The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520-1725 ed. by Margaret Spufford (review)

802book reviews accused Eberlin of fomenting radical upheaval.The case for Eberlin's moderation might be chaUenged. These questions aside, Dipple offers the reader a superb survey of historiography and a fresh and thorough review of Eberlin as weU as other anticlerical authors. Our view of the turmoU of the early 1520's is enhanced and put in sharper focus by this study. Paul L. Nyhus Bowdoin College The World ofRural Dissenters, 1520-1 725. Edited by Margaret Spufford. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Pp. xx, 459. $79.95.) In The World ofRural Dissenters Margaret Spufford has put together a volume of material with much greater coherence than most coUections of essays. Professor Spufford and a group of her former students, and other historians working in similar areas, address key issues pertaining to what one might caU the sociology of religious nonconformity in rural and smaU-town England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.These questions have long puzzled historians : what was the social, economic, status, or occupational profile of preReformation LoUards and later Puritans, Quakers, Baptists, and Familists; what types of communities fostered religious dissent and what does the geographical typology of dissenting communities tell us about the propagation of nonconformity ; and what connections (U any) were there between the places which experienced heresy early in the period and other forms of dissent after the Restoration? These are complex and weighty problems in their own right. In order to address them adequately, the authors need to confront other anciUary problems as weU; the circulation of cheap printed material of reUgious and other sorts, the nature of road networks and communications in the lateTudor and Stuart periods , and surname turnover in dtfferent types of agricultural environment are just a few examples. In short, Spufford and her coUeagues have brought to bear upon the problem of rural nonconformity the best of current English local historical practice.The results are stunning in then detaU and provocative in then impUcations, and will pre-empt any tendency historians may have in future to make simple generaUzations. One badly damaged generalization is the notion that the later LoUards were predominantly humble people, alienated from the society in which they dwelt: "LoUards were not insignificant members of isolated commumties.They were found at aU levels of rural and county society and they were totaUy intergrated into that society" (p. 132). Likewise, those who were involved in later nonconformity spanned the gamut of social types in Tudor/Stuart English society; the later seventeenth-century sectarians and the EUzabethan foUowers of the Fam- book reviews803 Uy of Love in rural Cambridgeshire emerge as neither "the meaner sort" nor a proto-bourgeoisie nor as splinter groups divorced from their parish communities . Moreover,the authors argue strongly and with a wealth ofexamples against the picture (sketched by, among others, Keith Thomas) of the rural poor as largely cut off—whether through poverty, iUiteracy, or indUference—from the basic tenets of orthodox Christianity or its radical offshoots: "there was in the seventeenth century a kind of general familiarity, in the alehouse, the cobbler's shop, the mUler's, the baker's, and many cottages, even of those exempt from taxation on grounds ofpoverty,with reUgious discussion and argument" (p. 85). A group of parishes in the ChUterns region in southern Buckinghamshire, where there had been a large number of LoUards in the 1520's and congregations of Quakers and Baptists 130 years later, serve as a limiting test case of an area with a remarkably continuous history of reUgious dissent, and thus as one focus of "microscopic study" (p. 29) for the book. In some of the most detaUed and painstaking of the local-history spadework (on the basis of surname longevity and genealogy traced from tax Usts and parish registers), Nesta Evans demonstrates both the relative geographical immobUity and the famiUal descent of nonconformists over the period; famUy, trading, and community networks as opposed to economic or social determinist explanations are aU the more critical for understanding the propagation of reUgious disssent (a conclusion recently underscored independently by Shannon McSheffrey's work on the earlier LoUards, Gender and Heresy:Women and Men in Lollard Communities 1420-1530 [Philadelphia: University...