English Reformations

Abstract

Discussing current historiography of the English Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and those movements regarded as its medieval precursors, we decided that a special issue of JMEMS could contribute fruitfully to this subject. As its statement of purpose proclaims, JMEMS aims to foster "the rigorous investigation of past cultural forms and their historiographical representations, representations whose political dimensions will be of special interest." It has also sought to overcome distortions of our understanding of the past produced by the patterns of periodization on which our disciplines are made. 1 A special issue on "English Reformations," we thought, is well suited to these paradigms of inquiry. We are grateful to our contributors for bringing this thought to fulfillment. We have used the plural noun in our title for a number of reasons. It gestures toward the continuity of the ideologies of reform across the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The commitment to reform the Church and its people was a constituent component of the late medieval church and, increasingly so, of its lay elites. 2 This commitment could take many different and contradictory forms. Reform could be initiated by leading ecclesiastic authorities (for example, the Gregorian reforms of the late eleventh century, those of the Fourth Lateran Council or, more locally, those of Archbishop Peckham in 1281); sometimes it could be initiated outside this hierarchy but appreciated and ordered by the hierarchy (for example, St. Francis's movement); sometimes it emerged among clergy and people in ways that led to mortal combat with the authorities of the Roman Church, a combat in which reformers might be classified and persecuted as heretics by the Church and secular authorities (for example, Waldensians or Wycliffites). But however different and conflicting such forms might have been, it is important to recognize that they were sponsored by dynamics of reform intrinsic to medieval Christianity. Who declared, "The Christian faith. .. was once a schism"? 3