Lecture One: Youth and Age
This lecture investigates the role played by people at different stages in the life cycle in the making of England’s long Reformation. It tests suggestions that the successive phases of religious upheaval precipitated by the ecclesiastical upheavals of the 1530s, 40s and 50s entailed forms of youthful rebellion and analyses the reversals of the age hierarchy to which these revolutionary events appeared to give rise. It examines age as a stage of spiritual growth as well as a biological phase and explores the role of education and conversion in the Reformation. It also considers some of the paradoxes of youth and age in a society that distrusted novelty and revered antiquity and engages critically with the idea that the authority of the old was steadily eroded in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Date: 19 January 2018, 17:00 (Friday, 1st week, Hilary 2018)
Venue: Examination Schools, 75-81 High Street OX1 4BG
Venue Details: South School
Speaker: Alexandra Walsham (University of Cambridge)
Organising department: Faculty of History
Part of: The James Ford Lectures - Family and Empire: Kinship and British Colonialism in the East India Company Era, c. 1750-1850
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editor: Laura Spence