in numerous polemical disputes. Tracing the origins, history, and use of the term gives us precious insights into the dynamics of the great transformation of philosophy usually designated by another polemical label—the Scientific Revolution.

By exploring the decision-making processes that were made by English publishers and printers as they navigated both readers’ increasing demands for books and the regulations of the English crown and the City of London, Chapter 2 demonstrates how regulatory, economic, and material constraints upon the manufacture of English books as commodities affected their production. It considers how the English crown’s early directed efforts to control the spread of heretical and seditious material influenced herbal production, as well as the way that the circumstances of print publication changed radically in 1557 with the incorporation of the Stationers’ Company of London.

Turner’s attitude towards printed books, and the uses to which they can be put by clever authors, can be seen to shift over the course of his interrelated careers as a physician, divine, and naturalist. This chapter demonstrates how Turner’s three herbals reflect a bibliographic self-consciousness in English botany that was emerging simultaneously with the efforts of English physicians to assert their influence over all elements of medicine. Anonymous bestselling English works like the little Herball as well as The Grete Herball were widely available during Turner’s undergraduate studies at Cambridge, but despite their popularity with readers, Turner claimed that those works offered little of use to professional medical practitioners. It was to remedy what he called the “unlearned cacography” of these texts that Turner was prompted in 1538 to first offer up his own botanical studies in English for the good of the commonweal despite his fellow physicians’ concerns that such an endeavor would make specialized professional knowledge widely available to laypeople.