English reformations

Abstract

This special issue is devoted to the English Reformations and current historiography. The title intentionally pluralizes the traditionally singular noun Reformation to signify a scope that includes both the early Reformation (through to 1547) and continuing senses of reformation through to the later seventeenth century. But the plural also encourages investigation of what has seemed a mistaken homogenization of the religious and political processes involved at all stages of "the Reformation." The articles in this issue look at the grand narratives into which the minute particulars of historical processes are perceived, interpreted, and occluded. They also carefully attend to the place of theology and its diverse traditions in these processes together with its relations to the political imaginary and practices driving what Eamon Duffy memorably calls "the stripping of the altars." © 2010 by Duke University Press.