The disastrous protestant defeat in the Schmalkaldic War (1546-47) and the promulgation of the Ausburg Interim (1548) left the fate of German Protestantism in doubt. In the wake of these events, a single protestant town, Magdeburg, offered organized, sustained resistance to Emperor Charles V's drive to consolidate Habsburg hegemony and reinstitute uniform Roman Catholic worship throughout Germany. In a flood of printed pamphlets, Magdeburg's leaders justified their refusal to surrender with forceful appeals to religious belief and German tradition. Magdeburg's resistance, interdiction and...

John Merbecke (c.1505-c.1585) is most famous as the composer of the first musical setting of the English liturgy, The Booke of Common Praier Noted (BCPN), published in 1550. Not only was Merbecke a pioneer in setting English prose to music but also the compiler of the first Concordance of the whole English Bible (1550) and of the first English encyclopaedia of biblical and theological studies, A Booke of Notes and Common Places (1581). By situating Merbecke and his work within a broader intellectual and religio-cultural context of Tudor England, this book challenges the existing studies of...

With its challenging, paradoxical thesis that Elizabethan England was a 'republic which happened also to be a monarchy', Patrick Collinson's 1987 essay 'The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I' instigated a proliferation of research and lively debate about quasi-republican aspects of Tudor and Stuart England. In this volume, a distinguished international group of scholars examines the idea of the 'monarchical republic' from the 1530s to the 1640s, and tests the concept from a variety of points of view. New suggestions are advanced about the pattern of development of quasi-republican...

Numerous historical studies use the term "community'" to express or comment on social relationships within geographic, religious, political, social, or literary settings, yet this volume is the first systematic attempt to collect together important examples of this varied work in order to draw comparisons and conclusions about the definition of community across early modern Europe. Offering a variety of historical and theoretical approaches, the sixteen original essays in this collection survey major regions of Western Europe, including France, Geneva, the German Lands, Italy and the Spanish...

The Whole Booke of Psalmes was one of the most published and widely read books of early modern England, running to over 1000 editions between the 1570s and the early eighteenth century. It offered all of the Psalms paraphrased in verse with appropriate tunes, together with an assortment of other scriptural and non-scriptual hymns, and prose prayers for domestic use. Because the Elizabethan Church rapidly and pervasively (if unofficially) adopted this metrical psalter for congregational singing, and because it had in practical terms no rivals for church use until the end of the seventeenth...

Drawing on a variety of sources and scholarship to talk about John Jewel, this work paints a picture not of a theologian and humanist, but an orator and rhetorician, who persistently breached the rules of logic and the canons of Renaissance humanism in an

Drawing primarily from Suffolk sources, this book explores the development and place of Protestantism in early modern society, defined as much in terms of its practice in local communities as in its more public pronouncements from those in authority. Using detailed analysis of four communities, Mildenhall, Bury St Edmunds, Thetford and Hadleigh, John Craig explores the responses and initiatives of these towns to the question of the Reformation in the 16th century. A fascinating picture emerges of the preoccupations and priorities of particular groups. The political goals and consciousness of...

It has been estimated that well over half of the books published during the European Reformation were in Latin, many of which have never been translated and have garnered little scholarly attention. Yet a good number of them have a direct bearing on the history of the Reformation and its actors. One such is Roger Ascham s Apologia pro caena dominica contra missam & eius praestigias ( A defence of the Lord s Supper against the Mass and its magic ). Written as a direct response to a series of religious debates held at Cambridge University at the start of Edward VI s reign, it was published some...