Skipping Lent in Tudor England: Popular Resistance to Lent in the English Reformation

This paper explores popular attitudes toward Lent in Tudor England during the Edwardian Reformation. It examines popular broadsides, poems, and ballads that denounced the observance of Lent in the wake of radical Protestant reform. Although previous revisionist historiography portrayed Edwardian Protestantism’s disfigurement of traditional religion as unilaterally destructive, this paper applies a post-revisionist critique to reevaluate Edwardian reform in the context of popular reactions to the season of Lent. After first analyzing criticism of the use of altars, images, holy water, and other traditional religious elements during Lent, it then investigates relaxed enforcement of both dietary restrictions and auricular confession as many began to view the spiritual disciplines of Lent as issues of the individual conscience rather than matters of ecclesiastically prescribed uniformity. It also explores the creation of the popular “Jack o’ Lent” tradition, in which communities constructed, hung, and burnt a human straw Lenten effigy to voice their disrespect for the fasting period. Additionally, it studies the emergence of a new corpus of popular literature that attacked Lent through satirical poems, rhymes, and ballads. Although this resistance was neither comprehensive nor permanent, it does, however, reveal that early radical (though magisterial) Protestantism seeped into the structure and rhythms of the early modern calendar, not least of which were the rhythms of spiritual feast and famine during Lent.