The Beginnings of English Protestantism (review)

Abstract

The Beginnings of English Protestantism. Edited by Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 242. $55.00 hardback; $20.00 paperback.) For generations the first English Protestants were regarded as the harbingers of post-medieval enlightenment and the founders of English national identity. Then about thirty years ago they began to be stigmatized as a revolutionary and destructive minority who first undermined and then destroyed a perfectly viable church, and permanently damaged the spiritual life of the country. This reemergence of a traditional Catholic view in turn prompted a radical rethinking of the whole religious history of sixteenth-century England. Now scholars do not see the Reformation in terms of Protestant/Catholic confrontation, but of a long and subtle process of transformation in which many factors played a part. The Reformers did not even adopt the name Protestant until the reign of Edward VI, and Peter Marshall here carefully refers to them as evangelicals, with all the doctrinal ambiguity which that implies. It was politics which determined the form of the English Reformation, but not its content. Whatever else he may have been, Henry VIII was not a Protestant. This collection, however, is not really concerned with politics, and not very much with the church at an institutional level, but rather with a variety of groups and individuals who for different reasons found themselves in conflict with the established orthodoxy of the time. Some, like the friars considered by Richard Rex, were well educated, and their views sprang partly from the continental theology of the time, and partly from what might be described as an indigenous skepticism about certain traditional practices. Others, like the Freewillers examined by Tom Freeman, were almost totally uneducated (a fact of which they made a conscious virtue), and their views were equally at odds with those of the Catholic Church and those of established Protestantism. In fact, in spite of the efforts of John Foxe, the unity of English Protestantism was more apparent than real, more imposed than spontaneous. Evangelical conversion was a highly individual experience, and expressed itself in eccentric ways, like those of Clement Armstrong described by Ethan Shagan, who contrived to mix a totalitarian view of the Royal Supremacy with a theology which was mainly Anabaptist. Dissent is a scarlet thread which runs through the whole of this story, from the known men of the fifteenth century to the Brownists and the Family of Love in the reign of Elizabeth. Women, as Susan Wabuda points out, were often leaders in this essentially domestic revolution, and exercised an influence which the leaders of the official Reformation were reluctant to acknowledge-although their Catholic opponents made much of it. …