The later Reformation in England 1547-1603 (review)

Reviews 143 The question of female agency is also the issue in Elizabeth Cohen's essay, 'No longer virgins; self-presentation by young w o m e n in late Renaissance Rome'. She examines the testimonies taken down in a dozen rape cases of virgins w h o did not belong to the elite, and in listening to the stories, seeks out individual voices within the socially and legally constructed testimonies. Thus she finds that the stories varied and that some of the w o m e n did portray themselves as acting with some sense of their own will, that they could speak not only as passive victims but as participants in the making of then own fate. The essays in the volume are to say the least catholic in their approaches, deploying strands from the traditional methodologies of established disciplines as weU as from the theoretical orientations provided by Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstraction, and iconography. The result is a series of essays that provoke and challenge and provide diverse perspectives not only on w o m e n in Renaissance Italy but also on the Italian Renaissance and some of its protean concomitants tike humanism and individualism. It is also a volume that unlike so many collections of papers, delivers precisely what thetitlepromises. Roslyn Pesman Cooper Department of History University of Sydney MacCulloch, Diarmaid, The later Reformation in England 1547-1603 (British history in perspective), Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1990; paper; pp. x, 205; R.R.P. £6.99. W e might say of the Church of England what Samuel Johnson pronounced of a dog walking on its hind legs, that we admire it not because it is done well, but because it is done at all. In this comprehensively incisive survey of cunent writing on English religious life 1547-1603, encompassing the 'political' Reformation, the theological conflict and the unresolved question of voluntary religion, Diarmaid MacCulloch writes as an ordained Anglican whose heroes are the nonconforming bishop, John Hooper, and the presbyterian organiser, John Field. H e appreciates the Church's achievement in squaring within a national body the circle of God's few Elect. Yet his perspective highlights official failure to keep up with Continental reformed theology after the 1550s and the unwananted survival of a Catholic structure thwarting sincere Protestant attempts at internal reform. Eventually that anested development produced its own apologists: his parenthetical villains John Whitgift and Richard Bancroft, dancing to the tune struck by the crypto-papist Sir Christopher Hatton. Inevitably Collinsonian in outline, the individual detailed shading of this 'political' discussion leads into an unusually clear analysis of English responses (to put them no higher) to shifting Continental theological influences. Zwingli's Zurich receives its due beside Geneva. Beginning with the chronically 144 Reviews eclectic Cranmer, MacCulloch progresses through a discriminating assessment of Calvin's restricted impact upon the English, towards a balanced appreciation of the Puritan tradition as firmly within the Elizabethan mainstream. In perhaps the most accessible short summary available of the debates between covenanters and 'proto-Arminians' over edification, predestination, and salvation, MacCulloch alone justifies the purchase price, and rounds it off with a sound discussion of the partial creation of a reformed church leadership, law, and ministry within a structure less reformed than the Roman Catholic by 1600. MacCulloch's ability to summarise the cunent state of historiographical play on these issues, and his carefulness in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of arguments from which he dissents, is fully stretched in the final section on the hotly debated c o m m o n reception of the Reformation. This question, like the earlier debate over 'Puritanism' which spawned it, is unlikely to be resolved to anyone's satisfaction, since it will inevitably metamorphose into still newer areas of enquiry. But, meanwhile, we have this discriminating summary. Pre-Reformation highland and lowland England displayed different patterns of devotional life, reflecting underlying differences in parish structure and control. The Reformation exacerbated these differences, and the competing arguments of A. G. Dickens, Christopher Haigh, and Patrick Collinson have yet to escape the limitations of their contrasting evidential bases. What may emerge, unlooked for, are two reordered worlds, one sanctified by either competing faith, the...