ABSTRACT
The Colloquium held at University College London in January 1996 has strengthened and lengthened a growing sense among historians of the English Reformation that (like the “Long Seventeenth Century” and the “Long Eighteenth Century”, ideas to which they may be in debt) it was a “Long Reformation”. We are already removed by a generation or so from those historians who confined the essential history of the English Reformation to the thirty years from 1529 to 1559, a manageable three-course meal preceded by a few late medieval apéritifs and rounded off with a small cup of Elizabethan coffee with one or two dissenting digestifs (“Puritanism” and “Recusancy”). Once upon a time, T.M.Parker’s little book The English Reformation to 1558 (not even 1559!) almost despatched the topic between the soup and the fish,1 while even A.G.Dickens thought that everything which happened after 1559 could be attended to (in 1964) in 38 out of 340 pages, and more recently (in 1989) 38 out of 396.2
To limit the Reformation to the concreteness of the politically motivated and publicly executed events of three remarkable and earthshaking mid-Tudor decades (separating the 44 years from 1485 to 1529 from the 44 years between 1559 and 1603) has some advantages besides symmetrical periodization, as more than one participant in the Colloquium observed. This was, beyond all dispute, the Reformation. To spread the concept over two or three centuries is, in effect, to jettison the definite article and to trade an almost timeless principle of religious history, if not of human affairs more generally, “reform” and “reformation”, against the specificity which must
always be the historian’s limiting concern, surrendering to a diffuse generality.
