Reformation religious identities and the fluidities of confessional allegiance: the world according to Sir William Monson
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: At some point in the late 1620s or early 1630s, the long-serving naval officer, Sir William Monson, took the time to set down his thoughts about recent history, particularly of the Reformation in the English Church, the success (or lack of it) of the so-called Protestant cause, and of what appeared to him to be a slew of corruption which he associated with an unchecked tendency to puritanism. However, Monson was not just any run-of-the-mill Church-of-England conformist. As his, admittedly, often bizarre and even rambling text made clear, he had internalised some of the sharpest edges of what one might term the ‘Catholic’ account of the post-Reformation. But despite his family’s reputation for having such tendencies, he, it seems, never went into separation. It is, therefore, worth revisiting his words to see how contemporaries in the early seventeenth century could think about their political and religious identity, and how they applied their thoughts in this respect to the political situations in which they found themselves.
Source: The Seventeenth Century
Author: Michael Questier
Institution: Durham University
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4406679055