by Kate Shore (Lincoln College, University of Oxford) and Dr. Fred Smith (Balliol College, University of Oxford) What have the English ever done for us? This central question guided participants in a one-day workshop, organised by Fred Smith and Kate Shore, exploring the European impact and legacy of England’s early modern reformations. Once seen as insular and introverted, historians have increasingly come to recognise the extent to which England’s reformations, both Protestant and Catholic, developed in close and intimate dialogue with religious changes elsewhere throughout Europe. However, the history of Europe‘s many reformations and counter-reformations is still often told without much reference to England. Indeed, it is often assumed that England’s reformations had relatively little to offer their continental counterparts: as Diarmaid MacCulloch once suggested, ‘the flow of ideas in the [English] reformation seems at least at first sight to be a matter of imports from abroad, with an emphatically unfavourable balance of payments.’ The workshop, held in Balliol College, Oxford, on 27 March 2025, sought to interrogate this narrative by bringing together an international group of historians, literary scholars and theologians. Over the course of 12 papers and lively discussion, a number of things became clear. The first was […]