"The Elizabethan settlement, and the Church of England that emerged from it, was in part a theological reformation, an institutional reformation, a high political reformation. It was a reformation that changed history, that birthed an Anglican communion, that would eventually launch new wars, new language, even a new national identity. But it was, above all, a peoples reformation, that not only shaped everyday lives but was profoundly shaped by them in turn. It is their stories that this book seeks to understand, and it is their stories that it tells. A Peoples Reformation provides a fundamental reinterpretation of the English Reformation and the roots of the Church of England. Drawing on archival material from across the United States and Britain, it examines the growing influence of state authority and the slow building of a robust state church from the bottom up in post-Reformation England. The Church of England was a fragile endeavour launched in a fractured country, one where political and religious loyalties were often at odds. In the face of such dissent, the Elizabethan state relied on the cooperation of everyday Englishmen and women to implement its reforms; in doing so, it also sought new powers to monitor and control their behaviour and beliefs.

The foundations of the Church of England and the newly-empowered modern English state were thus twinned, and they were profoundly shaped by the participation of the commons. A Peoples Reformation explores this world not from Parliament or the pulpit but from the pews, reimagining the lived experience and fierce negotiation of both church and state in the parishes of Elizabethan England. It places the people of England at the heart of not just the local or cultural but the political story of the Reformation and its remarkable, transformative effect on the world."--.