How the English Reformation was Named: The Politics of History, 1400-1700

How the English Reformation was Named analyses the shifting semantics of 'reformation' in England between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Originally denoting the intended aim of church councils, 'reformation' was subsequently redefined to denote violent revolt, and ultimately a series of past episodes in religious history. But despite referring to sixteenth-century religious change, the proper noun 'English Reformation' entered the historical lexicon only during the British civil wars of the 1640s. Anglican apologists coined this term to defend the Church of England against proponents of the Scottish Reformation, an event that contemporaries singled out for its violence and illegality. Using their neologism to denote select events from the mid-Tudor era, Anglicans crafted a historical narrative that enabled them to present a pristine vision of the English past, one that endeavoured to preserve amidst civil war, regicide, and political oppression. With the restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England in 1660, apologetic narrative became historiographical habit and, eventually, historical certainty.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1: 'In Head and in Members': Discourses of Reformation, c. 1414-1563 2: Dangerous Positions: Debating Reformation, 1553-1603 3: 'That Damned Dialogue': The Reformations of Jacobean Britain, 1603-1625 4: 'This Present Reformation in England': From Civil Wars to Apologetic Consensus, 1625-1660 5: Reformed Catholics, True Protestants: Tudor Religious History in Restoration England, 1660-1685 Conclusion

About the Author :
Benjamin M. Guyer is a lecturer at the University of Tennessee at Martin. He has also taught at the University of Florida, the University of Kansas, and Santa Fe College. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is a council member of the Sixteenth Century Society and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Anglican and Episcopal History.

Review :
A smashingly successful analysis. Strikingly original. How the English Reformation was Named makes a convincing case for the partisan nature of the term English Reformation and develops our understanding of how the naming of things is never a neutral process. One of the strengths of Guyer's book is that it uses language as a means of drawing together the history of religious change in England and Scotland, setting an example that might be taken up more widely ... in exploring the Reformation as a linguistic transformation, Guyer has produced a rich, interesting, and provocative book. If a book's contribution is measured by the intensity of conversation it can raise, or the careful and expansive use of sources that are not often used in the same book, not to mention the breathtaking coverage of the period that many specialists fear to tread, Guyer's first book is an absolute success. A thought-provoking first book which will reignite conversations about the relationship between language and history. Guyer's book is a welcome reminder to historians to reflect upon the terms we use, and to take seriously the ways our historical subjects thought and wrote about themselves. A significant contribution to the field of Reformation studies and its evolving historiography. Scholars interested in these conversations of early modernreligion in Britain and its historiographies will benefit not only from Guyer's meticulous research but also from his suggestions of new approaches to the Reformation(s) that would bring a deeper understanding to these religious developments.