Thomas Crammer: A Life.

Diarmaid MacCulloch. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. 44 ills. + xii + 692 pp. $35 (cl), $18 (pap). ISBN: 0-300-06688-0 (cl), ISBN: 0-300-07448-4 (pap).

Biographies of Cranmer have been sites of sectarian controversy since the sixteenth century, and though this book is an exception, MacCulloch confesses a possible bias in the introduction: "sympathy for a man who was frequently confused and who confused others" (3). Notwithstanding, MacCulloch does not approve of Cranmer's more ignominious actions, numbering among these his acceptance of the archbishopric and his part in the annulment of Henry's marriages to Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. He explains these steps as undertaken, not in self-interest, but in "fierce determination to promote the evangelical reform of the Church" (630). What sort of man made these choices and harbored this determination? MacCulloch's Cranmer is "kindly and politically clumsy" (258), "either blessed or cursed with the ability to see his opponents' point of view" (54), and an "adventurous connoisseur of words" (421).

This biography revises the traditional picture of Cranmer's early career in two important respects. MacCulloch's Cranmer was an Erasmian conservative during his Cambridge years rather than an early evangelical: his humanist commitment to Biblical studies and preference for conciliar over papal authority were orthodox in the 1520s. (MacCulloch posits 1531 as the decisive year for Cranmer's evangelical commitment.) Furthermore, he demonstrates that Cranmer went to Spain as one of Wolsey's diplomatic agents in 1527 and met Henry, probably for the first time, in June of that year.

MacCulloch finds the personal relationship between Cranmer and Henry key to an understanding of the former and the course of the English Reformation. It was, by the time Henry died in 1547, "the most long-lasting relationship of love which either man had known," though "Henry's death . . . freed [Cranmer] to be himself theologically" and to acknowledge his wife and children (360-61). Henry gained from this friendship a theological mentor and ecclesiastical safe-passage through his matrimonial adventures; Cranmer and the Church of England gained the doctrine of Supreme Headship and steps toward evangelical reform.

MacCulloch sees Cranmer as guiding both the Edwardian reforms and the pace of their implementation. Incremental changes (as those between the 1549 and 1552 prayer books) reflect not any evolution in Cranmer's theological understanding or external political pressures, but carefully calibrated progress toward the predetermined goal of a reformed church. He credits Cranmer with "dignified self-assertion" in the early months of the Marian regime (548) and notes that, rather than escaping to Continental exile during those months of liberty, he deliberately courted arrest. Throughout his trial for treason, the Oxford Disputations, his heresy trial, and the associated imprisonments Cranmer remained an unwavering evangelical, though MacCulloch shows that at times he allowed misrepresentations of his views (on the Supreme Headship, for example) to pass unchallenged and thus make himself appear ridiculous.

MacCulloch presents Cranmer's slide toward the abject recantations of February and March in psychological terms, speaking of the collapse of his "sense of self-worth" (587). Thus he stresses Cranmer's isolation from other evangelicals, his attachment to a Catholic guard, his exhaustion and poor health, and the visits of his Catholic sister. Similarly, his dramatic abjuration of the recantations on the day of his death and his "achieve[ment of] a final serenity . . . in the flames" (603) is explained as a "gesture of certainty" (3) "which would make sense of his public career and rebuild his personal integrity" (605). According to MacCulloch, "there is no reason to disbelieve" that Cranmer admitted that he would have continued in his new loyalty to the Church of Rome if it had saved his life, "but we cannot hear the bitter self-lacerating irony which may have accompanied" the admission (604). This Cranmer dies a chastened evangelical rather than a spiteful apostate or a brilliant Machiavel.

MacCulloch refuses to skim over the complexities of sixteenth-century theological argument and lucidly explains various doctrines of justification and the eucharist. He portrays the mature Cranmer as unflinchingly predestinarian, but shows how his pastoral concerns prevented him from giving predestination prominence in official statements and homilies. Especially fine is MacCulloch's account of Cranmer's developing understanding of the presence of Christ in the eucharist. Whereas at his trial Cranmer would admit to two stages (his initial Catholic acceptance of transubstantiation and "real presence," and his final Reformed doctrine of "spiritual presence"), MacCulloch demonstrates that Cranmer held an interim Lutheran position between the early 1530s and about 1547 which he expressed in the phrase "true presence." Likewise, MacCulloch's analysis of how Cranmer composed and compiled texts for public worship - the Litany, the Prayer Books, the homilies - reflects an extraordinary sensitivity to historical context, theological implications, and aesthetic value. For MacCulloch, those texts and their influence on "language and ... cultural identity" are Cranmer's "most enduring monument" - or at least "the widest aftermath of [his] life and work" (630-32).

MacCulloch's prominent and frequent engagement of other historians in the text itself as well as the footnotes presupposes a scholarly audience. Nevertheless, the New York Times has reviewed this book as "suprisingly accessible," and it is. Sixteenth-century English is re-spelled and punctuated to twentieth-century standards, and all but the briefest foreign phrases are translated. Illustrations are presented within a page of the relevant textual reference, and the page design, with footnotes rather than endnotes, invites rather than repels inquiry into sources. The sheer volume of information would present an obstacle to many non-specialist readers, and accordingly the text is studded with brief reintroductions and cross-references, many of them referring to a related passage by page number. Besides this deft hand with the large design, MacCulloch also deploys the smaller elements of his argument, and the transitions between them, with tact and skill. On the other hand, the frequent resort to colloquialisms can be jarring. In a work destined to become the standard, MacCulloch runs the risk of sounding somewhat quaint to a future generation who may consider "gravy train" (24), "user-friendly" (162), "emotional blackmail" (221), "hijacked" (435), and "culture-shock" (588) to be dated expressions.

But these anomalies, like the few typos and some confusions in the index, are trifling blemishes on the surface of a major and marvelous gift which enriches us all. Its scholarship is broad, deep, and current; its attitude toward sixteenth-century Europeans is respectful and sympathetic but judiciously skeptical of their own categories and self-understanding. MacCulloch has given us an important biography which substantially advances our understanding of a complex man and the complicated details of his life.

MARGARET CHRISTIAN Pennsylvania State University, Allentown