The widening gate: Bristol and the Atlantic economy 1450-1700 (review)

236 Reviews common ground between Fisher and Luther, although he is plainly not sympathetic to the ecumenical dialogue which has been reconciling the Catholic and Lutheran doctrines of justification (see p. 114). His treatment of Luther is not wholly satisfying. However, this is testimony to the difficulties of this kind of work, when the writing on individual figures is so specialized, complex, and vast. I would have liked more nuances in some places, for example in the first sentence of chapter 8: 'John Fisher's theology of justification, unlike that of Luther and the reformers, left room for the sacraments to play an active part in the Christian life'. The last controversy dealt with here is one which in the end cost Fisher his life: that over Henry VIII's divorce. Rex's assessment over aU is against the stereotype of Fisher as a die-hard conservative. He embraced Biblical and patristic humanism. He was a genuine friend of Erasmus. He believed in the vernacular Bible. Bruce E. Mansfield Department of History University of Sydney Sacks, David H., The widening gate: Bristol and the Atlantic economy 14501700 , Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford, University of Catifornia Press, 1991; cloth; pp. xxvii, 464; 6 illustrations; 30 tables; R.R.P. US$45.00 Surviving records of the past can be organized in different ways to produce alternative but often interlocking perspectives of the image they project David Sacks has already given us one perceptive study of Bristol. In this volume, drawing inspiration but not necessarily methodology from some anthropological and sociological descriptive techniques, he constructs a model of the process of change through what he himself describes as the old-fashioned method of political nanative. His concern is with the moments of change, particularly in economic matters, as they relate to the actors' own expectations and as these expectations also develop within their personal needs and their own moral and ethical codes. He sees change as pervasive, the intellectual reworking of one idea reverberating in other areas. The desire to maintain the art of merchandise as a separate craft ran in parallel to some forms of religious conservatism in the 1620s and 1630s, for example. Sacks sees the process of re-organization in Bristol society as a slow and often diffuse movement which ends with a more closed circle, a changed structure rather than a simple cutting off of mobility nanowly defined, but one making the city society increasingly rigid and hierarchical, he adroitly balances the individual decision making of his subjects against the cultural codes and social meanings increasingly shaped, as he seeks to show, by the intrusion of the wider community of Britain and Europe which could no longer be closed out. The new Reviews 237 vision of order in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries developed in the context of an altered relationship with the crown, which became an alternative source of legitimation to the community as national and local interpenetrated. Sacks illustrates the changes in ritual behaviour from the processions and masses recorded in Ricart to the more austere practices of a Protestant community. Acknowledging the problems of interpreting such symbolic activities, he tries to tease out the relationships between religious conscience, the strong Lollard traditions in Bristol for example, and the abandonment of ceremonies intended to strengthen a local, inward-looking unity. He concludes that theseritualshad ceased to be effective long before Reformation piety saw them as superstitious. Bristols's restructuring was forced upon it by the collapse of her medieval trade in wine and cloth with Gascony and the departure of many of her more prominent entrepreneurs to London. These enforced shifts in commercial thinking pushed the merchants into trading more broadly with Iberia, the Mediterranean, and across the Atlantic. They encouraged exploration, the development of new fishing grounds and eventuaUy an import-driven pattern of commerce which took Bristol ships and merchants to most of the ports of the Atlantic world. Success in the new trade demanded a more integrated commercial structure and linked the merchants in partnerships, reducing the number of merchants who could survive. A multi-faceted struggle between the old gtid, the retailers, the craftsmen, and the mere merchants developed, marked by the...