New Approaches to the English Reformation.

Caroline Litzenberger. The English Reformation and the Laity: Gloucestershire, 1540-1580. (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History.) Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xviii + 218 pp. $54.95. ISBN: 0-521-47545-7.

Malcolm Hardman. A Kingdom in Two Parishes: Lancashire Religious Writers and the English Monarchy, 1521-1689. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. 364 pp. $55. ISBN: 0-8386-3667-5.

John H. Primus. Richard Greenham: The Portrait of an Elizabethan Pastor. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998. ix + 224 pp. $35. ISBN: 0-86554-578-2.

P. G. Stanwood. Izaak Walton. (Twayne's English Authors Series.) New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998. xviii + 126 pp. $28.95. ISBN: 0-8057-7052-6.

The study of the English Reformation and its aftermath has been radically reoriented in recent years. Eamon Duffy has emphasized the flourishing state of late medieval religion in England and the destructiveness of the Reformation of the sixteenth century, marked by the disappearance of shrines, holy days, and much religious art. Christopher Haigh has shown that Roman Catholicism remained vigorous in northern and western areas of England until well into Elizabeth I's reign. He and J. J. Scarisbrick have argued that the English people were reluctant to accept religious reforms imposed by the political authorities. It was only late in Elizabeth's reign, according to the revisionists, that the country became predominantly Protestant, and even then the religious consensus was fractured and incomplete. The four books reviewed here, strikingly different from one another in methodology and approach, all aim to illuminate aspects of the religious history of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and to co rrect or modify prevailing historiographical interpretations. Together, they suggest a new way of looking at English religion in this era.

Caroline Litzenberger, Assistant Professor of History at West Virginia University; examines the degree of acceptance or rejection of religious changes by the laity in Gloucestershire between 1540 and 1580. In this period there were, successively, four official religious policies: Henry VIII's national Catholicism, Edward VI's radical Prorestantism, Mary I's Counter-Reformation Catholicism, and Elizabeth I's cautious Protestantism. Litzenberger's sources include parochial and diocesan records, local governmental records, surviving contemporaneous furnishings and decorations of parish churches, and last wills and testaments. She devotes special attention to two prominent parishes: St. Michael's, Gloucester, and St. Mary's, Tewkesbury. The wills she subjects to a sophisticated system of analysis aimed at revealing the testators' theological commitments. The seventeen categories of belief that the uses for purposes of analysis are based on expressions in the wills' preambles, where the testators bequeathed their souls to God. Certain expressions seem clearly traditional and others evangelical, while the largest group is ambiguous, made up of statements that could be interpreted in more than one way. Litzenberger is aware of the possible pitfalls of using the evidence of wills in this way: some theological formulas were probably conventional rather than personal, some may reflect the usage of a scribe rather than the words of the testator, and some are simply vague. Consequently, the wills, over 3,500 of them, are problematical as evidence for lay religion. Nevertheless, the record of religious change is impressively full, and Litzenberger's examination of it enables her to come to some significant conclusions.

The most important conclusion is that religious change came slowly among the laity and often proceeded piecemeal, so that, whatever policies or formularies were approved on the national or the diocesan level, the religious persuasions of men and women in Gloucestershire parishes remained a complex mixture of the old and the new. The changes reflected in part the policies of the Crown as interpreted by the bishops of Gloucester (the diocese created in 1541 that was nearly coterminous with the county). Each of the bishops, however, was very much an individual. In Edward VI's reign, the Zwinglian John Hooper, himself a noncon-formist in that he objected to the oath of obedience and the required vestments for his consecration, vigorously encouraged preaching and teaching based on the scriptures. He also urged the removal of altars in favor of communion tables and the destruction of works of art that could be considered idolatrous. Hooper's successor under Mary was the Catholic James Brookes, who assisted in Hooper's trial, resulting in the former bishop's execution by burning. Brookes ordered the restoration of the altars and the Latin Mass. Under Elizabeth, Richard Cheyney as bishop exercised an irresolute leadership and adhered to theological views difficult to characterize. He was closer to Luther on the nature of the eucharist than to Calvin or to his fellow Elizabethan bishops. Not surprisingly, then, lay religion in Gloucestershire in the early years of Elizabeth's reign had a kaleidoscopic quality. By 1580, a reluctant acceptance of the Elizabethan settlement, based on the Book of Common Prayer of 1559 and the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of 1571, had begun to emerge in Gloucestershire, but no secure resting place had been found. Litzenberger concludes: "Eventually, as in the rest of England, the Reformation would transform Gloucestershire into a predominantly Protestant county and diocese, even at the level of the laity, but in 1580, at least in that western shire, the process of change had only just begun" (167). One wishes that she had ext ended her study to the end of Elizabeth's reign.

Litzenberger's The English Reformation and the Laity is based on a painstaking analysis of often intractable archival materials and other evidence of religious change, and carried out with reference to important political, social, and institutional developments in the area. Expressed persuasively, the study has important implications for the understanding of the course of the Reformation throughout the kingdom. Litzenberger does not see the laity of Gloucestershire as divided along Catholic and Protestant lines, in the way that some historians do, but as arrayed across a broad spectrum of religious belief. The laity whose views she analyzes were on the whole conservative but responsive to the policies of the Church and the state. The ferment introduced by the Reformation, however, continued in the later Elizabethan and the early Stuart periods, producing further changes, the direction of which could not be clearly seen in 1580.

Malcolm Hardman's A Kingdom in Two Parishes: Lancashire Religious Writers and the English Monarchy, 1521-1689, the work of a literary scholar who is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Warwick, is partly a local history and partly a study of over a dozen religious writers stretching from the eve of Henry VIII's Reformation to the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. Remarkably, the writers were all associated with the adjoining parishes of Bolton and Deane. Hardman examines their writings with particular reference to their views on the English monarchy. His own views are expressed emphatically. He describes the dismantling of St. Werburgh's shrine and other religious shrines in 1539 as "a calculating brutality" that "extinguished all traces of the holy bodies of England's saints in order to transfer to the person of Henry Tudor all claims formerly made on their behalf" (31). The Elizabethan Book of Homilies is described as having reached its "final form only as part of a campaign of mind control in the wake of the Northern Rebellion of 1569-70" (150). On the careers of Archbishops John Whitgift and William Laud, Hardman writes: "A Whitgift or a Laud--martiners of limited brain, the chosen and futile tools of Elizabeth, or Charles I--were candidates for the respect of nobody. As offering to succeed where Innocent III had failed, they hardly rose to the level of the absurd" (276).

The achievement of the book, setting its occasionally polemical character aside, is nevertheless considerable. Hardman brings to the reader's attention a considerable body of writing that provides a vivid commentary on the religious and political events of two centuries. Among the most successful of his interpretations is that of George Marsh, the Marian martyr, who was educated at Cambridge University in his mature years, became a schoolmaster and pastor, and was burned at the stake for views whose heterodoxy is far from obvious and for adhering to a Prayer Book to which his persecutors had all conformed in the previous reign. James Pilkington, bishop of Durham early in Elizabeth's reign, emerges as a moderate Calvinist with a theology compounded of what Hardman calls Apollonian and Dionysian elements; his social concerns were evidently deeply felt and his views of the religious and political establishment he served were sometimes sharply critical. James Anderton, a Jacobean Catholic, is shown to be a moder ate, pro-establishment, non-confrontational figure, whose arguments on behalf of the toleration of his coreligionists were based on traditional English legal and constitutional principles. At the end of the seventeenth century, Zachary Taylor, "whose clever pen would help to write the Whig legend that the 'revolution' of 1688-89 was of divine inevitability" (256), is shown to be an important religious and political writer of the late seventeenth century whose liberalism anticipated the ideology of the philosophes. Was there anything that linked these writers together as thinkers? Hardman points to the fourteenth-century English philosopher and theologian William of Ockham, whose thought he describes as inquiring, non-dogmatic, particularizing, and skeptical, and he argues that the Bolton/Deane writers were mostly of this persuasion. This observation, sweeping as it is, makes sense.

John H. Primus, Professor of Religion Emeritus at Calvin College, provides what the publisher describes as the first book-length treatment of the life and thought of the celebrated pastor of Dry Drayton, near Cambridge. It should be noted, however, that Primus's Richard Greenham: The Portrait of an Elizabethan Pastor appeared in the same year as Kenneth L. Parker and Eric J. Carlson's "Practical Divinity": The Works and Life of Revd Richard Greenham (1998), a book that contains a detailed treatment of his life and thought and a selection of his writings. Primus devoted many years to this project, including three sabbatical leaves in Cambridge, during which he worked in major libraries and archives as well as visiting Dry Drayton and other sites appropriate to his subject. The resulting study is agreeably straightforward, full of learning that is never ponderous, and focused on a ministry that was severely limited in geographical and social terms but immensely influential in Greenham's own time and for decade s to come. Believing deeply in the spiritual value of sermons rooted in the word of God, Greenham preached twice on Sundays and four mornings a week during his twenty-one years as the clerical incumbent in the largely rural parish of Dry Drayton. Altogether, he preached, according to Primus, some 6,000 sermons in a parish of about 250 persons. He also trained a succession of students from nearby Cambridge University in the practical work of the ministry and published several well regarded treatises on religious subjects. His posthumously published Works appeared in five editions, beginning in 1599. The first edition of his Works included a treatise on the keeping of the sabbath, written in about 1580, that was probably the first and was certainly one of the most influential books on sabbatarianism written in England.

Primus deals effectively with Greenham's sabbatarianism, making it a more attractive doctrine than most readers of the book would expect. Greenham's view of the sabbath, according to Primus, was not based on a strict interpretation of the fourth commandment of the decalogue, but on the book of Genesis and the order of Creation: work for six days and rest on the seventh. Keeping the sabbath was thus, for Greenham, a perpetual moral principle. The observance of the day was transferred by the early Christians from the seventh day of the week to the first day to mark the day of the Resurrection and of Pentecost. The proper keeping of the day, Greenham argued, involved worship and self-examination, as well as the doing of charitable deeds. By keeping the day holy, he contended, Christians became holy through the action of the Holy Spirit. Preaching was the means by which human beings were most likely to be transformed, in Greenham's view, but the sabbath, comments Primus, was "The Means of the means" (177).

Primus wrestles in his concluding chapter with the problem of whether Greenham should be called a "Puritan," as twentieth-century historians have consistently done. His solution is somewhat surprising. In some ways, as Primus points out, Greenham was closer, theologically, to Luther than to Calvin, especially in his reiterated use of a contrast between law and gospel. Greenham was not what is sometimes called an "experimental" predestinarian, believing, instead, in assurance as part of receiving and acting upon the Gospel. It is far from clear to what extent he was a nonconformist in practice, though he evidently disliked wearing a surplice. But Greenham was on good terms with his diocesan bishop and he saw his life-work as strengthening the work of the established Church at the local level. He himself did not acknowledge being a Puritan, since he saw this term as one used or misused to ridicule theological opponents. In his concluding sentence, Primus defines Greenham, "along with scores of other Church of England clerics," as a puritan anglican" (199). Aside from its obvious anachronism, the term accurately suggests that Greenham was a faithful and constructive clergyman of the English Church.

Izaak Walton, by P. G. Stanwood, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, is a slender volume, though it is packed with information and comment. After a very compressed chapter on "Walton's Life and Times," Stanwood devotes the remainder of the book to Walton's literary achievement and reputation. Walton was a writer whose career spanned the political and religious turmoil of the middle of the seventeenth century, and his mature work everywhere shows his deep concern that the values and society of the England he knew should not be irretrievably lost. In particular, he was a devoted member of the Church of England. A successful businessman in the textile trade in London, he was evidently deeply affected by hearing John Donne preach at St. Dunstan is in the West, London. He also came to value the role of the English monarchy in supporting the Church and encouraging its ministers. Walton's Life of John Donne, stressing Donne's preaching and pastoral work over his writing of poetry, was publis hed in 1640, when England was threatened by sweeping changes in church and state. When both monarchy and episcopacy had been swept away, Walton published his Life of Sir Henry Wotton in 1651, describing Wotton's work as a diplomat representing the king and his work as headmaster of a famous school. After the Restoration, Walton published his Lift of Mr. Rich. Hooker in 1665 to replace a life by John Gauden that he considered inadequate, which had accompanied the first complete edition of Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity in 1662. Walton's Life of Mr. George Herbert followed in 1670 and his Lift of Dr. [Robert] Sanderson in 1678. Stanwood is immensely illuminating on all of these works, not overemphasizing the distortions and mistakes Walton is guilty of (these were treated in detail by David Novarr in The Making of Walton's "Lives" [1958]), but showing in rich detail the overall design of the biographies. They were, in effect, saints' lives, each one developed according to a pattern in whi ch Walton's subjects reject a worldly life in favor of a spiritual life that turns out to be highly productive and fulfilling. Donne is the supreme preacher, Herbert the supreme pastor and religious poet, and Hooker the supreme theologian of the English Church, as Walton presents them. Each of them is characterized by a disciplined, austere, prayerful way of life, and is committed to a constructive career in the established Church. The same is true of Wotton, who went from his life as a diplomat to that of headmaster of Eton as an ordained deacon, and of Sanderson, who wisely and moderately provided spiritual leadership as bishop of the diocese of Lincoln.

Stanwood also sees Walton's Compleat Angler, a book perennially popular, in this religious context. Ostensibly about the art of fishing, the book is, Stanwood shows, a prose pastoral, celebrating a peaceful, unhurried, unspoiled world that every English man or woman cherished. From the standpoint of the 1650s when the book was published (first in 1653, then in 1655), this familiar, if mythical, world was threatened, not so much with a loss of streams and meadows, as with a loss of institutions, customs, and social pleasures. A part of Walton's nostalgia was, of course, for the established Church of the prewar years. Stanwood goes so far as to argue that Walton "evidently intends a pun on the title of his fishing manual: The Compleat Angler is a comprehensive work for anglers who care for the Anglicana Ecclesia-the Church of England" (67). It is no doubt significant that the 1653 title-page of The Compleat Angler carried the quotation, "Simon Peter said, I go a fishing; and they said, We also wil go with thee . John 21.3" (70). The way of life celebrated by the book, with its country walks, its easy relations among classes, and its meditative quality, suited the aspirations of those who wanted to restore a religious and secular world that the violence, iconoclasm, and institutional innovations of the Civil War era threatened to destroy. Stanwood's Izaak Walton, the first book-length treatment in a decade of one of the creators of the art of biography in English, is a treasure in a small package.

These four books suggest to this reviewer that the Church of England, as it emerged from what is now known as the "long Reformation" (lasting, in fact, into the seventeenth century), was a sturdy and durable institution, which even its critics were reluctant to abandon. Its membership, at least until the Restoration, was remarkably diverse, ranging from those whose religion was close to Roman Catholicism to those whose religion was close to the Calvinism of Geneva, Amsterdam, or Edinburgh. This diversity created tensions, divisions, and, arguably, a civil war, but it also fostered cultural, intellectual, and literary achievements of amazing vitality. Too much stress on parties within that Church, whether Puritan, church-papist, or Arminian, can obscure its comprehensive, lively, and, preeminently, national character.

UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH