The Holocaust of His Discretion

What is it about?

Why was the orientation of church furniture the site of the most incendiary controversies in the English Church in the decade leading up to its dissolution and amidst nation's descent into civil war? This essay shows how competing claims to discretionary power over the circumstantial aspects of religion, taking place at the margins of the Church's authority, had a decisive impact on political disputes concerning nature of England's constitution. Reading widely in printed and manuscript sources from the period, it shows how the movement of judgments through the Church's hierarchy relied on metaphors, and shows how those metaphors also contributed toward the entrenchment of political differences.

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