Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (review)

A reviewer knows he is reviewing an important book when, a year or so after its publication—in the normal course of things—he finds himself turning to the task with the belated sense that half the intellectual world has already digested its contents, and the field itself already seems shaped by it. James Simpson’s Burning to Read is a polemical book with a powerful, urgent message. It argues that fundamentalism is rooted paradoxically in the very event seen by traditional historiography as one of the origins of Liberalism, the Protestant Reformation. A concept almost synonymous with “progressive” in Whig historiography, “reformation” in Simpson’s view had a far more complex role. “Contrary to the liberal tradition’s often complacent assumption that fundamentalism is reactionary and ‘conservative,’ ” Simpson maintains, “fundamentalism is a distinctly modern phenomenon, the inevitable product of newly impersonal and imperious forms of textuality, and of the application of ever fewer textual instruments to ever larger jurisdictions” (3). Participating in a rethinking of the Reformation that has been undertaken by such scholars as Eamon Duffy and Christopher Haigh, Simpson retraces Reformation history in terms of the changing nature of reading itself, and in particular the “imperious forms of textuality” that informed emergent systems of belief.

With this larger argument about the origins of fundamentalism as its framework, the book focuses its analysis on the uneasy birth of Protestantism in England. The detailed analysis spans chronologically from William Tyndale’s efforts to introduce the vernacular Bible in the 1520s to the death of Henry VIII in 1547. But before turning to this close analysis, the first chapter, entitled “Two Hundred Years of Biblical Violence,” draws a broad history that, Simpson suggests, partially produced—and reinforced—the rigorous forms of textualism inherent to the new evangelical program. (Simpson prefers the historically accurate term “evangelical” to “Protestant,” which was not yet in active use by reformers at this stage; “fundamentalism,” though an acknowledged anachronism, nonetheless suits the book’s larger claim that the early modern practice of biblical literalism cannot only be identified in familiar contemporary terms, but is also connected historically to contemporary practices.) In an effort to capture the violent consequences of the reform movement, this first chapter begins where Simpson’s detailed analysis ends, at the scripturally informed installation of Henry’s son Edward VI—the first English king to be anointed in the new church. Edward was seen as a second Josiah, a biblical child king whose high priest, like Archbishop Cranmer, had discovered the sacred text (the vernacular English Bible). Josiah provides a biblical exemplar of kingship at a turning point of religious history with the book at the center of transformation. But his story also provides scriptural examples of violent, exclusionist practices against other religions, as when Josiah destroys the altars of the worshipers of Baal and sacrifices the priests themselves (2 Kings 23). Christian violence was not only authorized by strict evangelical use of scripture, but it also reinforced the rigorousness with which scripture was read.

The next several chapters explore paradoxes in the evangelical program of reading, some related to this history of violence. The first of these chapters, “Good Biblical News,” records the extraordinary efforts of Tyndale in producing a vernacular New Testament, which he did from exile in Worms in 1526. By the early 1530s, he had also translated much of the Hebrew Bible, which he labored over in prison before being convicted of heresy in 1536, when he was then strangled prior to being burned. It is a painful and well-rehearsed historical irony that this occurred only a few years prior to Henry VIII’s issuance of a patent for printers to provide “in our own maternal English tongue” (39) a Bible profoundly indebted, as was the English evangelical movement itself, to Tyndale’s efforts. In accord with the Protestant biases that still dominate our conception of this story—biases perhaps out of place in rigorous historical analysis...