Early English Orthodoxies: Reading the English Reformations

The past two decades have seen a series of studies of late medieval and Early Modern heresy, reform, and orthodoxy, many of which challenge long-held narratives of cultural and religious change and supersession. At the vanguard of these reassessments, Eamon Duffy’s 1992 revisionist history of reformation England, The Stripping of the Altars, argued that because the late medieval English church “had about it no particular marks of exhaustion or decay,” the Reformation came as a “violent disruption” of the period’s robust religion.¹ But many scholars found Duffy to insist rather too strongly on a narrative of cultural rupture and change, noting his scant consideration of late medieval religious controversy and dissent. In a lengthy review of Duffy’s book, David Aers argued that Duffy’s emphasis on the vitality of “traditional religion” in late medieval England obscured the reality of heterodox sects in the century before the Reformation.² Subsequent considerations of early English religious cultures have continued to echo many of the same themes. More recently James Simpson and others have sought to recover a sense of the vibrantly “reformist” sensibilities and aesthetics of late medieval England, lamenting the destruction resulting from “revolutionary” tendencies, while also decrying scholarly tendencies to find a heretic under every late medieval bush.³ Still others have worked to expand critical awareness of the many examples of non Wycliffite dissent in the years before the Reformation.⁴ Such categorical broadening, troubling, and blurring has inflected recent work on heresy in late medieval and Early Modern England, where scholars have increasingly emphasized the “grey areas” of heterodox and orthodox stances, thus smoothing out difference and speaking of early English belief as a spectrum rather than a set of binary oppositions.⁵

If the boundaries between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in this period remain contested, nearly as debated are the Reformation’s chronological boundaries.⁶ Many scholars continue to be occupied with befores and afters, beginnings and endings, and models of cultural change and theological difference. Indeed, even as such temporal distinctions make our macronarratives possible, they have the unfortunate habit of obscuring more than revealing the vicissitudes of cultural continuity and change. Nonetheless, such distinctions remain difficult to avoid. Two decades ago, Christopher Haigh wrote that “the core of a study of English Reformations must be a political story. And that story begins in 1530.”⁷ Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magisterial Reformation: Europe’s House Divided focused on the pan-European reformations and thus set its historical range a bit earlier (1490–1700) but opened with a chapter that offers a brief backward glance toward “The Old Church.”⁸ In marking out such late boundaries, both works imply that the dissent that Anne Hudson tentatively suggested may have constituted a “Premature Reformation” in late medieval England was, in fact, no reformation at all.⁹ More recently, revisionist scholars have sought to adjust our lexicon and to reframe traditional period boundaries to emphasize continuities, naming “Reformations” in the plural so as to suggest “the continuity of the ideologies of reform across the Middle Ages and the early modern period” and to challenge the “tendency of grand narratives to homogenize the religious and political processes transforming English culture.”¹⁰ James Simpson likewise has repeatedly issued a call for a “more diachronic historicism,” noting that “when we draw lines sharply between periods whole unto themselves, wherever we draw the line, we are already falling victim to the logic of the revolutionary moment. It’s the revolutionary moment that needs the sharp breaks in history to define itself.”¹¹ What remains clear, if anything, is that we are far from reaching a consensus on how to talk about religious continuity and change, likeness and difference, and orthodoxy and heresy...