Since Patrick Collinson’s 1982 Religion of Protestants historians have tended to see the Jacobean church as witnessing the apogee of the ‘Reformed conformist’ tradition, before it was swamped by the Laudianism of the 1630s and the puritan counter-reaction which spelt the doom of the middle ground that Reformed conformist bishops had occupied. They were left with nowhere to go (it tends to be assumed) except to a royalism that was increasingly dominated by hardline conformists and Arminians. The study of ‘Reformed’ or ‘Calvinist’ conformity in England thus tends to disappear for the period 1640-1660. But this chapter suggests instead that in many ways the 1640s and 1650s were in fact the vital moment when ‘Reformed conformity’ played a key role in religious politics and doctrinal debates. Beginning with the ‘abortive reformation’ of 1640-41 and the newly enhanced political role that anti-Laudian episcopalians played in the Williams Committee and elsewhere in trying to facilitate a negotiated settlement with puritan critics, the chapter notes some of the tensions and ambiguities in the balance between the ‘Reformed’ and ‘conformist’ aspects of these divines as the political situation deteriorated. But it also highlights how many of the precepts and tropes of ‘Reformed conformity’ tended to dominate the official royalist negotiating position in the 1640s, while the 1650s and early 1660s were times when there was a veritable cult of figures such as James Ussher, Ralph Brownrigg, and John Prideaux among episcopalians and Presbyterians alike, for a variety of motives.

Situated in a working-class, enclaved British Asian neighbourhood in a fictional English town named Dasht-e-Tanhaii, Nadeem Aslam's 2004 novel Maps for Lost Lovers revolves around the 'honour killing' of a pair of lovers, exploring both the events that led to the crime and its repercussions for the families involved. With its focus on an immigrant Muslim family and written using some of the conventions of the social realist novel, it bears comparison with Brick Lane. Aslam's portrayal of a segregated Muslim community riven by honour crime is precariously poised on a faultline of twenty-first-century British multiculturalism. This chapter considers the novel's negotiation of the relationship between creative freedom and the sacred before exploring the extent to which it can be read as a critical artistic intervention in discourses surrounding honour crime and, more broadly, British Muslims and multiculturalism.

In September 1522, Martin Luther published his German translation of the New Testament. Each of the four Gospels opened with a woodcut initial depicting its apostle seated with a codex. Each apostle was identified by his symbol; otherwise, Matthew, Mark (lion), and Luke (ox) might have been taken for humanists in their studies, small cramped spaces with narrow windows. Lucas Cranach depicted Matthew (Figure 28), Mark, and Luke each holding a stylus, seated at a desk writing in the codex; Matthew and Mark are writing at the bottom of the right-hand page of a codex. John (Figure 29) was significantly different: seated not at a desk, not in a study, but outdoors in a landscape framed by a medieval town and mountains. He, too, held a stylus, but on a page already lined past his hand, a specific place in what was so visibly a complete text. Alone among the four, John was depicted in apostolic robes.