Title: Fire from heaven
Description: This dissertation is an original socio-religious study of popular religion and society in Wales from the revolt of Owain Glyndwr to the accession of James I in a comparative British and European historical context. While past studies of Wales in this period have dealt principally with the institutional church and religion imposed from above, this dissertation focuses on the diverse set of religious beliefs, customs, and practices of the laity. In order to achieve a more thorough understanding of the socio-religious beliefs and practices of the Welsh laity, those conventional ecclesiastical sources are examined, in addition to a wide range of new and previously underutilized interdisciplinary sources. This interdisciplinary approach successfully contends with the interpretive problems resulting from inconsistent survival of historical evidence by thoroughly analyzing surviving records, and pairing these with a critical use of literary and other evidence.

Late medieval belief and practice, along with the continuity, change, and the pace of the Reformation are investigated in the following dimensions of lay experience in Wales: the role of the parish and its calendar in daily life; religious understanding, practice, and observances; kindred and community; the use and meaning of sacred space; domestic and international pilgrimages; and finally, socio-religious beliefs and practices. These topics are also explored on a micro-historical level through a case study of select parishes in the diocese of St. Asaph. This dissertation examines and re-assesses conventional and teleological narrative of the torpor of the late medieval Welsh church and the welcome inevitability of the Protestant Reformation-shaped by the force of early Protestant rhetoric and the legacy of Nonconformism in Wales. It does so by reconsidering the supposedly backward and flawed state of lay piety in pre-Reformation Wales; the early successes of Protestant reformers, and the impact of early Welsh religious translations and reforms on a local and regional level on lay belief and practice. It argues for the vitality of late medieval lay piety in Wales, despite certain vulnerabilities, and a more complex, gradual, and varied narrative of socio-religious change, and particularly the importance of considering local and regional contexts of continuity and change.