The Long Dissolution

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, with its allusions to twilight, night and death, has often been interpreted by historians as an oblique, grieving comment about the closure of England’s religious houses during the Reformation. The standard account of events was established more than sixty years ago by David Knowles (1896-1974), Benedictine monk and Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, in his evocative and indispensable work, The Religious Orders in England.1 In more recent years, the overwhelming success of Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars has led scholars to concentrate not on the abbeys, but rather on life in English parishes in the sixteenth century.2 Now however, two fresh studies about the closure of the religious houses, with dramatically different approaches, have emerged almost at once: James G. Clark’s The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History, and Harriet Lyon’s Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England.