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Alexander's Exploration Of The English Reformations

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Alexander begins his exploration of the English Reformations by addressing that the conversion of England from Catholicism to Protestantism was not a nice transition and does not have set beginnings and endings. He questions how long it took for the protestants to finally have success and also if the method of negation of coercion was more effective. Alexander then addresses the questions if the Protestant reformations occurred from the top down, origination with the leadership, or bottom up, originating from the peasants in society. He also addresses the change came about through conversion or coercion.
Alexander references Dickens, another historian, who states that the reformation was gradual conversion because the Catholic church had been …show more content…

He was able to figure out that as time progressed there were fewer and fewer people identified as Catholic and those who did tended to hide it so it was not very apparent. Alexander also took into account that the scribes who recorded the will could be bias and concluded that many scribes skewed what they wrote in accordance with their own personal religious beliefs. Alexander bring up many other problems with using will to track the reformation such as the fact that there was often a certain formula that many used to write their wills which could have skewed the results as well as that many times wills didn’t accurately represent the person and probably aren’t a very good source to gauge how quickly the population England reformed.
Overall Alexander dismisses wills as being used as the sole gauge for the course of the reformation nut reaffirms that they still hold some value. HE says that historians would not put so much emphasis on wills and maybe search for other documents as an in-depth analysis on these dead people could cause confusion and false

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