THE REFORMATION OF THE GENERATIONS: YOUTH, AGE AND RELIGIOUS CHANGE IN ENGLAND, c. 1500–1700

This exploratory essay adopts the life-cycle as a tool with which to investigate religious change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines how inherited tropes about youth and age were deployed and the ways in which the notion of generational strife was invoked at various stages of England's long Reformation. These provide insight into how contemporaries understood and experienced the theological and cultural upheavals of the era and the process by which Protestantism ‘aged’ as it progressed beyond its unruly protest phase and became institutionalised as the official faith.