Current revisionist interpretations of the history of the Reformation in England and Ireland provide an intriguing paradox. In England the received wisdom, as variously purveyed in the magisterial studies of A. G. Dickens and G. R. Elton, represents the reform movement as triumphing under the Tudors. In latter years, however, the long established consensus has been shattered by means of a revisionist enterprise, heralded in the work of localist historians such as Margaret Bowker but mainly recently under the aegis of Christopher Haigh. This has challenged the notion of a decadent late medieval church heading for extinction and, conversely, has demonstrated the widespread survival of the ritualistic, quasi-magical elements of late medieval religion throughout the sixteenth century, despite the general acquiescence in the ‘religion by law established’ – a thesis now massively corroborated in both respects by Eamon Duffy's authoritative study of the religious culture of the period. The effect of the revisionist challenge, therefore, has been to throw serious doubt upon the impact of the Reformation on English religion in the sixteenth century whether from ‘above’ (Elton) or ‘below’ (Dickens). In contrast the conventional wisdom which held that the attempt to convert the Irish to the Reformation failed in the sixteenth century has also been challenged. Nicholas Canny has boldly asserted that the conventional approach which takes the failure for granted and seeks simply to explain it is begging the real issue. It assumes what requires to be demonstrated, namely that the religious struggle between the Reformation and the Counter Reformation was fought to a conclusion in sixteenth-century Ireland.

As the multinational states of Eastern Europe crumble, and the longer established ones to the west continue to be vulnerable to militant agitation for secession on the part of minority nationalities comprehended within them, the historic stability of the United Kingdom begins to seem something of a phenomenon. By reason of the particular perspective which it adopts – on which see the Introduction – the collection of essays presented here is offered in the belief that it sheds light upon the secret of the remarkable stability of the British multinational conglomerate. At the same time it also points up the fragility of the Union, not least in the form of its historic and ongoing Irish problem. Finally in terms of a contribution to the ‘new subject’ of British history it aims to fill a niche not hitherto adequately provided for so far as the early modern period is concerned – on which also see the Introduction. In that respect it may perhaps be claimed that with its appearance the pioneering phase in the development of the new subject has been brought to completion at least so far as concerns the early modern period.

Some debts remain to be gratefully acknowledged. First the editors wish to thank the young historians who comprise their co-contributors. Their ready response to the invitation to join the project and their cooperation at all stages has been a continuing source of encouragement to the editors in overcoming unanticipated difficulties.

British history as a ‘new subject’ may be said to have been launched by John Pocock in a series of path-breaking studies charting the conceptual contours that define its unique territory which appeared over the two decades from 1974. So far as concerns the chronological span to which the present volume is devoted, the early modern period, the subject was ‘brought down to earth’, to adopt the phrase of Rees Davies, the distinguished practitioner of the genre for an earlier period, in the mid nineteen nineties. In the last few years a series of studies has appeared in print firmly grounded in documentary sources which explore the possibility of a political history of the Atlantic Archipelago as a coherent entity, not just as the sum of its national constituents, much less as a history of England with occasional glances towards the Celtic fringes as they intruded themselves into domestic politics. The agenda which emerged from these pioneering explorations largely relates to the implications of political developments on the two islands over the period for an emergent British state. One item they address is the extent to which the constitutional unions between England and Scotland in 1707, and between the United Kingdom thus constituted and Ireland in 1800, were pre-conditioned by moves towards greater integration between the relevant polities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Renaissance eloquence: rhetoric and philosophy

Skirting the problematical subject of the reception of Renaissance humanism outside Italy (Skinner 1978, 1, ch. 7) this chapter addresses itself directly to humanism as an established phenomenon north of the Alps. Chronologically it spans what may be described as northern humanism's epic phase: the period from roughly the last decade of the fifteenth century when, with the writing of such scholars as Robert Gaguin in France, Conrad Celtis in Germany, and John Colet in England, humanist discourse in the north acquired a native voice, down to the late 1530s when, with the death of the generation of Erasmus and Budé, and the burgeoning of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, northern humanism lost its discrete character as a cultural force – succumbing to the role of handmaiden in the service of a variety of other cultural forces. The specific concern of the chapter is to explore the intellectual and ideological content of the political literature generated by northern humanism in this epic phase. Thus, having skirted a historigraphical Scylla, it will be necessary to engage with a Charybdis.

Charybdis looms in the form of a well-established orthodoxy which denies Renaissance humanism any specific philosophical content. It does so by defining humanism in exclusively literary and educational terms, as a movement devoted to the cultivation of bonae literae and the studia humanitatis. Accordingly, it is argued, the involvement of humanists with the larger questions of religion, morality, and politics must be distinguished from their proper role as humanists.