December 10, 2015
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The English Reformation And Revisionist Confusion.
From the pages of a book by Paul Avis I am studying from on Revisionist History and the English Reformation.
The revisionists have made their point. The Reformation in England was not the smooth, uninterrupted outworking of a coherent plan, conceived in the minds of Cranmer and Jewel. It was a complex, contingent, contradictory concatenation of incidents. As Haigh puts it: ‘The religious changes of sixteenth-century England were far too complex to be bound together as “the Reformation”, too complex even to be “a Reformation”. England had discontinuous Reformations and parallel Reformations … England had blundering Reformations, which most did not understand, which few wanted, and which no-one knew had come to stay’ (Haigh, 1993, p. 14).
Anglicanism And The Christian Church: Theological Resources In Historical Perspective, p. 5, Paul Avis
Comments (1)
"Smooth, uninterrupted"? Whoever said that, ignores Bloody Mary, Charles I, Simnel, Cromwell and the various backs and forths between England and Scotland, to say nothing of the constant turmoil in Ireland.
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