Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England (review)

Nicholas Tyacke's work on Arminianism in the English church transformed the field of early modern British religious history. Tyacke argued that the Church of England, in its inception, was dominated by Calvinist predestinarianism, a dominance that was only overturned with the rise of an anti-Calvinist movement after 1610. His work —which served to upend longstanding assumptions about nature of Anglicanism and its supposed opposite, "Puritanism" —proved deeply influential, not least among political historians, who incorporated it into emerging revisionist accounts of the causes of the English Civil War. This volume pays tribute to Tyacke's legacy. Interestingly, only one of the essays tackles the classic (but still controverted) problem of the Rise of Arminianism. Anthony Milton argues, with subtlety and plausibility, that the sometime divinity professor and bishop John Overall should be seen as a pivotal figure in the emergence of the tradition we know as Anglicanism, seen here not merely as a doctrinal and liturgical complex but as a kind of methodology of argument, which posits the Church of England as an authoritative entity, and organizes itself around the concept of a mean between extremes. Yet other essays do treat the broader Tyackeian theme of change within the Church of England. Tom Freeman gives us an interesting chronological exploration of the uses of the legend of Pope Joan, while Kenneth Fincham offers a study of a Restoration Norwich parish (thus revealing the fractured nature of restoration society and allowing us to trace the roots of those fissures back to pre-Civil-War conflicts). Diarmaid MacCulloch, long a champion of Tyacke's approach, provides further testimony to the essentially reformed nature of the Elizabethan Church, concluding playfully that it is with the Dissenter Richard Baxter that we might find the core of Anglicanism. Richard Cust offers a sensitive reading of the religious dimension of King Charles I's thought and life.

Perhaps paradoxically, however, the theme touched upon most frequently in these essays is the history of Puritanism —paradoxical, in some ways, because Tyacke in his early work did so much to problemetize that concept. Yet it is also true that in his later work, Tyacke began to embrace the study of the godly in their own right, producing what is perhaps still the best study of the continuity of non-conformist Puritanism in the early Stuart period. Essays by Brett Usher on Elizabethan social networks, Susan Hardman-Moore on the motivations of New England emigrés, Bill Sheils on Yorkshire clergymen, and Paul Seaver on lay patronage, all bear witness to the resilience of the godly, both in their own day and as subjects of historical scrutiny. Patrick Collinson shows that four decades after the publication of his masterwork, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, there remain as yet undiscovered gemstones waiting for scholars willing to chase the godly into the archives. Peter Lake's "Anti-Puritanism: The Structure of a Prejudice," serves as a self-conscious refrain, two decades after the fact, to Lake's now seminal article "Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice." Here, without denying the existence of a free-standing entity we might call Puritanism, Lake explores the various and competing ways in which contemporaries constructed and attacked a Puritan other, suggesting that a nuanced and careful reading of such polemics allows us a deeper understanding of the contested and diverse spectrum of religious opinion in early modern England. If Lake's is perhaps the most conceptually abstract and challenging of the essays, Keith Thomas's is the most sweeping: seeking to undermine longstanding assumptions about Protestant aversion to all art and imagery, Thomas suggests instead that what Protestantism did was to decouple art from devotion, making way for a distinctive, even secular, aesthetics (and arguably, therefore, paving the way for the category of pure "art" which we now recognize as unproblematic). It is vintage Thomas: highly provocative, and executed with grace and erudition, but...