ABSTRACT
Having sustained more than a decade of vigorous criticism, A.G. Dickens in
1989 responded with a revised edition of his classic work, The English
Reformation which reaffirmed his view of the Reformation as successful within
its first generation in converting English people dissatisfied with late medieval
Catholicism to the protestants’ religion of the Word. The article that follows
was published shortly before the book; it offers a direct, point-by-point response
to his critics, drawing heavily from detailed local studies. Dickens points out
here that limitations on our surviving sources should not be allowed to obscure
the massive protestant iceberg below the surface. He grants regional diversity,
as he always has, but he argues that protestantism encountered resistance mainly
in the less populous and less politically significant areas of the realm. Local
evidence shows that for London and the heavily populated South and East, an
‘expansionist’ view of pre-Elizabethan protestantism remains more credible than
Haigh’s ‘minimal picture’. Protestanism grew slowly 1530 to 1547, but
blossomed under Edward VI, and by the beginning of Mary’s reign in 1553 it
was ‘seemingly ineradicable’ in much of England. Dickens maintains throughout
his work that popular belief and opinion are the legitimate focus of a historian’s
efforts and can be deduced from the evidence that remains to us.
