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

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.