ABSTRACT
Jane Austen was a product of the Reformation. Like some of the earliest critics of the Dissolution, and like her contemporary Samuel Johnson, Austen laments the haste and lack of discrimination that destroyed medieval Christian buildings and institutions. She can imagine alternate outcomes that would have better preserved continuity between the old religion and the new. The conversation about the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the significance of the pre-Reformation past, did not end with Austen. In 1829, 12 years after Austen's death, British Catholics achieved emancipation after many decades of struggle, a victory won in part by changing attitudes toward the medieval Catholic Church. In the 1830s and '40s, a group of Anglican clergy made the case for the Catholic tradition in English worship as part of the Oxford Movement. In the 1840s, three hundred years after the cessation of monastic life in England, the first Anglican monastic communities were established.
