The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485-1603

The sixteenth century was an age of Reformation. There was religious reformation as Protestantism came to England Scotland and even Ireland bringing liberation chaos and bloodshed in its wake. And there was political reformation as the Tudor and Stewart (later Stuart) monarchs made their authority felt within and beyond their kingdoms more than any of their predecessors. Together these two reformations produced not only a new religion but a new politics -absolutist yet pluralist populist yet law-bound – and a new society – controlled fractured yet more widely engaged and empowered than ever before. In this book Alec Ryrie provides an authoritative overview of these momentous events showing how religion politics and social change were always intimately interlinked from the murderous politics of the Tudor court to the building and fragmentation of new religious and social identities in the parishes. Drawing on the most recent research he explains why events took the course they did – and why that course was so often an unexpected and an unlikely one.