Paper at the Society for Reformation Studies

From April 9 to 11, 2024, with the generous support of the AHSS Faculty Research Board, Colin Donnelly attended the Society for Reformation Studies conference in Cambridge, England. The conference theme was ‘Networks and Networking in the Reformation’, as was apt, since the conference has always been itself a fruitful place for the building and strengthening of academic networks, and this year was no exception.

There were brilliant papers from scholars from around the world, spanning the range from intensely detailed microhistories of individual relationships or networks to the vast illumination of multi-century connections between countries or denominations. Colin's own contribution focused on the role of social networks in the religious conversions of a key group of early English Protestants at the University of Cambridge. When written about at all, these conversions have generally been considered in isolation, and in purely intellectual and doctrinal terms. By demonstrating the existence of a range of previously unknown connections between these individuals, using documents as mundane as college account books and as exciting as a preacher’s last words before being burned at the stake, he aimed to show that social and emotional factors were just as important as intellectual and doctrinal ones in conversions to Protestantism during the early years of the reign of Henry VIII. This matters because an irreducible fact (among the few universally agreed by the various warring tribes of historians studying the English Reformation) is that without at least some conversions from Catholic approaches to Christianity to evangelical or Protestant ones, the Reformation would not have happened.

Understanding and explaining the Reformation therefore fundamentally requires understanding and explaining religious conversion. Despite this, as Peter Marshall has written, ‘it is remarkable that to date there has been little or no attempt to explore the phenomenon of evangelical conversion in the early Tudor period in any systematic or broadly thematic way’. More than twenty years on from that comment, this remains sadly true. His paper represented an attempt to address one small part of this lacuna.