Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England.

David Cressy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. xvi + 641 pp. $39.95. ISBN: 0-19-820168-0.

Tudor and Stuart England experienced dramatic cultural and social change, at the heart of which stood the attempt of Protestant reformers to reshape the religion of the people, their attitudes to life, love and death and the rituals with which they marked them. To investigate this process David Cressy calls upon not only tracts and sermons, liturgies, visitation and church court material, poetry and plays, but also letters, diaries, and account books, in the effort to expose not only debates about what people should have been doing, but what people actually did. He reads his material with an eye to the complexities of gender and rank and also to the nuances of language, vital in an area in which, as Archbishop Whitgift complained to a critic, "the common people . . . will not be taught to speak by you or by any man, but keep their accustomed names and terms" (209). He is commendably wary about grand narratives of "a simple linear progression from medieval to modern" (379), yet he does have two large and convincing stories to tell. He charts a three-cornered and inconclusive struggle between traditional practice, some of it soon stigmatised as superstition, all of it marked by a sociability fuelled by food, drink, and flowers; Protestant reform, pressed ever onwards by the godly who saw popery lurking in every unscriptural gesture or prop; and Laudian ceremonialism, demanding submissive adherence to the church's ritual prescriptions. Meanwhile he shows how social polarisation led by the end of the period to a taste amongst the elite for private christenings, weddings, and funerals.

Its refusal to simplify is one of the book's great strengths. It shows us Laudians who found some traditional rituals too casual about the church's holiness, Puritans who disapproved of the godliest of funeral sermons because they seemed too visibly a substitute for the funeral masses of the past. Equally subtle are the stress on local variation and the explanation of why some rituals caused more debate than others: thus emergency baptism by midwives gave more purchase to theological controversialists than did the interment of the dead. All these qualifications fit the overall theme that rituals were open to local negotiation amongst clergy and people but were also nationally regulated, a potentially combustible combination. This point is perhaps not pushed as far as it might be: readers are left to make their own connections with recent work on the role of local ecclesiastical tradition in encouraging civil war allegiance. There are other ways in which the book might perhaps have been improved. The accumulation of detailed examples throws up fascinating episodes and individuals, but can on occasion be rather numbing. Though the canvas is broad, it might have been still broader. Coming-of-age rites such as confirmation or the end of apprenticeship are not considered. Traditional practice is depicted as rather static, with little sense that merry England might have had a rise as well as a fall. At times considerable explanatory weight is placed on the disruptions of the Interregnum despite the fact that, as Professor Cressy freely admits, we know all too little of the scale and impact of those disruptions. There are intriguing leads which are not pursued: did Quaker "dry baptism" (139) really happen and if so what was it like? And there are, for English readers, puzzling assertions: what is so confusing about the rules of cricket (299)? Nonetheless, this is a rich and stimulating book which marks an important step forward in our understanding of the cultural and social impact of the English Reformation.

S. J. GUNN Merton College, Oxford