ABSTRACT
. This chapter examines each of these three responses and considers what they mean for our understanding of worship and the Reformation as a whole. The subject of fasting has received surprisingly little attention from historians of the Reformations in Britain: whether it is the formal, or the private or household fasts which many Protestants encouraged and some may also have practised. Protestants of every kind rejected this practice as works-righteousness, legalism and superstition, using the language of Christian liberty. Protestant establishments generally rejected the calendar of religious fasting. This meant that fasting, amongst Protestants, took three courses. First, and most commonly, it was privatized, becoming something that pious individuals did on their own initiative when they felt the need. Second, it became an occasional public event, used in response to a real, anticipated or imagined public calamity. And third a British peculiarity fasting was secularized, as traditional practices persisted clad in new rationales
