Quiet Reformation: Magistrates and the Emergence of Protestantism in Tudor Norwich

By examining the unusual course of religious change in Tudor Norwich, this book significantly revises the study of both the Reformation and the history of religious toleration in England. It shows that though Norwich experienced a genuine and far-reaching reformation in the sixteenth century, even becoming a hub of Puritan activity in the Elizabethan era, it did so without the breakdown of community, habitual intolerance, and widespread persecution that has been the focus of recent scholarly studies of the period. In showing that conflict and persecution were not inescapable consequences of religious change in the sixteenth century, this book challenges the received assumption of historians about the implacability of religious conflict in Reformation England. It conclusively shows that religious coexistence was possible, and in Norwich, exercised for most of the Tudor period, over a full century before most historians have commonly traced its emergence.