Debating Reformations

Peter Marshall's new article, ‘(Re)defining the English Reformation’, Journal of British Studies 48, 3 (2009): 564-86, is a very useful summary of recent views of the Reformation (from above/below, quick/halting, etc.), and even-handed, even though Marshall himself has staked a position in these debates. This was published too late, of course, to be included in the 2nd ed. of Sources and Debates in English History, 1485-1714, ch. 3, although much of the relevant work is included there under "Historians' Debates," grouped by various debate questions (74-77). Note that the Wiley-Blackwell website includes Historiographical Commentaries
from Sources and Debates in English History (1st edition), which, although not updated with new secondary works like the 2nd ed., are still valuable essays for further research.

Students select Elizabethan Worlds documents (group D)

Please post by Sat., Oct. 3 or before as a comment which 3 documents about which you would most want to lead discussion for week 7. Oct. 8. Key and Bucholz, Sources and Debates, ch. 4. Add one sentence for each document about why you like that document or think it would work well in class. (I will email you which one document you will be working on once I have your submissions.) Sign your comment with your first name and last initial. (If you post earlier, I will confirm your assignment earlier so that you might begin on your presentation before the Mid-Term Exam.)

Students select Reformation after 1547 documents (group C)

Please post by Sat., Sept. 19 or before as a comment which 3 documents about which you would most want to lead discussion for week 4. Sept. 17. Key and Bucholz, Sources and Debates, ch. 3 (post-1547). Add one sentence for each document about why you like that document or think it would work well in class. (I will email you which one document you will be working on once I have your submissions.) Sign your comment with your first name and last initial.

The Henrician Reformation: a Quiz

To check one's knowledge of the narrative of the 1520s and 1530s (and the relevant glossary words), the linked Quiz is based on Bucholz and Key, Early Modern England, ch. 2.

Students select Reformation documents (group B)

Please post by Sat., Sept. 12 or before as a comment which 3 documents about which you would most want to lead discussion for week 4. Sept. 17. Key and Bucholz, Sources and Debates, ch. 3 (pre-1547). Add one sentence for each document about why you like that document or think it would work well in class. (I will email you which one document you will be working on once I have your submissions.) Sign your comment with your first name and last initial.

Students select Yorkist/Tudor Government documents (group A)

Please post by Sept. 7 or before as a comment which 3 documents about which you would most want to lead discussion for week 3. Sept. 10. Key and Bucholz, Sources and Debates, ch. 2. Add one sentence for each document about why you like that document or think it would work well in class. (I will email you which one document you will be working on once I have your submissions.) Sign your comment with your first name and last initial.

Scots and English: another view

Is Scots readily understandable by and English person and vice versa in the 17th century or not? I assume M. Pittock overstates the case. But constructing a narrative such as our textbook is a difficult architecture on shifting sands.

Pittock, Murray G. H. Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685-1789. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997, p. 45: “It would perhaps be not too far off the mark to suggest that about a quarter of the Scottish population spoke Gaelic in 1700 (the vast bulk of the rest speaking Scots, a tongue (now attenuated almost to extinction) as separate from English as Dutch is from German). Wales and Ireland were very heavily Celtic-speaking at the same date.”

Scotland and a Greater England?

Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), 20:

• England and Scotland had been joined together by history and geography since the fall of the Roman Empire.... Both spoke the same language, since the Scottish royal court had adopted English (or a dialect related to Middle English called Scots) back in the eleventh century, relegating Gaelic to the cultural backwater.

We did not, I believe, incorporate this point into our Early Modern England, 1485-1714.