Abstract
By 1600 a Protestant Church in England had succeeded in marginalising significant principled dissent both from Catholics loyal to Rome and from other Protestants. Yet how far could the new establishment claim to play a central part in the lives of the whole population? Was there, as historians of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation like Jean Delumeau have suggested, a significant stratum of society which remained largely unaffected by religious practice both before and after the Reformation? Did the standards of religious comprehension and literacy which were demanded by Protestantism, the religion of the Book, exclude a good proportion of the population, and did magic and witchcraft play a more central part in the lives of many people?1
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Notes and References
Cf. e.g. J. Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: a new view of the Counter-Reformation (London: Burns and Oates, 1977).
M. Spufford, ‘Can we count the “Godly” and “Conformable” in the seventeenth century?’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985), esp. pp. 435–6.
I. Green, ‘The emergence of the English catechism under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 37 (1986), pp. 397–425.
J. Edwards, ‘Religious faith and doubt in late medieval Spain: Soria circa 1450–1500’, Past and Present 120 (August 1988), pp. 3–25.
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© 1990 Diarmaid MacCulloch
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MacCulloch, D. (1990). Conclusion: A World Beyond?. In: The Later Reformation in England 1547–1603. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20692-6_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20692-6_10
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