Abstracts Category : Other

The Life and Writings of Thomas Becon, 1512-1567

by Jonathan Mark Reimer

This dissertation analyses the life and writings of the Tudor clergyman and bestsellingauthor Thomas Becon (1512-1567) as well as communities of production, patronage andpious readership that occasioned, supported and first received his books. Not only doesit illuminate new aspects of his life, such as his remorse over his recantation at PaulsCross in 1543 and the fact that he was considered for the bishopric of Chester in 1559,but also it provides an account of his extraordinary literary output. Between the early1540s and the late 1560s, he composed or translated at least 56 works, which by the1630s had been printed in 126 known editions. He was thus the most widely publishedvernacular devotional author in England until the later decades of the sixteenth-century.Despite his influence in early modern England, Becon has received littlescholarly attention. When his works are studied, they are simply mined for quotations,rather than contextualised and considered in their own right. This dissertation attemptsto redress this imbalance by embedding Becon within the communities and contexts thatproduced and consumed his books. It argues that, as a prolific and highly influentialmember of the middle management of the English Reformation, his life and writingsoffer a unique and valuable perspective on the propagation, enforcement and receptionof religious change in sixteenth-century England. This dissertation not only reconstructsand reconsiders his biography and literary output, but also it shows the contributions thatsuch study makes to broader historical and literary understandings of early modernEngland, particularly in light of the post-revisionist project, which has focused upon theprocesses of negotiation, accommodation and resistance that shaped the EnglishReformation. By illuminating the career of one significant, but largely overlookedreformer, it furnishes new evidence and interpretations for understanding early modernEngland.