Long Reformation

Long Reformation is a historiographic term that interprets the process of the Protestant Reformation, particularly the English Reformation, as longer and broader than the traditional chronology of happening through mid-sixteenth-century legislation.

The concept was shaped by revisionist reformation historians such as Jack Scarisbrick, Christopher Haigh and Eamon Duffy, who emphasised the vitality of late medieval Catholicism and the slow, uneven pace of Protestantisation and was first used by Duffy in 1996. The term describes a multi generational process of religious, cultural and social change in Europe from the late medieval period through to as late as the eighteenth century.

The concept has been compared to confessionalisation an approach which also emphasises the protracted and multifaceted nature of religious change and is used in continental European, particularly German, historiography to analyse how Catholic and Protestant Continental churches and states collaborated in social disciplining which between the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) formed religious identities and consolidated political authority.

The Long Reformation thesis has also been linked to the work of French historian Jean Delumeau, whose studies of Catholic reform and the persistence of popular religion emphasised gradual processes of cultural and religious change across early modern Europe.