The Legacy of Edward VI as Explained in Tudor Church...

MACCULLOCH, D. Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation. London, Penguin Books, 2001. The foundation of this book comes from a series of Birkbeck lectures which the author, Diarmaid MacCulloch, delivered at the University of Cambridge in the Lent term of 1998. MacCulloch’s purpose in writing Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation were to voice his argument that the Edwardian reformation was a critical moment in the progress of the Anglican Church and the establishing of England’s Protestant identity. The aim of this book is to recapture King Edward’s reformation of the Church of England from revisionists such as Haigh, Duffy and Pollard. They and others viewed that the reorganisation of the†¦show more content†¦The third chapter; King Solomon: Building the Temple, compares the religious ideas and tasks that the young Solomon had to complete in the rebuilding of the temple of Jerusalem with Edwards completion of a spiritual temple of Christianity in England. This chapter attempts to make the Edwardian Reformation seen as an achievement by defending that even though Protestants still represented the minority of the country’s population, they were concentrated in areas that mattered such as the south east and East Anglia. It also attracted the youth of the country as the Edwardian Reformation was a movement and the promotion of faith, divine authority and condemnation of greed. The last chapter; The Afterlife of the Edwardian Reformation, looks at consolidating MacCulloch’s argument that the legacy of the Edwardian church was far greater and longer than what has usually been acknowledged by other historians. It does express that the Edwardian reformation was later adopted and refashioned not only by Edwards’s half-sister; Elizabeth and her government, but also in 1660 during the Restoration. MacCulloch has used a wide variety of different source material such as paintings, maps, pictures, religious articles (p98), legal documents (p40, 41), floor plans (p85), metals/coins- propaganda (56/62) and educational documents (p22) in order to explain and answer his main argument throughout the book. With a balance of primary and secondary