Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England—Essays in Honour of Professor W. J. Sheils ed. by Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England—Essays in Honour of Professor W. J. Sheils ed. by Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton Michael Questier Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England—Essays in Honour of Professor W. J. Sheils. Edited by Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton. [St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2012. Pp. xiii, 250. $124.95. ISBN 978-1-4094-0089-9.) Quite unusually for a Festschrift, this set of essays really has something to do with the body of work of the person whose career is being celebrated. William Sheils, in the later part of his œuvre, was noted in particular for probing, as he put it, the “ecumenicity of the everyday.” Most of these pieces look at aspects of where the everyday took precedence over and trumped the polemical divisions which defined post–Reformation English politics. This, of course, has been a topic of some significance in recent times because of some scholars’ continuing interest in how one narrates the rise of a tolerant mind-set, i.e., as the state became less inclined to persecute people for their religious beliefs. It is certainly possible to show that successive regimes in this period frequently did not go after people purely because they held this or that view about doctrine. So the capacity for people to “get along” should not actually be all that surprising; except, of course, that there were so many occasions when they did not. [End Page 364] So thoughtful, and really very accomplished, is the introduction (forcefully reminding the reader how recent postgraduates still are the future of the profession) and so well assembled are the essays that it is difficult in the space of a short review to do justice to them all. Alexandra Walsham reprises the literature of practical tolerance among the godly. The claim is that reformed/evangelical Protestantism in this period had a considerable capacity for socialization. There is a sense that, all the way through the period, with a theological and ecclesiological arm, Starbucks could have done well even in the godlier parts of country. Peter Marshall produces a cutting-edge essay on one of the more problematical issues of the period, the question of how Catholics who were urged to separate themselves from their local parish and all its ungodliness could end up in the churchyard even while the parochial authorities sometimes tried to keep them out. Robert Swanson’s “Fissures in the Bedrock” looks at how far the more confessionally explicit difficulties after the Reformation had their analogues in the period before it—a useful reminder for historians of the Reformation who tend to think that the world starts in 1558 or 1533. Emma Watson has a chapter on the continuing efficiency of the church courts and concludes that “both before and after the Reformation, clergymen were accountable to their congregations” (pp. 113–14). The source base for the essay reminds us that there is so much more mileage for PhD students in the under-used church court records of this period. Andrew Cambers has a brilliant piece on the circulation of libels in Northampton, a worthy addition to the trail blazed in the recent past by Alastair Bellany. This refers back also to Sheils’s work on Northamptonshire Puritanism—one bookend of his career, as it were. The article is in fact about the two libels that John Lambe denounced in Star Chamber in 1607 as part of a conformist attempt to “out” Northamptonshire Puritans and is really interesting, because it reveals a coterie of conformists and future Laudians there; this is, of course, slightly against the grain of the volume, as these people were definitely not getting along. Rosamund Oates’s contribution reviews the Challenge controversy and says, basically, that polemicists could not do anything to (re)confessionalize the calendar. Peter Lake weighs in with a typically nuanced reading of the play Sir John Oldcastle. Part of his recent long-term project is to work out the historical context for what London theatergoers were watching in the late-Elizabethan period. This play reverses the tropes and assumptions of Shakespeare’s...