Henry VIII and the English Reformation (review)

There are many decisions to be taken, and many dangers inherent, in offering a second edition of a well-thumbed book. Richard Rex in his new edition of Henry VIII and the English Reformationhas had to make all the usual decisions, and for the most part has avoided the dangers. The first decision is whether or not to revise the original text in detail to incorporate new scholarship. Rex has chosen to let his original text stand largely unaltered, instead relegating the shifts in scholarly opinion to additional or altered footnotes. The second decision is whether to change the overall argument. This arises as an issue only when the author’s view of the material has altered substantially in intervening years, and he or she feels compelled to mount a new argument based on the same sources. This was not a problem faced by Rex, who noted that his basic judgments had not changed. The dangers of the second edition bearing little resemblance to the first, or being a confused mish-mash of anachronistic historiographies, are thus avoided in this case. The third decision is whether or not to add substantial new material in the form of an additional chapter or section so that, John Foxe-like, each edition grows ever larger and more unwieldy. Rex has, indeed, chosen to add a new chapter (chapter 6) to what was, in its first edition, quite a slim book. The additional twenty-six pages do not overextend the text and, if anything, add a sense of completeness that was lacking in the earlier volume.

It is this final chapter that makes this new edition worthy of review. It is a distillation of developments in Rex’s thinking (and English Reformation historiography) over the previous twelve years and narrates his argument that any “sharp conceptual separation between politics and religion . . . poses the primary obstacle to an informed and sympathetic understanding . . . particularly of ‘religious’ history in sixteenth-century Europe” (p. xi). Narrativeis perhaps not quite the correct descriptor for this chapter, which is, rather Elton-like, an argument held together by an extended series of examples. These are for the most part well-known, even canonical examples ( Utopia, the Hunne case, the Maid of Kent, and so forth), but that is appropriate in what is, after all, a book intended for undergraduates. Given that Rex has signaled that his views on the period are substantially unaltered and that new perspectives from other scholars have not forced any major reworking, it might reasonably be asked what this additional chapter offers that is sufficiently novel to warrant inclusion? As a succinct essay on Henrician religion and politics, chapter 6 is indeed successful and comprehensive enough to stand alone from the rest of the book. For this reason, however, it is perhaps not as well integrated as the reader might wish. It sometimes seems more of an extended concluding summary than a chapter adding a new idea. On balance, however, it is this extra chapter that justifies the second edition. The student wishing a solid survey of the Henrician Reformation can and should read the whole book. The student looking for a concise summary of Rex’s view could do worse than simply to read chapter 6 and skim over the rest—and that makes it useful.