ABSTRACT
The Dissolution, then heated up a revolution that was underway, but made the land, its inhabitants, and its disposition visible in a way that they had not been before. In Foucauldian terms, the Dissolution turned the land into a different kind of object than it had been in the past, an object that inhabited a new order of things, inaugurating an episteme defined by country house discourse. The Dissolution of the monasteries was framed by Henry's first minister, Thomas Cromwell, as a religious purge of corrupt and unprofitable religious houses. The Dissolution itself spawned an articulation of country house discourse in a series of popular protests. The literature of these protests framed the structure of country house discourse, limning the major ideas in their most traditional and undiluted form. Central to them all was a concern with the legitimate exercise of power.
