Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations, 1558-1630

Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations, 1558-1630 revisits what used to be regarded as an entirely 'mainstream' topic in the historiography of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries - namely, the link between royal dynastic politics and the outcome of the process usually
referred to as 'the Reformation'. As everyone knows, the principal mode of transacting so much of what constituted public political activity in the early modern period, and especially of securing something like political obedience if not exactly stability, was through the often distinctly un-modern
management of the crown's dynastic rights, via the line of royal succession and in particular through matching into other royal and princely families. Dynastically, the states of Europe resembled a vast sexual chess board on which the trick was to preserve, advance, and then match (to advantage)
one's own most powerful pieces. This process and practice were, obviously, not unique to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the changes in religion generated by the discontents of western Christendom in the Reformation period made dynastic politics ideologically fraught in a way which had
not been the case previously, in that certain modes of religious thought were now taken to reflect on, critique, and hinder this mode of exercising monarchical authority, sometimes even to the extent of defining who had the right to be king or queen.


Author: Michael Questier
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 03/31/2019
Pages: 528
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.90lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.00w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9780198826330

About the Author

Michael Questier, Senior Research Fellow, University of Vanderbilt, Nashville, TN

Michael Questier recently left East London to take up a senior research fellowship in the department of history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He also holds an honorary chair in the Centre for Catholic Studies at the University of Durham.