The Post-Dissolution Lives of Monastic Buildings in England and Wales and the Reception of Reformation in the Sixteenth Century

My research will re-evaluate key aspects of the Dissolution of the Monasteries and its reception by analysing the treatment of monastic buildings and estates after they were dissolved. Scholarship has excluded many practical aspects of the Dissolution from narratives of religious change in the Reformation period, and writing on it remains largely concerned with motivations

and strategies at the centre of government. My research refocuses attention on the negotiations that people below court circles engaged in during this dramatic period of change, refashioning the Dissolution of the Monasteries as a process of gradual and negotiated acceptance of significant religious, social, and architectural change. The re-occupation of monastic space has

overwhelmingly been portrayed as the drastic conversion of churches or of cloisters into manor houses - while such conversions occurred, my proposed body of source material presents opportunities to demonstrate that the re-assimilation and reuse of territory, space, and infrastructure was more adaptive and creative than the vision of a wholly destructive Dissolution

or histories of the Tudor manor house might suggest. This in turn informs histories of the Dissolution by highlighting the variety of responses to the process.