Women and Religion in England 1500-1720; & Community and Clergy

Social and religious studies from the 16th century

Claire Cross | Published in 28 Feb 1994
  • Women and Religion in England 1500-1720
    Patricia Crawford (Routledge, 1993, x + 286 pp.)
  • Community and Clergy: Bristol and the Reformation c. 1530 - c. 1570
    Martha C. Skeeters (Clarendon Press, 1993, x + 319 pp.)

Religion provides the link between these two very dissimilar books on early modern England, the one surveying the religious experience of English women over two centuries, the other investigating the affect of the Reformation changes upon the clergy of Bristol within a single generation.

Patricia Crawford has set herself the ambitious task of assessing English women's apprehensions of God in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. English women, she maintains, 'could both accept beliefs about their inferiority and transcend them. They were neither passive nor oppressed victims, but rather human agents, making their history within a social structure which was not of their making.'

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