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Tudor England: A History

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Fasting was a regular part of Tudor life, both before and after the Reformation. In the pre-Reformation period, everyone abstained from meat and dairy on Wednesdays and Fridays, on the eve of important saints’ days, and throughout Advent and Lent. One of Protestantism’s attractions was that it dispensed with these requirements. However, the threat to the fishing trade was such that Friday fasting was hastily restored during Edward VI’s reign – although it remained unpopular, as the attempts to regulate butchers’ sales on fast days indicate. [35] In later Protestant culture, it became common to mark times of mourning, or special intercession, with fast days. Public fasts might be held in parish, town or by the nation at large in response to a particular crisis, whilst the godly might keep private fasts, accompanied by prayer and almsgiving, in pursuit of greater personal sanctity. [36] The response to the terrible famines of the 1590s, after three consecutive harvests had failed, was to declare public fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays – with the pious objective of showing penitence to a providential God for the sins that had merited such punishment, and with the practical objective of giving the food saved to the starving poor. The Council interpreted God’s displeasure as a response to the ‘excesse in dyett’ and ‘nedeles waste and ryotous consumpcion’ prevalent throughout the kingdom. [37] In more private fashion, many dedicated Protestants resumed the medieval practice of fasting the night before receiving communion. [38] Growing Vegetables to Feed the Poor

This bleeds into a revisionist account of Henry VIII that portrays our most notorious monarch not as a sex-crazed monster but as an “oddly bookish king”, who gathered the finest legal and theological minds of his age to try and resolve his “Great Matter”, the divorce of Catherine of Aragon (no less sharp but determined to remain married), in the pursuit of a male heir. It is the dust raised by these tome-flippers that irritates religious orthodoxies, leading in significant part to the Reformation (or indeed reformations – Wooding stresses that it was Henry VIII’s son, Foxe’s “godly imp” Edward VI, whose tenure saw the first Book of Common Prayer, the everyday impact of reform with a meaningfully Protestant character, and a great explosion of anti-papal rhetoric). I mean, I’ve always argued that Henry needs to be set in the context of his own time, rather than evaluated according to later categories of what we think Protestant and Catholic might mean. Because in the 1530s and 1540s, everything is still in flux. There is no single Protestant identity. It’s interesting that, you know, with Anne Boleyn, he’s already had an affair with her sister. So yeah, no surprises there. So, I don’t think seeing him as some kind of sexual predator is really at all appropriate.BARBARA BOGAEV: Well, the first and maybe overarching point that you make in your book is that Tudor England, as most of us think of it from depictions in popular culture, is a myth and a huge distortion. So if you had to choose one thing, what do we get most wrong? BOGAEV: Great. And we’re going to get into some of the details that you give that are fascinating about the people at the bottom all throughout Tudor society. But as you say, this was such a complicated period and England was so politically unstable. You had, Scotland was hostile territory, and Ireland a big political problem, and Wales, the separate country, and the Cornish spoke another language. Why was Tudor England, as you put it, so preoccupied with its own historical past? There can never be a definitive history of Tudor England. The debates about religion, government and society still rage unabated as they have done for much of the past 500 years. I suppose, ignoring for a moment the Horrible Histories nature of the period, this is why the reigns of the Tudor monarchs continue to have such a hold over our imagination in a way that the Plantagenets and Stuarts do not.

Teaching with the Folger Method An accessible and immersive way to teach students about any kind of literature The Telegraph values your comments but kindly requests all posts are on topic, constructive and respectful. Please review our Print has always been associated with the arrival of Protestantism, but actually for the first 50 or more years of the printing press in England, it was churning out great medieval religious classics. So, we began to think again. In Mary's case, my argument is not, at least primarily, about her later image; it is that, though she had supporters and was skilful at representing herself as she wished – as wife of a Habsburg – such a representation drew detractors in her own lifetime and contributed during her lifetime to negative images, which were bequeathed to later history, not invented by it.

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rounded up - it started off strong but was generally disappointing. Of course I understand how important religion was to Tudor England, from the big rituals to regional traditions and people's personal faith, but man did she just go on about it. Honestly, I think it could have been called 'Tudor England: Politics and Religion' and I would have at least been prepared for the sheer amount of Catholicism vs Protestantism. I do think one thing that set them apart though, is that even the wealthy in Tudor society quite often had a really powerful sense of social responsibility towards the poor. Something which I think, well, I think perhaps compares favorably with attitudes today.

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