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The Long Dissolution

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James G. Clark, The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2021, pp. x + 689, £ 29.00. ISBN: 978-0-300-11572-7. £75.00; Harriet Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. xvi, 285, £75.00. ISBN: 978-316-51640-9

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2023

Susan Wabuda
Susan Wabuda*
Affiliation:
Fordham University. Email: wabuda@fordham.edu
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British Catholic History , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , May 2023 , pp. 347 - 358
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© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Trustees of the Catholic Record Society

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References

1 The third volume of David Knowles’s The Religious Orders in England: The Tudor Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959) was reprinted as Bare Ruined Choirs: The Dissolution of the English Monasteries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). See also Eamon Duffy, ‘The Conservative Voice in the English Reformation’ and ‘Bare Ruin’d Choirs: Remembering Catholicism in Shakespeare’s England’ in Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 211-54.

2 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992).

3 J. T. Rhodes, ‘Syon Abbey and its Religious Publications in the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), 11-25.

4 See the estimates given in Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 44.

5 In addition to chapter 7 of The Stripping of the Altars, see Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers 1240-1570 (New Haven and London; Yale University Press, 2006), especially 4-5.

6 As a recent contribution to a huge literature, see Eamon Duffy, ‘Cathedral Pilgrimage: The Late Middle Ages’, in A People’s Tragedy: Studies in Reformation (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 7-30.

7 Still valuable for its annotated listings is David Knowles and R. Neville Hadcock’s Medieval Religious Houses England and Wales (London: Longman, 1971). See also Clark, Dissolution, 3; Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 1, 15

8 For one notable example of a wealthy house, see The Letter Book of Robert Joseph Monk-scholar of Evesham and Gloucester College, Oxford 1530-3, eds. Hugh Aveling and W. A. Pantin, Oxford Historical Society, ns, vol. 19 (1967).

9 Peter Gwyn, The King’s Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (London, 1990), 342-4, 349-50; Susan Wabuda, ‘Cardinal Wolsey and Cambridge’, British Catholic History, vol. 32 (2015), 280-292. See also Clark’s perceptive comments, Dissolution, 179-86.

10 See Lorna Jane Abray, The People’s Reformation: Magistrates, Clergy and Commons in Strasbourg, 1500-1598 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985); Martin Greschat, Martin Bucer: a Reformer and His Times, trans. Stephen E. Buckwalter (London, 2004), 52-4, 61-64].

11 The Act of Supremacy: 26 Henry VIII, c. 1; Stanford Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament, 1529-1536 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 64-73; Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers: a History of the English Reformation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), 203-43.

12 Howard Leithead, ‘Cromwell, Thomas, earl of Essex (b. in or before 1485, d. 1540), royal minister.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 Sep. 2004; Accessed 16 Dec. 2022. https://www-oxforddnb-com.avoserv2.library.fordham.edu/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-6769; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell: a Life (London: Allen Lane, 2018), 54-74.

13 F. D. Logan, ‘Thomas Cromwell and the Vicegerency in Spirituals’, English Historical Review,103 (1988), 658-67.

14 The Act of Supremacy: 26 Henry VIII, c. 1; Stanford Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament, 1529-1536 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 64-73; G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: the Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Peter Marshall, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), 203-43.

15 Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535-1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) and the same author’s Michelangelo and the English Martyrs (London: Routledge, 2016).

16 27 Hen. VIII, c. 28; Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 4.

17 Clark, Dissolution, 220, 294, 354; Anne Dillon, ‘John Forest and Derfel Gadarn: a double execution’, Recusant History [now British Catholic History], 28 (2006), 1-21; Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 32-3; MacCulloch, Cromwell, 459-65; Peter Marshall, ‘Papist as Heretic: the Burning of John Forest’, The Historical Journal, 41 (1998), 351-74; and for the friars in general, Susan Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 107-146.

18 Clark notes that a few suppressions of smaller houses on the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands occurred in summer 1540, Dissolution, 1-3, 9-10; Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 4, 39.

19 Clark, Dissolution, 379-81. A letter to Cromwell by the Italian engineer, Giovanni Portinari is reproduced as fig. 24. For background, see also MacCulloch, Cromwell, 431-441.

20 Clark, Dissolution, 155, 157, 187. For her considerable patronage, see also Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

21 Susan Wabuda, ‘Receiving the King: Henry VIII at Cambridge’, in Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance, eds. Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 163-178, especially 164-8.

22 Clark, Dissolution, quotations at 151-2.

23 Clark, Dissolution, 188. Duffy notes that the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury drew over 8000 pilgrims in 1530s, ‘Cathedral Pilgrimage’, 26-7.

24 Clark, Dissolution, 205; Susan Wabuda, Thomas Cranmer (London: Routledge, 2017), 16-17, 202.

25 Clark, Dissolution, 166.

26 Clark, Dissolution, 204.

27 Clark, Dissolution, 160.

28 Clark, Dissolution, 18-19.

29 Clark, Dissolution, 19.

30 G. W. Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), and the same author’s ‘Reflecting on the King’s Reformation’, in Henry VIII and the Court, 9-26, quotations at 14 and 23. Cf. Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

31 E. A. Jones and Alexandra Walsham, eds., Syon Abbey and its Books: Reading, Writing, and Religion, c. 1400-1700 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2010).

32 Clark, Dissolution, 420.

33 Clark, Dissolution, 1, 247.

34 Paul Ayris, ‘Thomas Cranmer and the Metropolitical Visitation of Canterbury Province 1533-1535’, in From Cranmer to Davidson: a Church of England Miscellany, ed. S. Taylor, Church of England Record Society, 7 (1999), 1-46; M. E. James, ‘Obedience and Dissent in Henrician England: the Lincolnshire Rebellion 1536’, Past and Present, 48 (1970), 1-78; Jonathan Michael Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Marshall, Heretics and Believers, 244-53; Wabuda, Cranmer, 85-6.

35 Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, quotations at 30, 32.

36 Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 4-7, 25-75, 94, 119-120, quotations at 15. For the longue durée of the Reformation, see Nicholas Tyacke, ed., England’s Long Reformation, 1500-1800 (London: Routledge, 1998) and John Bossy’s The English Catholic Community 1570-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).

37 Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 48.

38 Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 6-7, quotations at 17, 49.

39 Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 88-95.

40 Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 54.

41 Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 15, 18.

42 Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 39.

43 Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 56. See also Ethan H. Shagan, ‘Selling the sacred: Reformation and dissolution at the Abbey of Hailes’, in Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 162-196.

44 Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 127-142. See also Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

45 Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 107, 135, 188.

46 Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 142-58. See also Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape.

47 Lyon, Memory and the Dissolution, 211.

48 ‘William Latymer’s Cronickille of Anne Bulleyne’ ed. Maria Dowling, in Camden Miscellany XXX, Camden Fourth Series, 39 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1990), 23-65, quotations (in modernized spellings) at 59, 64. Eric Ives, ‘Anne Boleyn on Trial Again’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 62 (2011), 763-77. See also the same author’s The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, ‘the most happy’, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation, 129-135.