Pieties in Transition: Religious Practices and Experiences, c. 1400-1640 (review)

This richly-textured group of nine essays explores different aspects of piety and how it changed across the late medieval and early modern period, using close examinations to open up wider questions. Aside from Annemarie Speetjens's contribution, the essays focus on the county of Kent, a region usually seen as relatively religiously homogenous and long known for being "the most responsive in England to evangelical reform and the most precociously Protestant" (14). For readers expecting a broader scope, the combination of eight Kent-focused essays with one piece examining the Low Countries may seem jarring, although both Speetjen's essay and the rest of the book do an excellent job of fulfilling the editors' goals of opening up directions for the future.

In the introduction and afterword, Lutton and Salter discuss the reasons for these particular selections. Bringing them together is meant to provide a model of small-scale, detailed work on a particular geographical area. The long-running debate about the nature of the English Reformation threads through the collection, but is never a focus; indeed, the authors consistently state that their goal is to move beyond it by using very detailed examinations of specific questions to broaden traditional analytical categories.

The first essays compare two towns that have traditionally been lumped together, and two women who have traditionally been viewed as completely separate. Focusing on individual and family bequests, Robert Lutton analyzes religious beliefs and practices in Cranbrook and Tenterdon, geographically close towns with different demographics, economies, and material cultures. These differences, Lutton argues, lead to Tenterdon's "drifting towards a particularly English evangelicalism" by the mid-sixteenth century while Cranbrook maintained a range of traditional practices for far longer (29). Andrew Hope explores the connections between the two very different religious worlds of martyrs Elizabeth Barton and Joan Bocher, arguing that Joan Bocher not only had the model of The Maid of Kent in front of her, but was specifically reacting against the martyrdom of a family member for speaking out against Henry VIII by becoming "the Protestant Elizabeth Barton" (50).

In the second group of essays, the focus is on institutions. Sheila Sweetinburgh uses wills to trace changing patterns of pious donation to hospitals and charities as ideas about Purgatory and the "godly poor" shifted and evolved in sixteenth-century Canterbury. G. M. Draper challenges the longstanding belief that medieval schools were incompetent and ill-supported and that education only became important during the Protestant Reformation. Instead, he shows that in Kent, medieval education was supported and set within a larger context of pious devotion. Paula Simpson's exploration of tithe avoidance patterns shows a clear structure to tithe-related disputes, visible in court documents. Because tithe payments were "an inherent part of everyday social and economic relationships," the "ritual and symbolic behaviour" connected with them could serve as a way to express other social tensions (106). Getting out of Kent, Annemarie Speetjens's essay on quantitative approaches to piety in the Low Countries contains a very thorough discussion of post-Huizinga historians, valuable as a survey of the topic. Speetjens uses it to establish parameters for her discussion of confraternity membership and what happens to it around the Reformation, investigating the validity of Goudriaan's "1520s thesis."

The final three essays look at material culture. Claire Bartram analyzes the funeral monument of Elizabethan gentry. In an age where art in churches was controversial, effigy monuments modeled pious behavior and demonstrated the spirituality and morality of their subjects. Elisabeth Salter uses primers and prayer books for a detailed ethnographic analysis of popular culture across the shift from manuscript to print culture and Catholicism to Protestantism. She suggests that popular devotional literature played a key role in reshaping religious ideology, but that the genre had deep medieval roots. The last essay takes us to a single Carthusian manuscript...