THE SEMANTICS OF REFORMATION: DISCOURSES OF RELIGIOUS CHANGE IN ENGLAND, C. 1414 – 1688

Abstract

The Semantics of Reformation: Discourses of Religious Change in England, c. 1414 – 1688 examines how the events of the sixteenth century were conceptualized as the English Reformation. The word ‘reformation’ was widely used during these centuries, but its meaning changed in significant ways. By adopting a linguistic methodology, the dissertation studies reformation as a concept in motion; consequently, the English Reformation, a term widely used today, is treated not as an analytic category but as a historiographical label that developed contingently. The chapters fall into three roughly equal sections, each of which covers a distinct discourse of reformation. Chapters one and two cover the first discourse, which identified reformation as the work of a church council. This discourse began at the Council of Constance (1414 – 1418) and remained firmly in place in all Christian localities through the mid-sixteenth century, when it was challenged by a new discourse: reformation by armed resistance, which is introduced at the end of chapter two and discussed in chapters three and four. The Anglo-Scots reformer John Knox brought this discourse to England’s doorstep through his work The History of the Reformation of the Church of Scotland, which discussed how Knox and his associates pursued a program of religious revolution in mid-sixteenth century Scotland. With Scotland’s church reformed by force, English theological debates about reformation sometimes carried revolutionary implications. When civil war engulfed the entire British Isles in the 1640s, England saw its own reformation by armed resistance. The final two chapters study how Anglican apologists developed a third discourse of reformation in the 1650s. After the regicide of Charles I in 1649 and the ensuing political oppression, Anglican apologists claimed that Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I brought about the English Reformation. They argued that unlike the Scottish Reformation and the reformations of mid-seventeenth century England, which were accomplished by force, Tudor sovereigns accomplished the English Reformation by law. With the restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England in 1660, this apologetic vision became the standard historical assumption in English society.