This book - Centro de Estudos Anglicanos

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY 337ormations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993),questions the notion that the triumph of Protestantism was inevitable or that the transformationof the church took place instantaneously as the result of statecraft. Another bookthat illuminates the complexity of the process of religious change in England is J. J. Scarisbrick,The Reformation of the English People (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). The enduringstrength of medieval Catholic piety throughout the Tudor period is ably demonstrated,moreover, in Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England,1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). While it is important to understandthe emphasis that historians such as Scarisbrick and Duffy place on the continuity betweenEnglish religion before and after 1534, the work of Patrick Collinson probes anothersegment of the English church that believed the initial stages of the Reformation were notradical enough. Collinson’s book, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Oxford: Clarendon,1967), provides the classic account of the rise of Puritanism as a movement of militantreform within the Church of England. As Collinson also stresses in The Birthpangs ofProtestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries(New York: St. Martin’s, 1988), “Protestant” England did not begin with Henry VIIIbut only emerged 40 years later during the reign of Elizabeth I.THE COLONIAL ERAReaders seeking an insightful, well-written, and broad-based introduction to the settlementof Europeans in North America would be wise to begin with Alan Taylor, AmericanColonies (New York: Viking, 2001). Taylor provides an excellent overview of the historyof pre-revolutionary America, giving special attention to the international and multiculturalimplications of colonization. Another important work that focuses on the migration ofEuropean cultures to North America is David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four BritishFolkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Fischer’s book is particularlyuseful because of the ways in which he weaves religious practices and beliefsinto the social history of seventeenth-century Britain and America. Jon Butler, Awash ina Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1990), focuses on the movement of European institutions and religious ideas, both informaland formal, to the New World and the tremendous spiritual pluralism that resulted. Butleralso gives considerable attention to the often deleterious role of the Church of Englandand its clergy in colonial America. A recent book that concentrates on the establishmentof Anglicanism in England’s first permanent American colony is Edward L. Bond, DamnedSouls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Macon, Ga.: MercerUniversity Press, 2000). Analyzing the piety of the colonists as well as the institutionalaspects of their faith, Bond demonstrates how Virginia Anglicans were able to create areligious identity distinct from that of their mother country by the end of the seventeenthcentury.Although the most comprehensive history of Anglican developments in eighteenthcenturyAmerica remains John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in NorthAmerica (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984), there are a number of other worksthat offer information about particular geographical areas and colonies. John K. Nelson,A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), for example, is a masterlystudy of everyday religious experience in colonial Virginia. Although historians have