Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England by Ole Peter Grell (review)

350book reviews Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart England. By Ole Peter GreU. (Brookfield, Vermont: Scolar Press, Ashgate PubUshing Company. 1996. Pp. x, 249. $76.95.) Now that we possess this study, Grell's earlier volume on The Dutch CaIvinists in Early Stuart London (1989), Andrew Pettegree's Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (1986), and Keith Sprunger's Dutch Puritanism (1982), the dimensions of the pan-European 'Calvinist' Reformed connection are becoming clearer, stretching from Lucca in the south, Poland in the east, to London and Edinburgh in the British Isles from the 1550's to past the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in the late seventeenth century. Particularly for those of us who focus parochiaUy on the English story, it is important to be reminded that Continental influence and interchange did not cease with the contributions of Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr to the Edwardian Reformation. GreU's current volume coUects eleven articles and chapters in books, aU but one of which had appeared before but scattered over a variety of EngUsh and Dutch publications. Although there is inevitably some repetition—Archbishop WUUam Laud's attempt to impose an English unUormity on the stranger churches in the years after 1634 appears in several contexts in several chapters —and a primary focus on the Dutch, GreU is not concerned exclusively with either the Dutch church at Austin Friars or with the EUzabethan and Early Stuart history of these exUes. In fact, one of his most interesting iUustrations of the truly international connections of the Reformed exiles concerns the three prominent Lucchese families—the Burlamachis, Calandrinis, and Diodatis— who left Lucca a generation after Peter Martyr and whose ramified families turned up in Geneva and Hamburg as weU as Amsterdam and London. Franciscus Gomarus, the Dutch theologian and leading anti-Remonstrant, had studied at Oxford and Cambridge in the early 1 580's, and a generation later such notorious Puritans as John Bastwick and Alexander Leighton were to study at the new university of Leiden. If the international nature of the Reformed community is one theme that runs through this volume, another is the gradual decline of the Dutch church at Austin Friars,initially the largest,richest, and most powerful ofthe exUic communities —when James I raised a loan of£100,000 from the City in 1617, another£20,000 was extracted from the merchant strangers, Dutch and French—but one which after the 1590's no longer received any new influx of refugees and by the 1630's was faced with a generation of young people for whom Dutch was no longer easUy understood. In 1625 the Dutch community hired BenJonson to write the commendatory verses to celebrate the coronation of Charles I, ultimately raising close to £1,000 for a triumphal arch; in 1661 the Dutch and French churches together barely managed to raise £400 toward the celebration ofCharles II's coronation. Symbolic was the transformation ofJan de Groot, deacon of the church at Austin Friars, who became Master of the Brewers' Com- book reviews351 pany in 1641 andAlderman of London a decade later,now known to his EngUsh colleagues as John Great. Paul S. Seaver Stanford University Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France. By Henry PhUlips. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. Lx, 334. $59.95.) The Catholic Reform movement began to have a significant impact in France during the seventeenth century, after the conclusion of the devastating religious wars. The Church undertook to assert its authority over society through its educational system, its missionary efforts in rural areas, and its promotion of activities designed to instill in the various segments of society a more intense religious consciousness. However, as Professor PhiUips informs us, the reforming efforts of the French Church were hampered not only by secular trends within French culture, especiaUy in science and phUosophy, that became increasingly influential at this time, but by forces within the Church itseU as well. In order to inspire in the hearts and minds of the faithful a greater respect for the authority of the Church, ecclesiastical officials at aU levels undertook to develop a clearer understanding of Catholic tradition and doctrinal orthodoxy. This task proved...