Alec Ryrie

Professor of the History of Christianity Alec Ryrie

The first comprehensive account of what it actually meant to live a Protestant life in England and Scotland between 1530 and 1640. The focus is on material reality and the real experience of actual believers, drawn from diaries and other direct testimonies.

Being Protestant in Reformation Britain

The Age of Reformation charts how religion, politics and social change were always intimately interlinked in the sixteenth century, from the murderous politics of the Tudor court to the building and fragmentation of new religious and social identities in the parishes. In this book, Alec Ryrie provides an authoritative overview of the religious and political reformations of the sixteenth century. This turbulent century saw Protestantism come to England, Scotland and even Ireland, while the Tudor and Stewart monarchs made their authority felt within and beyond their kingdoms more than any of their predecessors. This book demonstrates how this age of reformations produced not only a new religion, but a new politics – absolutist, yet pluralist, populist yet bound by law. This new edition has been fully revised and updated and includes expanded sections on Lollardy and anticlericalism, on Henry VIII’s early religious views, on several of the rebellions which convulsed Tudor England and on unofficial religion, ranging from Elizabethan Catholicism to incipient atheism. Drawing on the most recent research, Alec Ryrie explains why these events took the course they did – and why that course was so often an unexpected and unlikely one. It is essential reading for students of early modern British history and the history of the reformation.

Professor of the History of Christianity Alec Ryrie

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