Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations, 1558-1630 revisits what used to be regarded as an entirely 'mainstream' topic in the historiography of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries - namely, the link between royal dynastic politics and the outcome of the process usually referred to as 'the Reformation'. As everyone knows, the principal mode of transacting so much of what constituted public political activity in the early modern period, and especially of securing something like political obedience if not exactly stability, was through the often distinctly un-modern management of the crown's dynastic rights, via the line of royal succession and in particular through matching into other royal and princely families. Dynastically, the states of Europe resembled a vast sexual chess board on which the trick was to preserve, advance, and then match (to advantage) one's own most powerful pieces. This process and practice were, obviously, not unique to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the changes in religion generated by the discontents of western Christendom in the Reformation period made dynastic politics ideologically fraught in a way which had not been the case previously, in that certain modes of religious thought were now taken to reflect on, critique, and hinder this mode of exercising monarchical authority, sometimes even to the extent of defining who had the right to be king or queen.
Michael Questier recently left East London to take up a senior research fellowship in the department of history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He also holds an honorary chair in the Centre for Catholic Studies at the University of Durham.
Title: Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations, 1558-1630
Author: Questier, Michael
ISBN: 9780198826330
Binding:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication Date: 2019-01-31
Number of Pages: 518
Weight: 0.9003 kg
Pugnacious, peppery and lively, Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations, 1558-1630 succeeds in reintroducing and reintegrating Catholic voices into the 'mainstream' narrative, Questier railing against the historiographical tendency to view Protestantism as the consensus option. As far as contemporaries were concerned, religion and politics were up for grabs; there was nothing guaranteed about Protestant success. * James E. Kelly, Journal of Ecclesiastical History *
This book offers a nuanced take on the place of religion in the world of political history, recognising that there was no single Catholic political position in this period, but rather a variety of views that changed in responseto political developments. ... I would certainly recommend this book to readers who want to read about the lesser-known Catholic perspective on well-known events in Elizabethan and Jacobean history. * Joseph Massey, Royal Studies Journal *
Uncovering this Catholic strand at the center of British politics has been a major part of Questier's work ... Questier places the loyalist English Catholic laity in a central, if not a crucial, role in British dynastic and religious policy, rescuing them from both the rhetoric of their Protestant opponents and from the condescension of those Catholic historians who would wish for a more positively Roman expression of their faith. This is an important contribution of this deeply researched and densely argued book. * W. J. Sheils, Journal of British Studies *
Questier emphasizes that this is not counter-factual history, but alternative histories can be felt hovering in the background. What if Elizabeth I had been deposed and replaced by Mary Queen of Scots? What if the Armada or the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded? Questier delineates a world in which those things remained possibilities. ... by incorporating the ideological fissures and fractures , Michael Questier has supplied us with a valuable sense of how contested, divisive and rebarbative the early modern political process remained. * Lucy Wooding, Time Literary Supplement *
