The Guitar in Tudor England: A Social and Musical History.
Christopher Page. Musical Performance and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xx + 248 pp. $99.99.
In recent years, a number of works devoted solely or partly to martyrdom in early modern England – most notably Brad Gregory's seminal Salvation at stake and Anne Dillon's The construction of martyrdom in the English Catholic community – have helped to bring the study of this topic from the margins of scholarship into the academic mainstream. Two of the three works discussed here further develop this recent research by analysing representations of martyrdom in English martyrologies; the third work, Sarah Covington's survey on religious persecution in early modern England, is gravely impaired by its almost complete disregard of the complexities present in the narrative sources on martyrs and their persecutors.
Religious life and English culture in the Reformation. By Marjo Kaartinen. Pp. vii+210. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. £45. ISBN 0 333 96924 3Preaching during the English Reformation. By Susan Wabuda. Pp. xx+203 incl. 15 figs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. £40. ISBN 0 521 45395 XAuthority and consent in Tudor England. Essays presented to C. S. L. Davies. Edited by G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn. Pp. x+301. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2002. £47.50. ISBN 0 7546 0665 1Keywords and concepts provide important organising principles when historians attempt to make sense of the past. Some keywords are virtual constants of historical discourse, such as ‘continuity’ and ‘change’, although the relative emphasis that historians place on them can fluctuate with circumstances and fashion. Other terms come and go. The study of the English Reformation is no exception to the ebb and flow of historical keywords. For much of the 1960s, 1970s and the early 1980s, ‘popular reformation’ was a central concept of interpretation and research. But no more. Thanks to the historical fashion which has been styled ‘revisionism’, ‘popular reformation’ in early sixteenth-century England at least is widely considered to be an oxymoron. Consequent on the work of A. G. Dickens, ‘official’ or ‘state-sponsored reformation’ went into an eclipse but with the advent of revisionism it has been both revived as well as revised.
