The Reformation in English Towns, 1500-1640 (Themes in Focus)

The concern of this collection of essays is to redress two balances at once: to tell the story of what the Reformation did for the towns of England, and of what the towns did for the Reformation. Seven case studies of the fortunes of the Reformation in the North, the West Midlands, the Thames Valley, and the East are followed by four thematic studies. These studies investigate the financial and institutional entrails of the Reformation changes as they redistributed endowments and resources with implications for urban parishes, urban clergy and the townsmen and their ruling elites. The last two essays bring us to some of the cultural reverberations of religious change.