Providence in Early Modern England (review)

Providence in Early Modern England. By Alexandra Walsham. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. xvii, 387. $85.00.)

During the past half a decade Alexandra Walsham has established herself as one of the best of the young historians working on the English Reformation. Like many of them she has been following the trail blazed by Patrick Collinson, of understanding the process by studying its results rather than its causes: in her own words, by considering the "how" rather than the "why" or "when." Such a methodology fits well with the current preoccupation with cultural studies, and with cultural relationships between different levels of society, and this book represents one of its triumphs.

The title is something of a shorthand. "Early modern England" stands here (as now so often) for the period between the accession of Elizabeth and the outbreak of the Civil War, and "providence" signifies publicly articulated attitudes to catastrophic natural events, from earthquakes and plagues to monstrous births and sudden deaths. The source material consists mainly of two different but related printed genres: tracts and sermons by Protestant divines and cheap sensationalist literature. The comparisons and contrasts between the two are illuminating in themselves, and the market for both suggests that to a reasonable extent they can be considered to reflect wider public attitudes. It is part of the quality of Dr. Walsham's work, however, that she sets both in a context which ranges from folklore to medieval devotional works to tapestries and funeral monuments. The text is well illustrated with woodcuts taken from some of the principal texts.

The conclusions of the book are characteristically multivalent and subtle. Beliefs in the providential origin of disasters and prodigies reveal the limited impact of the Reformation, in that they show strong continuities with medieval and ancient attitudes and stubbornly included aspects which ministers thought theologically suspect. On the other hand, they also illustrate the transformative power of the Reformation, by showing how the new religion remolded the older ideas in its own form, and uncoupled them from Catholic theology. It emerges as both the long, uneven, and officially imposed process of Christopher Haigh and the "howling success" of Diarmaid MacCulloch. Providentialism represented one of the areas in which divines most strongly and angrily distanced themselves from what they held to be popular beliefs and those of populist literature, but in reality they had a far closer interaction with the latter, and relied far more on negotiation and compromise with it, than their fulminations suggest. For a long time, providentialist discourse served to unite English Protestants and to give them a sense of membership of an elect nation, but as divisions between them widened from the 1620's, it became a divisive and subversive force which was eventually largely discredited by its association with partisan and sectarian polemic.

Niggling doubts must remain as to how far even the spectrum of attitudes represented by these printed sources really represented that of society at large, but this may be as close to the truth of the matter as we will ever get. More than ever before, moreover, studies such as this are providing a sense of the period between 1560 and 1640 as a distinctive one in English history, in which initial Protestant success created a polity and culture too dynamic, complex, and insecure to survive the strains of the age. The English-speaking world still lives in its ruins.

 

Ronald Hutton
University of Bristol

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