Pieties in Transition: Religious Practices and Experiences, c. 1400–1640 (review)

This interesting collection takes as its points of departure the contentions that recent historical scholarship has overemphasized the unity and coherence of piety before the English Reformation and has underestimated the continuities across it. It suggests, too, that an excessive concern with one unit of analysis—the parish—has neglected other sites of “pieties in transition” such as the family and communities of readership. The declared focus here is on the county of Kent, although this is blurred by the contribution from Annemarie Speetjens, which is a useful review of the controversies generated by Jacques Toussaert’s attempt in the 1960s to apply exact quantitative techniques to the study of piety in late-medieval Flanders, and other authors struggle to shoehorn references to the county into their discussions. Not so with Robert Lutton’s methodologically rigorous reading of testamentary bequests from the pre-Reformation parishes of Tenterden and Cranbrook, which finds marked disparities between the two in lavishness and style of pious benefaction. The claim (p. 38) that “orthodox religious culture before the Reformation was deeply heterogeneous” puts a distinctly maximalist interpretation on his evidence, but there is no doubt that he is raising questions with which current scholarship needs to wrestle. G. M. Draper focuses on educational provision in Kent and emphasizes the extent of pre-Reformation provision through the chantry system. Paula Simpson’s chapter on resistance to tithe across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries finds a concentration of suits over time in particular places, and also—based on an analysis of defendants’ names—in particular families. Sheila Sweetinburgh examines testamentary charity in sixteenth-century Canterbury and finds symbolic resonances linking patterns of pre- and post-Reformation giving to the poor. Further continuities are identified in Claire Bertram’s study of representations of piety in gentry funeral monuments, although her argument that post-Reformation tombs were far from entirely “secular” is less innovative than its presentation implies. The interdisciplinary character of the collection is exemplified in Elizabeth Salter’s adoption of an “ethnographic approach to reading” (p. 145) to suggest that, before and after the Reformation, printed primers drew on a popular oral discourse and that readers responded to these texts in an “oralized manner” (p. 159) through their marginalia. It is perhaps unfortunate, however, that Salter uses the annotation “where the tree fallath ther he lyeth” as an example of popular “proverbialization” (p. 159) of official text. The phrase is, in fact, scriptural (Ecclesiastes 11:3) and was cited in the Elizabethan Book of Homilies. Emily Richards’s thoughtful exploration of the paradoxical relationship between the solitary life of late-medieval Carthusians and their mission to communicate with lay readers is only slightly marred by several erroneous assertions that Richard Rolle was a member of the order.

It is disconcerting to review a volume that has already reviewed itself, yet this is the nature of a characteristically insightful afterword by Alexandra Walsham. She rightly praises the subtlety and originality of many of the contributions, although she also identifies an implicit drift here towards a model of “English . . . exceptionalism.” (p. 189). She might have added that these are essays that emphasize individual and collective agency to the virtual exclusion of magisterial authority and its role in shaping pious choices.

Overall, the volume showcases some very good work being undertaken by younger scholars of late-medieval and early-modern religion, although the outstanding essay in the collection is the work of a more mature historian. Andrew Hope’s beautifully written and meditative piece discusses the hitherto unsuspected links between two contrasting Kentish female martyrs: the Catholic nun Elizabeth Barton and the radical Joan Bocher, alias Knell.