Childhood, Youth, and Religious Dissent in Post-Reformation England

"This book explores the role of children and young people within early modern England's most controversial minority: Catholicism. It examines Catholic attempts to capture the next generation, Protestant reactions to these initiatives, and the religious, social, legal and political contexts in which young people formed, maintained and attempted to explain their religious identity. The young, it argues, were not inevitably pawns in a world governed by hierarchies of kinship, workplace, church and state. The motives and even the voices of those who challenged various manifestations of authority in the early modern world can often be recovered, and the choices they made tell us much about the complex and changing relationships between society, church and state in the post-Reformation world"--