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Most English people initially saw the Reformation as an unexpected catastrophe, wrenching their religious lives out of shape, and stripping their communities of resources they had naively believed belonged to them.
This lecture will survey this ‘black legend’ and ask what made it so enduring – and why some parts of the story, such as the Inquisition’s genocidal campaign against Spanish Jews, received so much less attention than others.
The criminalisation of religious speech before the ordinary courts in England began in 1676. Although the law on blasphemy was finally abolished in 2008, many of the troubling aspects of the old law remain in the form of the offence of incitement to religious hatred.