Generations: Age, Ancestry, and Memory in the English Reformations

This book examines England's plural and protracted Reformations through the novel prism of the generations.Approaching generation as a biological unit and a social cohort, it demonstrates that the tumultuous religious developments that stretched across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not merely transformed the generations but were also forged by them.It provides compelling new insights into how people experienced and navigated the profound challenges that the Reformations posed in everyday life. Alexandra Walsham investigates how age and ancestry were implicated in the theological and cultural upheavals of the era and how these in turn reconfigured the nexus between memory, history, and time.Generations explores the manifold ways in which the Reformations shaped the horizontal relationships that men, women, and children formed with their siblings, kin, and peers, as well as the vertical ones that tied them to their dead ancestors and their future heirs.It highlights the vital p