Religious Thought, Political Practice (1200-1600)

A two-day conference focused on the interface between religious ideas and political practice
supported by the George Macaulay Trevelyan Fund, the Royal Historical Society,
the Centre for History and Economics and Manchester Metropolitan University

Pembroke College, Cambridge 20-21 April 2006

Conference report »

Specialists in a variety of disciplines are increasingly aware of the social dimension of both politics and religion. Politics can now mean the experience of governance in a peasant community or gentry network as well as the high politics of court or parliament. Religion can mean sophisticated theology or popular moral and spiritual beliefs. These new perspectives have led to questions in common:

Can religious ideas genuinely shape the aims of political actors, or are they always subordinate to political aims or socio-economic pressures? How does religious belief allow the formation of bonds and networks with an ultimately political significance? How do religious modes of thought provide tools for participants in popular revolt?

Contributors included:

John Arnold, Birkbeck College, London
Peter Biller, University of York
Mishtooni Bose, Christ Church, Oxford
James Clark, University of Bristol
Elizabeth Evenden, Newnham College, Cambridge
Natalie Mears, University of Durham
Michael Questier, Queen Mary, London
John Watts, Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Programme

Thursday, 20 April

2pm
Welcome

2:30pm
John Arnold, ‘Religion and popular politics in the middle ages’

3:15pm            
Natalie Mears, ‘“All the news that’s fit to preach”: prayer books and the public sphere in Elizabethan England’

4pm
Tea

4:30pm
James Clark, ‘Popular Politics and the Dissolution of the Monasteries’

5:15pm            
Michael Questier, ‘Catholic Loyalism in early Stuart England’

8                     
Dinner

Friday, 21 April

9:30-10:15      
Mishtooni Bose, ‘After the Wycliffite Controversies: Religious Thought and Political Practice in the Thought of Thomas Gascoigne’

10:15-11         
Elizabeth Evenden, ‘The Official Word: Tudor privy councils and the promotion of printed religious propaganda, 1548-1603’

11am               
Coffee

11:30-12:15    
John Watts, ‘The Church as a Polity, c. 1300-c.1500’ 

12:15-1pm      
Peter Biller, ‘Heresy: Thought and Practice’

1pm                
Lunch

2pm-4pm        
Round Table