The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c. 1540-1640 & The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850.

Robert Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c. 1540-1640

New York: Clarendon, 1998. x + 395 pp. n.p. ISBN: 0-19-820718-2.

Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, Joseph P. Ward, eds., The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xiv + 253 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-59201-1.

These are two very different books that one might have expected to have explored some common themes. But not only are they in search of different histories, more importantly, they pursue these histories in vastly different ways. Let me begin with Tittler's book, which for historical studies in general and Renaissance studies in particular, is of much greater value.

In so many ways, this is an excellent example of historical scholarship: meticulously and widely researched, clearly argued, precisely written, and judiciously concluded. Indeed my only passing disappointment involved wishing that he less cautiously established the implications of his bold thesis -- or put more directly, I found myself expecting at times a richer theoretical framework to contextualize his assertions.

In attempting to provide a chronology for urban changes and to conceptualize these changes culturally, Tittler argues convincingly that the "Reformation marks a distinct watershed, even a titular episode, in English urban history" (335). His book extends our general sense of the processes of secularization as it very particularly investigates the changing patterns of political administration and culture in English towns from the earliest Henrician Reformation legislation to the beginnings of the Civil War. What Tittler so freshly focuses upon in the wake of the dissolutions that brought down so many of the medieval, Catholic traditions upon which urban institutions rested is the civic fashioning of "an alternative political culture to fill that void: a culture which was secular and civic, and which effectively legitimized the prevailing distribution of governing authority" (335).

Tittler interprets the history of a shift from religious to civic legitimacy for urban political authority in sixteenth-century England, a shift that entails the construction of "notions of 'oligarchy'" in place of an "ethos of 'community'" (13). Indeed towns became secular, rationalistic entities in the process of negotiating the dissolution of traditional religious institutions and traditional institutional identities. Tittler carefully and laboriously details the many strategies that different towns used over decades to capitalize on opportunities even if they did not control sufficient resources to acquire dissolved lands initially. In so doing they also acquired "greater civic jurisdiction over social institutions" (136), constituting civic identity as autonomous and articulating political cultures to sustain those autonomous identities.

A process of administrative formalization, bureaucratization, and mechanization, ensues. Office replaces community in importance as the political elite aim to consolidate "their own authority" (147) rather than to represent the freemanry. We witness a move from "collective responsibility to the spirit of patriarchy" (140).

Indeed Tittler's account of urban history opens up larger issues of the secularization of power, representation, and identity, issues which he touches upon carefully but never explores in a fashion that would limit the credibility of his particular study. Still it is worth noting that the shift from divine to civic legitimacy that he sees as the cultural support for a new urban autonomous identity and for new forms of urban political administration clearly parallels processes of change that characterize newly fashioned constructions of centralized political identity and private concepts of self during these same years. Another point that he affirms more directly that I feel is worth reinforcing is that the revised political ethos that he illustrates should not be reduced to a product of Protestant or Puritan efforts. Rather Puritanism, he maintains correctly, I believe, "provided one answer to the problem of how to fill a doctrinal void" (251).

Finally, a cautionary word about Tittler's "use" of culture. In so clearly differentiating politics and authority from political culture, Tittler dichotomizes action and meaning suggesting throughout his book the primary status of the one and the reflective or representational (at best) value of the other even as his evidence and discussion indicate a much more recursively constructed civic polity. My point is not merely methodolgical. I believe that in so doing, in asking, for instance, how civic culture was "employed to legitimize the prevailing distribution of power" (251), Tittler employs a functionalist methodology that not only undervalues cultural production and human agency but more important, projects too secular a meaning on a political culture that he rightfully and carefully shows is in the process of making culture and meaning secular.

But even such minor criticism as this seems precious when confronted with the methodological and ideological assumptions and aspirations set forth by the editors in their introduction to The Country and the City Revisited. Unfortunately, the introduction distracted me from the assembly of essays to follow, many of them solid and useful examples of various fresh attempts to do literary or cultural history, and a few of them especially fine ones. The point, however, is that the collection is meant as a book, and as a "history" as well, and from such a perspective the editor's goals have to be examined and the value of the contents considered with relation to them.

Ostensibly the purpose of the collection is to revisit Raymond Williams's The Country and the City (1973) as a starting point to investigate "the politics of place in the formation of English cultural identity" (1). This entails reconsidering Williams's paradigm of the court/city, rural/metropolitan as "dialectically related constructs," to rethink this in relation to "space," understood theoretically as "social relationships, capital flows, cultural representations and global forces" (1). A bit abstract, perhaps, but more usefully focused as what "Williams figured as an analytical dichotomy can be more satisfactorily grasped as a series of permeable boundaries" (4).

So far so good, and if this were the framework for what follows, what we'd have is a useful collection of provocative essays around the broadly conceived subject of politics and the aesthetics of land(scape) in early modern England. But larger purposes -- methodological, ideological, historical -- are imagined. "How were the English people," the editors ask, "able to remake themselves from a tough, bucolic island nation . . . into an imperial power? How can new concepts of spatiality, of socially produced space, help us to envisage how new forms of identity emerged during this period?" (4) Besides presuming the capacity to explore issues of such imaginative scope, the question postulates concepts ahistorically and unreflexively. While the goal is to reconsider "space," concepts such as "English people" and "nation" are taken as given unproblematically.

Even more unreflexively do the editors construe their methodological and ideological presumptions. Their present project is warranted because today Williams's work would "be criticized as insufficiently attentive to questions of imperialism and colonialism" (3). By some, certainly. But certainly not by all, and who but those wedded to a particular ideological perspective in the first place gave priority of place to Raymond Williams as the source for early modern English social or cultural history?

A final critical comment: the editors unnecessarily defend the methodologies that follow by pointing out that the canon has expanded. "The texts of popular culture . . . now clamor to be read alongside the formerly canonical works of literature" (3). When did "now" begin? When did historians not read "broadsides, pamphlets, newspapers and court materials"? (3) Such a strange presumption is proliferated within as well. In his essay, Andrew McRae announces that his conclusions are the result of "new" methodologies, by which he means he uses "flexible strategies of analysis," being as he is "alert to a wider range of sources and representations" (42).

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge a few of the outstanding essays in the collection. Joseph Ward's own contribution clearly revisits the traditional assumptions of historians and literary critics alike that for Elizabethan and Stuart Londoners city and suburbs were experienced dichotomously. Robert Markley rereads "Upon Appleton House" within a framework that problematizes traditional constructions of nature and culture as dichotomous.

Perhaps the most successful pieces given the goal of the collection are the ones that treat the eighteenth century. Maybe I think this because I know much less about this period and the fit appears less tailored. But maybe it is because the themes that the volume treats as related, capitalism, imperial identity, and the political meaning of the land do inform eighteenth-century cultural history more clearly than they do sixteenth and seventeenth-century history. Having said that, I urge a careful reading of two excellent essays: Karen O'Brien's "Imperial Gorgic, 1660-1789" and Elizabeth A Bohles's, "The Gentleman Planter and the Metrepole: Long's History of Jamaica (1774)."