Personal religion during the reigns of Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I: testamentary evidence for the restoration of Protestantism

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the investigation of religious expressions and personal piety of testators through 1624 wills from the counties of Kent and Gloucestershire during the reigns of Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I. The sample utilised in this dissertation is collected from The National Archives, Prerogative Court of Canterbury wills in series PROB 11. Drawing upon the collected primary sources, wills, this dissertation aims to categorise the wills under Protestant, Traditional (Catholic), Ambiguous, and a recently established category by myself, Crypto-Protestant and Catholic, to provide an insight into the changing personal piety and attitudes of laymen towards the policies of Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I. Previous historians predominantly focused on the committal of the wills, specifically where a testator bequeths his or her soul to the entitiy, to identify possible expression of personal piety to understand the possible religious affiliations of the testators from their secret voices reflected in wills. This research expands the interpretation of possible religious expressions and provides a new and unstudied analytical lens to the field by investigating and testing a variety of elements in wills, such as the entity to which the testator entrusted his or her soul to, reference to the title Supreme Head of the Church of England, Preambles, Verbs and Nouns utilised in the comittal part, presence and omission of the title Defender of the Faith and presence and omission of Acknowledgement of Monarchs. The study of these elements demonstrates changing use of religious and legal vernacular through lexical preferences of testators across regions and monarchs. This study not only tests these new elements for possible religious expressions and the identification of personal piety but also proposes a new interpretation for understanding the secret voice of testators. This dissertation also contributes to the overall debate on the validity and reliability of wills as religious sources for religious identity in Early Modern England.