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Religious Life in Tudor and Stuart England, c.1560-1700

Module description

In Tudor and Stuart England, religion was an unavoidable part of human life and it influenced and provided a framework for every aspect of society. Alongside the crown, it was a chief source of authority, and it sought to regulate and control the behavior of the English people. On this module we examine a wide variety of primary sources in order to explore this relationship between the English Church and the English people. You will learn what sources historians have used to explore a range of questions, such as: how did the Church get their message across? What exactly did the parish church look like, and how did it feel to worship there? Did the people take on board what they heard? What exactly did they believe? When people misbehaved what happened? Did anyone question religious authority? Is it possible to get inside the head of an early modern parishioner? Focusing on primary sources that illuminate early modern religious cultures will provide a genuine insight into the way that past societies understood their lives, and themselves.

Module aims - intentions of the module

The aim of this module is to introduce you to the various types of sources available to the historian of early modern religion, society and culture. You will compare and analyse different types (genres) of source, assessing the difficulties and advantages of using them to understand religious life in the past. You will learn about the complex nature of Protestant cultures by looking at a range of archival material such as published texts, prayer books, parish financial accounts, tombs and mortuary culture, diaries and court records. You will develop your presentation, discussion, independent research and writing skills, and you will also gain an understanding of how primary sources can be used to study early modern society.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Understand and assess attitudes towards the Church and religion in early modern England
• 2. Work critically with a diverse range of historical sources relating to Tudor and Stuart religious life
• 3. Understand the purposes for which different contemporary sources were produced, and analyse and evaluate their usefulness for the study of early modern cultures more broadly

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 4. Identify the problems of using historical sources, e.g. utility, limitations, etc., and compare the validity of different types of sources
• 5. Present work orally, respond to questions orally, and think quickly of questions to ask other students

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 6. Conduct independent study and group work, including the presentation of material for group discussion
• 7. Digest, select and organise material to produce, to a deadline, a coherent and cogent argument, developed through the mode of assessment
• 8. Work with others in a team and to interact effectively with the tutor and the wider group
• 9. Write to a very tight word-length

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:

• Skills
  • Religion in the early modern world
  • Analysis: Print, Orality and Literacy
  • Skills workshop (referencing, formatting, source analysis, presentations)
• • Sources: The Church
  • How to worship god (Book of Common Prayer, special form of prayer)
  • Teaching the people to believe (devotional printed text)
  • What were parish churches like? (churchwarden account)
• • Sources: The People
  • What did the people believe? (cheap print - pamphlet)
  • What did individuals believe? (diary)
  • What about people who couldn’t read? (visual & material culture)
  • How did people behave? (church court records)

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

Indicative reading:

• Aston, A., England’s Iconoclasts: Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988)
• Cambers, A., Godly reading: Print, manuscript and Puritanism in England (2011).
• Crick, Julia and Walsham, Alexandra (eds), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300-1700 (Cambridge, 2003).
• Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars (Cambridge, 1991).
• Fox, A., Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700 (2000)
• Green, Ian, Print and Protestantism in early modern England (Oxford, 2000).
• Haigh, Christopher, The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (2007).
• Hamling, T., Decorating the ‘godly’ household: religious art in post-reformation Britain (Yale, 2010).
• Hunt, Arnold, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences (2010).
• Llewellyn, N., The Art of Death: Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual (1991).
• Marshall, Peter (ed.), The Impact of the English Reformation (London, 1997).
• Mears, N., and Ryrie, A., Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (2013).
• Nilsson Stutz, Liv, and Tarlow, Sarah (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial (Oxford, 2013).
• Raymond, Joad, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003)
• Ryrie, Alec, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford, 2013)
• Sangha, Laura and Willis, Jonathan (eds), Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources (London, 2016).
• Sherlock, Peter, Monuments and memory in early modern England (Aldershot, 2008).
• Watt, Tessa, Cheap Print and Popular Piety (Cambridge, 1991).

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• Early English Books Online
• English Broadside Ballads Archive
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• Internet Archive
• Lexicons of Early Modern English.

Key words search

Religion, parish, Church, Tudor, Stuart, early modern, sources, skills