England‘s Radical Reformation

England’s Reformation was supposed to bind the nation into a single ‘Church of England’. In fact the country was shattered into a kaleidoscope of religious variety. Amid the confusion, a few English people embraced radical possibilities: mystics turned religion into an allegory, separatists created democratic, self-governing communes, utopians explored ideas ranging from pacifism to full-blown revolution. 

This lecture traces how this radical edge of the English Reformation helped shape some of the most apparently secular aspects of the modern world.

Image © Wellcome CC BY