The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation by Alec Ryrie (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 278 artist from Florence, as apparently many did, and his connections with the Carmelite church. In the latter portion of this section, Rowland discusses the full history of the Carmelites, an order founded by the Old Testament prophet Elijah and had first established themselves on the slopes of Mount Carmel. Their spread to Italy had been a slow one, and it was not until 1317 that Pope John XXII issued a bull granting the order the same rights as the other preaching communities, the Franciscans and Dominicans. Paintings were part of a far-reaching publicity program in which Carmelite centers in Florence, Siena, and Pisa hosted unusually innovative altarpieces and frescoes. These pieces also promoted their associations with Old Testament figures such as Elijah and Elisha, and smaller commissions made for personal devotion included insertions of Carmelites into historical sequences, such as the institution of Saint Peter’s appointed role as head of the Catholic Church surrounded by representatives of numerous orders. The year the Pisa Altarpiece was completed, Rowlands observes, also marked the 200th anniversary of Pope Honorious III’s confirmation of the Carmelite Order, and may have been commissioned to commemorate this event. At this point, it should be noted that the influences of Ser Giuliano and the Carmelites upon Masaccio’s Pisa Altarpiece has not received a great deal of attention until now. And yet, it is somewhat difficult to see how this summary of the history of the Carmelites has any strong bearing on the matter. Aside from the possible commission of the piece to specifically commemorate the 200th-year anniversary that Rowlands briefly mentions, there does not appear to be any significant Carmelite influences on the iconography of the altarpiece itself. The last section of the book is devoted to the later history of the Pisa Altarpiece and how different parts of it have become a part of various collections. Ser Giuliano’s chapel was destroyed in 1568 for renovation of the church, and the Masaccio’s altarpiece would have been moved to a new chapel or to the sacristy. Not long afterwards, the panels were broken up, and there are references to the scattered parts as early as 1612. What follows is the provenance of some of the individual pieces up to their current collections. This small book functions splendidly as separate independent topics of discussion , but perhaps like the Pisa Altarpiece, readers must reconstruct these pieces in the manner they see most fitting. It may not be remarkably groundbreaking , but it is a convenient source as a brief introduction to the scholarship on Masaccio’s life, the Pisa Altarpiece, and the Carmelites. LISA TOM, Art History, UCLA Alec Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press 2003) xix + 306 pp., ill. In his work on evangelicals during the last decade of Henry VIII’s reign, Alec Ryrie argues against both A. G. Dickens’s depiction of this period as a “quiet advance” for Protestants on the one hand, and the more recent notion of these years as a “conservative reaction” on the other. Instead, Ryrie posits a “profoundly ambiguous” monarchial attitude toward reform, an attitude that left enough religious wiggle-room to permit a significant degree of evangelical REVIEWS 279 thought and activity to survive and even to thrive until Edward’s succession to the throne. This very ambiguity, however, led to a conflict of loyalties for the evangelical subjects—to their faith and to their king. This conflict provides the lens through which Ryrie proposes to view the last decade of Henry’s life. Part 1 reviews the historiography of the period beginning, perhaps inevitably, with John Foxe and the profound impact his work has on perceptions of the early 1540’s even to this day. Foxe and other later-sixteenth-century Protestant writers wanted to acknowledge Henry’s break from Rome, but could not countenance his persecution of evangelicals. The fact that Henry had them burnt was difficult enough, but the legislative permanence of the Act of Six Articles —represented later by Foxe as the “whip with six strings” was perhaps his most unforgivable deed...