Engendering England: The Restructuring of Allegiance in the Writings of Richard Morison and John Bale

This paper examines the way in which old systems of allegiance are interrogated, and replaced by an emergent nationalism in two writers closely associated with the Cromwell government: Richard Morison and John Bale. In their attempt to contruct nationhood in sixteenth-century England, both Morison and Bale adapt late medieval ways of imagining community in order to provoke a shift in allegiance and a reunification of the English nation modelled on patriarchal structures.