The culmination of cultural and literary achievements in the final decade of Elizabeth I's reign coincided with some of Tudor England's worst years economically which were exacerbated by plague, successive harvest failure, and belligerence at home and abroad. This critical edition of the scribal publication 'Reformed Government' c. 1594 provides a unique point of entry into the 1590s. Recovering a pivotal moment in the history of puritan radicalism, it represents the most extensive reformed response to the onslaught of anti-puritan literature in the late sixteenth century, including Richard Hooker's iLaws of Ecclesiastical Polity r. In addition to mounting an epistemological and ecclesiastical defence of reformed presbyterian government, it sheds light on new appropriations of Renaissance ideas about historical contingency, and introduces a dynamic reading of Christian antiquity.
The edition also provides a wider context for later developments in the seventeenth century. Exploiting the instability of the period, the 'Reformed Government' seized the opportunity to re-imagine society and even anticipated the idea of altering civil and religious constitutions which theorists later developed in Revolutionary Britain. By expanding and reconfiguring the relationship between civil and ecclesiastical government, it imaginatively stretched the implications of historical change to entertain new possibilities. This recovery of an alternative vision of a reformed society in the late sixteenth century offers an alternative model for reading church history. Based on maximal visions and proposals of reform, the 'Reformed Government' is essential reading for the study of ecclesiastical tradition alongside confessional documents and summative statements.
Polly Ha, Associate Professor of the History of Christianity, Duke Divinity School, USA
bPolly Ha/b is Associate Professor of the History of Christianity at Duke Divinity School, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She is the author of
English Presbyterianism, 1590-1640 (Stanford University Press, 2011), chief editor of
The Puritans on Independence (Oxford University Press, 2017), and co-editor of
The Reception of Continental Reformation in Britain (Oxford University Press, 2011). She formerly taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Southern California, and East Anglia, and has held Research Fellowships at the British Academy, The University of Cambridge, the American Antiquarian Society, The Huntington Library, and the Long Room Hub at Trinity College Dublin.
bJonathan D. Moore/b holds a PhD in historical theology and ecclesiastical history from the University of Cambridge and is the author of
English Hypothetical Universalism (Eerdmans, 2007) and assistant editor of
The Puritans on Independence (Oxford University Press). He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow of the University of East Anglia, and an Adjunct Lecturer & Research Associate at Union Theological College, Belfast.
bEdda Frankot/b is Associate Professor at Nord University in Norway. She has been involved in several editing projects including the 1641 Depositions project (1641.tcd.ie) and Aberdeen Registers Online. She is the author of
Medieval Maritime Law in Urban Northern Europe (EUP, 2012) and
Banishment in the Late Medieval Eastern Netherlands (Palgrave Pivot, 2021), assistant editor of
The Puritans on Independence (Oxford University Press, 2017), and co-editor of
Cultures of Law in Urban Northern Europe: Scotland and its Neighbours, c. 1350- c. 1650 (Routledge, 2020).
