A Companion to Tudor Britain provides an authoritative overview of historical debates about this period, focusing on the whole British Isles.

• An authoritative overview of scholarly debates about Tudor Britain
• Focuses on the whole British Isles, exploring what was common and what was distinct to its four constituent elements
• Emphasises big cultural, social, intellectual, religious and economic themes
• Describes differing political and personal experiences of the time
• Discusses unusual subjects, such as the sense of the past amongst British...

The century bounded by the Henrician Reformation and the Civil Wars marked an important stage in the development of urban institutions, culture, and society in England. At the outset of this period, England was still very much an agrarian society; by its end, it was well on the way to becoming an urban one as well. The complexity and subtlety of those developments become especially vivid when we experience them through the lives of more or less ordinary townspeople, which Tittler allows us to do here.

These biographical studies not only have much to tell us about the time and...

This is an important new analysis of the secular impact of the Reformation on English towns. It shows how the transfer of property, coupled with new statutory responsibilities and the destruction of a doctrine-based political culture, enabled many towns to extend their holdings and increase their institutional authority.

Our conventional understanding of English portraiture from the age of Holbein and Henry VIII on to Reubens, VanDyck and Charles I clings to the mainstream images of royalty and aristocracy and to the succession of known practitioners of 'Renaissance' portraiture. Projection of the royal or aristocratic persona, the self-fashioning of the individual, remained the main objective of these works, and the steady development towards more sophisticated stylistic conventions, as imported by prominent foreign-trained artists, remains the traditional art historical context in which they have been...

In this, the first comprehensive study of post-Reformation provincial English portraiture, Robert Tittler investigates the growing affinity for secular portraiture in Tudor and early Stuart England, a cultural and social phenomenon which can be said to have produced a 'public' for that genre. He breaks new ground in placing portrait patronage and production in this era in the broad social and cultural context of post-Reformation England, and in distinguishing between native English provincial portraiture, which was often highly vernacular, and foreign-influenced portraiture of the court and...