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The Shock of Change: Continuity and Discontinuity in the Elizabethan Church Of England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2008

Eamon Duffy
Eamon Duffy
Affiliation:
Professor of the History of Christianity in the University of Cambridge and President of Magdalene College
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This paper questions accounts of the English Reformation which, in line with sometimes unacknowledged Anglo-Catholic assumptions, present it as a mere clean-up operation, the creation of a reformed Catholicism which removed medieval excesses but left an essentially Catholic Church of England intact. It argues instead that the Elizabethan reformers intended to establish a Reformed Church which would be part of a Protestant international Church, emphatic in disowning its medieval inheritance and rejecting the religion of Catholic Europe, with formularies, preaching and styles of worship designed to signal and embody that rejection. But Anglican self-identity was never simply or unequivocally Protestant. Lay and clerical conservatives resisted the removal of the remains of the old religion, and vestiges of the Catholic past were embedded like flies in amber in the Prayer Book liturgy, in church buildings, and in the attitudes and memories of many of its Elizabethan personnel. By the early seventeenth century influential figures in the Church of England were seeking to distance themselves from European Protestantism, and instead to portray the Church of England as a conscious via media between Rome and Geneva. In the hands of the Laudians and their followers, this newer interpretation of the Reformation was to prove potent in reshaping the Church of England's self-understanding.

Type
Articles
Information
Ecclesiastical Law Journal , Volume 7 , Issue 35 , July 2004 , pp. 429 - 446
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical Law Society 2004

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