Oaths and the English Reformation

'This extremely well-researched and methodologically sophisticated monograph reminds us how central the use of oaths was in a society that had relatively few means of coercion available to it … an extremely successful transition from dissertation to monograph - a far-from-easy thing to accomplish nowadays, especially in the context of the ridiculous time pressure to publish that bedevils the university system. The reconstruction of the verbal mechanisms of Henrician coercion, which remind one, in fact, of the passive-aggressive but still really malicious workings of some of the both worst- and overregulated university departments, is a major addition to the literature on the 1530s.' Michael Corrie Questier, Renaissance Quarterly

'The central thesis of this carefully written and precisely annotated book is that the primary accomplishment of the English Reformation is to be found in the texts of the many and varied oaths that were forced upon English citizens by the Crown at that time as well as in the measure of the resistance with which they were met. To know what the Reformation in that country was about at that period we need not turn primarily to an assessment of the cult of images at various shrines or to popular treatises or to the composition of new prayers or devotional manuals.' J. Robert Wright, Anglican and Episcopal History