ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the Reformation as a very long-term process, and will not generally distinguish various episodes of destruction. The Reformation was not a single event, nor even a number of events, but a process which transformed British religious practice, and redefined relations of power, over more than a century. The theological issues confronted by philosophers and clerics of the Reformation were numerous and subtle, but in practice most people encountered the Reformation in the way it impacted on local networks of power, and on daily ritual and liturgy. Religious images, including direct representations, symbols of Catholic belief and fetishized words or letters, all became more or less suspect. The 16th-century reformers were driven by a religious understanding which saw the things of this world as utterly separate from the things of God. Confusion between the two was likely to lead to the transgression of the second commandment.
