Popular Politics and the English Reformation

Reviews / Votes

'What impresses me especially about this work is the way it tackles the vast array of intractable and often obscure primary sources. Shagan has proved to have an extraordinary nose for investigation in manuscript material; he has come up with some gems of neglected sources and has exploited them to the full. He has also acquired a sense of context: that indispensable sense of the shape of the English landscape, and how one area relates to another. In sum, this study will become a central statement in our understanding of the English Reformation.' Diarmaid MacCulloch, University of Oxford 'This book deserves careful reading because it challenges many accepted views and offers us a new angle from which to understand these momentous changes in our island's history.' Contemporary Review 'Shagan has presented a refashioned study of the ever-engrossing interplay between the governed and the governors of the early English Reformation.' Susan Wabuda, H-Albion 'This is one of the most important books ever written in its field and a must-read for specialists and students alike.' History '... an important book ... consistently intriguing.' Journal of Ecclesiastical History 'Ethan Shagan's new study of the early years of the English Reformation is a tour de fource. What Popular Politics and the English Reformation attempts to do is to take on and defeat a number of the revisionist shibboleths that have become largely accepted within current historical thinking on the English Reformation. [This book] is an excellent volume, well written, polemical and persuasive - a real contribution to our understanding of the early English Reformation.' Reformation 'This is unusually interesting, clever and learned book. ... He must be congratulated on uncovering so much exciting and complicated detail on the huge canvas of sixteenth-century English religion.' Recusant History