The fundamental question Ethan Shagan's book seeks to answer is how a government without a bureaucracy, police force, or standing army managed to affect the English Reformation. Shagan answers that it was an act of negotiation between the people and the government, an "act not done to the people [but] done with them" (25). Shagan's book represents one of the first post-revisionist attempts to understand the English Reformation. He eschews the most common questions asked by revisionist historians: To what extent was the Reformation a process of national conversion? Was that national conversion rapid from below or slow from above? When did England become a Protestant country? Instead of chasing these "phantasmagoric" questions, Shagan reconceptualizes the Reformation as "a piecemeal process in which politics and spiritual change were irrevocably intertwined" (7).To get at this process, Shagan examines court records, royal proclamations and propaganda, sermons, and theological tracts. Divided into three parts, Shagan's book looks at the political and social processes of Reformation from the Act of Supremacy (1534) to the end of Edward VI's reign in 1553.

"Popular politics" is a crucial term in Shagan's book because it identifies the locus where state and society negotiated Reformation. According to Shagan, revisionist historians have too often associated Reformation with theology, thereby leading them to discount the crucial process of politicization required for it to happen in the first place. Because the Reformation was an act of state, negotiated between it and the people, the concept of "resistance" is a problematic one. Instead, Shagan prefers to use the term "collaboration" to describe the interaction between the people and the government in making reform. However, just because it was central for the people to collaborate with the Tudor regime does not mean, according to Shagan, that the Reformation was popular. In fact, Part One, the Break with Rome and Crisis of Conservationism, goes to lengths to show that it was not. Chapter one, the most provocative of the three in this section focuses on debates over royal supremacy and argues that through its effective use of propaganda, the regime effectively politicized the Reformation making the prime issue not theology but loyalty. In doing this, the King divided opinion among between "conformist" and "non-conformist" Catholics, patronizing the former while making the latter traitors of the state.

Part II, Points of Contact: the Henrician Reformation and the English People, is divided into three chapters and looks at anti-clericalism, the dissolution of the monasteries, and public religious debate. These well-worn themes of English Reformation historiography are reexamined by Shagan with the intention of "analyzing [them] within the context of popular politics" (133). In doing so, Shagan removes these questions from the theological framework in which they have traditionally been analyzed and examines them in terms of how the Reformation fundamentally reordered the assumptions, which guided social behavior. Here, the example of the dissolution and spoliation of the abbey of Hailes is instructive because he shows how the members of the once traditional community "internalized" the rhetoric of the Reformation and plundered a once sacred building.

In part Three, Sites of Reformation: Collaboration and Popular Politics under Edward VI, Shagan looks at popular engagement with the Reformation during the Reign of Edward VI. In these two final chapters, Shagan most forcefully argues that the Reformation was brought about through a negotiation between people and state. He shows how the Edwardian government appealed to decidedly political and economic reasons in their quest for evangelical reform through the idiom of "commonwealth ideology." An especially interesting example, and one with which Shagan concludes his book, is the story of John Boller who was brought before the Star Chamber in 1550 for supposedly rejecting the king's authority to strip the parish altar at Highworth parish. However, according to a deposition made under oath, we find out that the real issue was not Boller's slandering of the King but the assertion of his right, as the farmer of the vicarage, to possess the recently dismantled altar stones. Shagan makes the point that in this case, the stripping of the altars does not represent all that was harmful and destructive in the English Reformation, as Eamon Duffy does, but shows how both individuals empowered themselves through co-opting the Reformation and how economic issues could be just as significant, if not more so, than confessional ones.