George Gifford and the Reformation of the Common Sort: Puritan Priorities in Elizabethan Religious Life (review)

George Gifford (1548?–1600), a Puritan clergyman in Maldon, Essex, had a multifaceted career in Elizabethan England. He was a participant in the unsuccessful movement to establish a presbyterian system of discipline within the Anglican Church, a polemicist against both Roman Catholicism and Separatist Congregationalism, an expositor of biblical prophecy, a voice of moderation in the prosecution of witches, and a discerning observer of rural folkways. Gifford is already the subject of several scholarly articles, and he frequently surfaces in broader studies of Elizabethan religious culture; now, for the first time, he is the focus of a monograph.

Timothy Scott McGinnis argues that the "unifying force that undergirded Gifford's ministry" was "an abiding interest in translating reformed religion into a language that could be appropriated by the 'common sort' of Christian who filled the parishes of the nation" (62). McGinnis adopts this interpretive angle because Gifford dismissed intellectualist preoccupations and pretensions as "either irrelevant or, worse still, harmful to the spiritual edification of the common sort" (158), and because Gifford's parish in Maldon was "a microcosm of the conflict between conformity and reform that so permeated the English church throughout the Elizabethan period" (51). This emphasis on practical divinity and local history places McGinnis's study within a tradition of scholarship recently exemplified by Eamon Duffy, Margaret Spufford, Caroline Litzenberger, and other historians who investigate the question of how the English laity received the Reformation.

This book's best chapter is the one on witchcraft, where McGinnis distinguishes Gifford from two English contemporaries who also wrote books about witchcraft, Reginald Scot (1538?–1599), a justice of the peace in Kent, and William Perkins (1558–1602), the famous Puritan lecturer at Great St. Andrew's Church in Cambridge. Gifford rejected Scot's skepticism about the existence of witches, but he lacked Perkins's zeal for their detection and prosecution (in fact, Gifford defused a potential witch scare in Maldon in the early 1590s). The remaining chapters — on Gifford's Presbyterianism, his anti-Catholicism, his anti-Separatism, and his preaching and catechizing — do not reach the same level of achievement. McGinnis's statements in these chapters often sound like Puritan platitudes. "Gifford feared that those who were just beginning to accept the godly message would be deceived by the separatists' call to private purity and drawn away from the Church of England" (107). "Gifford . . . argued for the right — indeed the responsibility — of the common sort to read the Bible for themselves" (143). "At the same time that Gifford proclaimed the perspicuity of the gospel, however, he also recognized its elusiveness. The gospel might be simple and available to all — even the simplest of the common sort — but the godly life was far from easy" (155). "Gifford frequently spoke of the common sort in a manner that stressed both his sympathy with their plight and his faith in their ability" (157).

McGinnis's book has one notable topical omission, a discussion of Gifford's fascination with biblical prophecy. Gifford translated William Fulke's 1573 Latin commentary on the Book of Revelation, and he also published his own Sermons Upon the Whole Booke of the Revelation (London, 1596), a work derived from a series of fifty sermons that he preached in Maldon on John's Apocalypse. Gifford's Sermons Upon . . . Revelation creates an interpretive problem for McGinnis, for the work's exegetical intricacy challenges his claim that Gifford was a committed popularizer. Moreover, by excluding this work from consideration, McGinnis overlooks one of the two areas (witchcraft is the other) in which Gifford clearly contributed to English intellectual history. Gifford (and Fulke) were two of only five English or Scottish authors who published expositions of the entire Book of Revelation during the Elizabethan period; their works, like those of the other three persons, laid the...