This collection of essays seeks to bring some of the most recent innovative work on the English Reformation to the attention of teachers and students, and to show how a new understanding of the subject can be built up from work which has so far been hidden away in technical academic journals.

Historians have long known that Lancashire remained more solidly Catholic after the Reformation than any other part of England, but the peculiarity of the area has never been explained. This book argues that for geographical, social and economic, as well as religious reasons, orthodox Catholicism in the county was at its high-point immediately before the Reformation, so that the history of religious change in Lancashire in the sixteenth century is not the conventional one of Protestant triumph and Catholic failure. The Henrician Reformation was met by resistance and rebellion, while the...

The reign of Elizabeth I was one of the most important periods of expansion and growth in British history, the so-called 'Golden Age'. This celebrated and influential study of Elizabeth reconsiders how she achieved this and the ways in which she exercised her power.

Elizabeth I is a popular historical obsession and an endless source of inspiration for TV series, biopics and biographies. With her four hundredth anniversary on the horizon (1603), time is right for a new and lavishly illustrated edition of this hugely successful study of our favorite and most dramatic queen.