Altars are powerful symbols, fraught with meaning, but during the early modern period they became a religious battleground. Attacked by reformers in the mid-sixteenth century because of their allegedly idolatrous associations with the Catholic sacrifice of the mass, a hundred years later they served to divide Protestants due to their re-introduction by Archbishop Laud and his associates as part of a counter-reforming program. Moreover, having subsequently been removed by the victorious puritans, they gradually came back after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. This book explores these...

Volume IV of the magisterial History of the University of Oxford covers the seventeenth century, a period of institutional and intellectual expansion for the University and of religious and political tumult for Oxford in general. In this volume, leading experts examine Oxford and its University's role in the major British events of the century, including the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and the Restoration.

During the sixteenth century, England underwent a religious revolution. This book examines the reverberations of this Protestant Reformation, which continued to be felt until at least the end of the seventeenth century. Brings together twelve essays by Nicholas Tyacke about English Protestantism, which range from the Reformation itself, and the new market-place of ideas opened up, to the establishment of freedom of worship for Protestant nonconformists in 1689. For this collection the author has written a substantial introduction, and updated the essays by incorporating new research.

Focusing on the crisis of transition marked by the English Revolution (1640-1660), this collection of essays also places it in the context of a long seventeenth century.
Leading experts in the field explore this theme with special reference to developments in politics, religion and society, at both national and local levels. The volume breaks decisively with recent historiography, in emphasising both the long-term nature and revolutionary implications of the seventeenth-century events in question. Features of the crisis include the growing challenge to the confessional state from within...

This is a study of the rise of English Arminianism and the growing religious division in the Church of England during the decades before the Civil War of the 1640s. The author argues that it was Arminianism, not the rise of puritanism, that was a major cause of the war,