The Holy Thorn of Glastonbury: The Evolution of a Legend in Post-Reformation England

Abstract

The body of legend about the origins and significance of the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury continued to evolve in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the winter-flowering tree becoming both a symbol and focus for the conflicts and tensions unleashed by the advent of Protestantism and exacerbated by the Civil Wars of the 1640s and 50s. Its post-Reformation history questions long-standing assumptions about the role which Protestantism played in eroding historical traditions linked with evocative sites in the landscape and reinforces recent qualifications of the claim that the Reformation was a powerful agent of the desacralization of the natural world.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 16 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.