Thinking of the Laity in Late Tudor England (review)

Thinking of the Laity is not quite a counter-factual history, but it does concern itself with a "might-have-been" of the English Church in the sixteenth century. It examines the hopes and schemes of advocates of greater local and lay control over the Elizabethan Church, and attempts to account for their ultimate failure. This is a line of thought that Kaufman traces from Lollardy and the early Reformation, through the activities of "stranger" churches in the Edwardian period, and into and beyond the Marian persecution (a time when exiled congregations experimented with lay participation in governance). Thereafter, the key figures included William Fulke, John Field, Thomas Lever, and Dudley Fenner, proponents of what Kaufman dubs a populist Puritanism in the first half of Elizabeth's reign. The anachronism "populist," he contends, is allowable if "we suspend the requirement that populists reflect the opinions of those whose participation they promote" (p. 25). The aim was usually, if not full-blown presbyterianism, then at least some degree of lay oversight of the local ministry, involving the right to consent to patrons' nominees, or to veto unsatisfactory candidates after probation. All the plans came to nothing, partly as a result of a royal and episcopal backlash in the 1570's exemplified in the putting down of the preaching exercises known as "prophesyings" (occasions which Kaufman regards as more genuinely subversive than does Patrick Collinson); partly as a consequence of reformers' own growing distrust of the common people. From the 1580's, Kaufman contends, Puritans turned to inward piety and abandoned schemes for congregational participation.

There is much to think about here, but also some occasion to pause and question. The decision to wrap the story up in the mid-1580's prevents any discussion of the Marprelate Controversy, surely a seminal moment for both perceptions and practices of populist puritanism. There is also the issue of what precisely we should understand by Kaufman's regularly recurring phrase, "broadly participatory parish regimes." On one reading, English parish regimes had always been broadly participatory, before and after the Reformation. Kaufman is arguably too dismissive of continuities, and too prone to find new shoots in the everyday working out of parish life. Thus, he suggests that in the early Elizabethan decades churchwardens were coming to resemble presbyters, and that their initiative and leadership in the policing of morality and disorder anticipated that puritan desideratum, "a lawful and godly seigniory in every congregation" (p. 89). It was surprising, he thinks, that Puritans did not make more of them in their schemes. But churchwardens were simply doing what they had ever done, in the context of a well-understood demarcation of responsibilities between clergy and laity. A good case can be, and has been, made that lay oversight of the sort Kaufman valorizes was actually more evident before rather than after the Reformation, not least through the regular employment and supervision of chantry and fraternity priests. It will not quite do to say (p.77) that pre-Reformation parishes must have been less popular and participatory than revisionists like to think, just because early evangelical activists castigated the clergy. Thinking of the Laity is an engaged, and engaging essay, but one rather too locked into its own terms of reference.