Reformation without end

Religion, politics and the past in post-revolutionary England

Reformation without end radically reinterprets the English Reformation. No one in eighteenth-century England thought that they lived during ‘the Enlightenment’. Instead, they thought that they still faced the religious, intellectual and political problems unleashed by the Reformation, which began in the sixteenth century. They faced those problems, though, in the aftermath of two bloody seventeenth-century political and religious revolutions. This book is about the ways that the eighteenth-century English debated the causes and consequences of those seventeenth-century revolutions and the thing which they thought had caused them, the Reformation. Reformation without end draws on a wide array of manuscript sources to show how authors crafted and pitched their works.