Domesticating the Reformation

Protestant Best Sellers, Private Devotion, and the Revolution of English Piety
People who lived through the English Reformation had the shock of witnessing the dismantling of institutions and relationships they had been taught were permanent. Of course, not all English people welcomed this dismantling; this study, however, focuses on those people who did, and on those forces such people willingly allowed to wrench them from their religious ancestry. One such force came in the form of books. In an effort to guide popular consciences through the dizzying reform process, Protestant writers and preachers used various media to shape evolving patterns of domestic worship. While many post-revisionist studies focus on the deeply disruptive aspects of the Reformations alternative devotional program, Patterson considers some of its more positive articulations. She reveals underexplored expressions of religious dissent by rescuing three key texts largely ignored despite their being certifiable 'best sellers' in their day: Thomas Becon's The Sick Man's Slave, John Nordens A Pensive Man's Practice, and Edward Dering and John Mores A Brief and Necessary Instruction for Householders. Patterson analyzes how the writers packaged 'high' theology for ordinary persons, offering accessible guidelines for an everyday reformist piety to be worked out in the 'ideally' Protestant, English household. By drawing portraits of new religious identities, these little-known authors became chief actors in the Reformation theater, as translators and disseminators of a Protestant and distinctly anti-Catholic world view that would come to characterize much of modern, Anglo-centric religious culture. Patterson asks the following questions: how did these devotional manuals, intended to be read aloud, stream continental theology into the domestic contexts of parish, school, and home? What sorts of individuals or households did the authors envision? How did issues of literacy/ illiteracy affect or not affect popular absorption of new ideas from books? Finally, how can the occasional incalculability o

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