The Quiet Reformation: Magistrates and the Emergence of Protestantism in Tudor Norwich (review)

The Quiet Reformation: Magistrates and the Emergence of Protestantism in Tudor Norwich. By Muriel C. McClendon (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999) 340 pp. $55.00.

The divisive, often bloody, nature of religious reform in early modern England is well known. Yet, in Norwich, Tudor England's second city, McClendon discovers an unusually "quiet" Reformation--one marked by civic officials' profound disinclination to police conscience and their practice of de facto religious toleration. McClendon is careful to clarify that "toleration" does not imply a belief in religious freedom or an anachronistic appreciation for religious diversity. Rather, it represents a practice, which Norwich's mayor, aldermen, and magistrates crafted and refined in their attempts to maintain local control over their city in an era of dramatic religious reversals.

McClendon's account of how and why magistrates responded to the challenges of the Reformation as they did is persuasive. On three traumatic occasions in Norwich's past, civic officials' inability to resolve religious and political disputes provoked outsiders' intervention in the city's affairs and the temporary suspension of civic liberties. Norwich's leaders learned their lessons from these troubling violations of civic autonomy; subsequently, they tried to find local and peaceful resolutions to defuse potentially explosive religious conflicts. Instead of widespread religious persecution, the city witnessed repeated examples of magisterial reserve, even in the Edwardian era when open conflict about religion emerged among Norwich's governors and "the temptation to crack down on all dissenters must have been great" (147). By the Elizabethan era--when, for the first time, civic officials were primarily Protestants--enforcement of moral and social discipline and the reformation of manners, particularly among the poor, became the magistrates' main concerns, not recusant hunting.

McClendon examines a wide array of Norwich's civic, judicial, and ecclesiastical records, many of them previously unexplored by historians. She is rightly cautious in her use of preambles in wills to determine magistrates' religious beliefs. Although the paucity of extant personal papers occasionally renders murky the degree of self-consciousness in the magistrates' political maneuvering, McClendon is forthright in acknowledging the limitations of her sources and is careful to note that no existing "policy statements" explicitly outline magistrates' rationales and goals and that no remaining records show "the formulation of any policy" to keep outsiders out of Norwich's affairs (14, 39). Yet, the overlapping tenures of the city's officials for much of the Tudor period enabled the "transmission of governing knowledge" and a "historical consciousness" about Norwich's previous battles for autonomy that help explain how their "consistent strategy" of toleration was possible (16, 147, 255).

McClendon's work is a significant contribution to the integration of English urban history and Reformation history, and she is attentive to economic and political issues. Her conclusions are of interest to scholars of secularization and toleration, terms that she uses with care. Her detailed analysis of Norwich's magistrates' "ability to compartmentalize religion" as one of many political concerns raises important questions about how scholars across disciplines understand the roles of religious beliefs in the lives of early modern people (28, 253). McClendon's fascinating account of magistrates' invention, and re-invention, of civic ritual makes use of historical and literary studies, but could have benefited from the insights of anthropologists. So, too, could her analysis of "civic identity," for which sociological works also would have proven useful.

Colleen M. Seguin
Valparaiso University

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