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The reign of Edward IV, as Jonathan Hughes points out, is unique in English history; it was the first – and last – time a king of England lost his throne, went into exile, invaded his own kingdom and regained his crown, enabling him to destroy his rivals and to reign in relative peace and tranquillity for another thirteen years.
Wars of religion, for so long an embarrassment to humanist agendas within the academy, have suddenly become relevant again.
This volume is dedicated to Barrie Dobson, whose work over four decades on the peculiar clerical institutions and communities of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has been a model of scholarship, broad vision and human sympathy.
Despite a certain academic heaviness, with no fewer than fifty-seven pages of notes, bibliography and index, and despite an occasionally disagreeable academic vocabulary, of which more anon, this book has a pleasantly simple knock-down argument, that Christianity in Britain enjoyed a long nineteenth century of prosperity, between 1800 and 1960, and only began to go into terminal decline in the
Professor John Kent brings a distinguished reputation as a historian of religion in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain to the near-impossible task of saying something new about John Wesley.
Reflecting the place of the Bible as the bedrock of medieval culture, biblical imagery was ubiquitous in medieval England, yet it has not hitherto been the subject of a comprehensive modern monograph. Such precedents as there were – notably M. R. James’s The Apocalypse in Art (London: British Academy, 1931) and F. Wormald’s ‘Bible Illustration in Medieval Manuscripts’, in G. W. H.
The 1990s in Ireland witnessed intense popular and academic interest in the events of two centuries before, culminating with the bicentennial commemorations of the United Irish Rebellion of 1798.
This study sets itself the task of restoring ‘the tarnished reputation that Henry VIII’s bishops have earned from contemporaries and historians alike’.(p. 7) From Francis Bacon, through David Hume, and into the twentieth century, historians have condemned the occupants of Henry’s episcopal bench as mediocrities and time-servers.
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, laments the excesses of Puritan iconoclasm in her poem 'An antient Cross', first published in 1656 in Natures Pictures:
Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (Yale, 1992) provided a broad, compelling account of popular religion in England before and during the Reformation, and was a book which undoubtedly changed the way we think about late medieval Catholicism and the popular experience of religious change.