Chapter 8 - Exchanging Beliefs: The Anti-Enlightenment. From Humanities to Technologies

Summary

One of the major shifts that underlay Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries was his validation of the Protestant Reformation and the exchange of belief systems that it involved. The most important modern studies of this process vary in their interpretations. David Knowles, whose The Religious Orders in England was the standard for decades, saw “the great enterprise of the suppression of the monasteries” as a premeditated plan drawn up for the king by Thomas Cromwell.¹ More recently, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Thomas Cromwell traced a series of unplanned events and unforeseen personal motives culminating in essentially the same result. On the other hand, in his The Stripping of the Altars Eamon Duffy concentrated on the radical change in belief and practice during, and in the wake of, the Dissolution. His masterwork is as detailed as MacCulloch’s but in a far different way. Where MacCulloch saw the contingent elements of causality, Duffy saw the random, but often planned, results of the same processes. Taken together, however, all three masterworks point in the same direction and afford us valuable insights into changes of belief systems. Over the course of the half century that they studied, England went from a deeply Catholic country, where medieval beliefs and practices permeated every aspect of life, to a fundamentally Protestant one, in which the religious goals of the Reformers and their new practices took the place of the old dispensation. Change was often swift and helped by many willing hands. It was often haphazard, and the result of many differing agendas. And it was often slow, uncertain, stalled, reversed, and long fought, as many local centers resisted passively, actively fought back, and ultimately required persuasion, incentives, and compulsion to change completely.