:Ronsard: Etude historique et litteraire. Vol. 5: Un Brasier sous la cendre

Abstract

Graham Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation: Glory, Laud and Honour, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2005, pp. xii + 207, hb. £45.00, ISBN: 1843832089This book has to be judged at two levels. For the general and non-expert reader it is a fair, well-written and attractively-illustrated introduction to the topic, though some of us might quibble about the atrocious pun in the sub-title and question the extent to which the high church movement of the early seventeenth century really was a 'counter-Reformation'. For the more expert scholar it is a sad disappointment and this is a pity, since there is a good deal more to be researched and published about the grassroots response to the episcopal initiatives of the 1620s and 1630s. Graham Parry looks at church building and furnishing (five chapters), contemporary devotional literature (two chapters), church music and the role of antiquaries in promoting romantic visions of a pre-Reformation heritage (one chapter each). The last four chapters are undoubtedly the best since they cover those areas where Graham Parry, Professor of English at York University, has the greatest expertise. Whilst he tries to weld these elements together with the architectural and liturgical ones to provide a 'seamless robe' of high church belief and practice there is little doubt that the robustness of his thesis is challenged by the defects of the first five chapters. These suffer from no really new source material being used, some major omissions in the secondary works consulted, and a serious lack of contextualisation.Parry treats the seventeenth-century high church movement as if it was a purely English phenomenon led largely by a few bishops. There is no mention of Ireland, Scotland and Wales yet the movement (if it was one in the classic sense) cannot be understood without being seen in a British context. Whilst there is no doubt that there was much opposition to the ceremonial initiatives, though the vociferousness of the opposition probably exaggerated its true extent, it is at least arguable that without the attempt (by Scottish bishops) to impose the Laudian agenda on Scotland the religious fall-out of the 1640s might have been more modest, and the campaign for a limited episcopacy successful. Parry also sees this high church revival as something that was confined to the period between about 1615 and 1645. There is, however, growing evidence that, at the grassroots, opposition to Puritanism, and its attack on the Book of Common Prayer, was beginning to drive people, with or without an episcopal lead, into a greater appreciation of ceremonial. Where Parry is at his most misleading is in giving the impression that, with the execution of Laud and the abolition of episcopacy, the high church revival was a spent force after 1645. In fact, of course, as we now know from the work of John Spurr (not cited) and others, there was far more residual Anglican liturgical practice during the interregnum than had been realised and, although the 1662 religious settlement tried to be as comprehensive as possible, its failure to reconcile all the Puritans was to lead to a high church triumph by the 1670s. …