Reformation England, 1480-1642

Abstract

Some university students find historical controversy challenging and exhilarating: for them, it is what makes our subject worth doing. Others find it irritating, predictable and sometimes rather childish: perhaps they should be studying something else. And many find it confusing to see the same material interpreted in different ways, or different kinds of evidence set against each other: ‘How are we to know what's right?’ they sometimes ask. Peter Marshall's book will not tell them what is right, but it will tell them what the issues are and how they can be approached. Reformation England is an early volume in Arnold's ‘Reading History’ series, edited by Michael Biddiss, and it aims to make sense of the recent historiography of the English Reformation and of the Reformation itself. It cleverly combines outline narrative of the period with analysis of the main interpretative debates since the 1970s. The first half of the book is structured around a conventional chronology (‘Catholic England’ to 1530, ‘Henry VIII's Reformation’, ‘Edwardian Revolution’, ‘Queen Mary's Reformation’), and is followed by three thematic chapters on the period 1559–1625 (‘Protestantism and Puritanism’, ‘Religions of the People’, and ‘Catholics in Protestant England’), and finally by ‘Charles I's Reformation’. Each chapter has the same pattern: an introductory survey of the historiographical issues, a section on each controversy, and a ‘summation’ (am I the only one who finds that word ugly?). The argument is pretty constant too: first there was the traditional somewhat whiggish interpretation; then there was revisionism, that showed the whigs were wrong but went too far; and now we have sensible post-revisionism, that tells it how it really happened. I am not sure it has been quite like that. Rather we have seen two necessary stages of revision. First, there were efforts to set the record straight, a partly negative drive to discredit a progressivist interpretation and inject some balance. Then, by the 1990s, there were attempts to provide a revised explanation of change in the light of newer knowledge. It was a shift of agenda rather than a shift of interpretation, which is why early revisionists (such as this reviewer) found it so easy to become post-revisionists—of a sort. Of course, the labels are simplifying and a little demeaning: historians have their own individual standpoints, their own particular expertise, their own favoured evidence, and their own blind-spots. We are often unhappy to be bundled into a ‘school’, along with allies we might not recognise. But many historians of the Reformation, the post-Reformation and the pre-civil war periods certainly shared some intellectual characteristics and approaches in the 1970s and 1980s, and there was certainly a marked change of emphasis in the 1990s. It would have been interesting to see Marshall explain all this, though perhaps that is a task for a cultural history of the late-twentieth century rather than a tightly-focused textbook on Reformation England. As a text for students, Reformation England is a great success. The presentation is stylish and often witty, the treatment level-headed and fair-minded, and the approach is student-friendly: the book is easy to read, easy to use, and easy to agree with. Marshall's calm and unremitting common sense is attractive to students, and I fear a flood of predictable, monochrome, post-revisionist essays. Someone needs to stake out a bold post-post position, before early modernists are all bored to tears and our students turn to the Restoration for a bit of excitement.