The Roots of the Reformation: Tradition, Emergence and Rupture by G. R. Evans (review)

In this lively survey, aimed at students and general readers, the distinguished medievalist G. R. Evans sets herself the task of placing the Reformation in the long sweep of Christian history. The early chapters take us through fundamental questions of Christian origins and approach (“The Idea of Church”; “Where Was the Bible?”), and supply effective summaries of medieval theology and reform movements—Waldenses, Beghards, Franciscans, and the like. Martin Luther makes his appearance on page 287, by which time we are thoroughly acclimatized and orientated. Evans’s publishers have secured from leading scholars an impressive list of endorsements for the book, and on the cover it is described as making “a profound contribution to the current paradigm-shift in Reformation studies.” This, however, is somewhat to over-ice the cake. The placing of the Reformation in medieval context is welcome (if not so very innovative), but Evans does not really have a distinct thesis to offer on the precise relationship of sixteenth-century reform to earlier developments, beyond noting the prevalence of doctrinal debate, intellectually curious layfolk, and anticlericalism in preceding centuries. Nor does the book have very much to say about the consequences of the Reformation, other than in Evans’s own specialist area of biblical hermeneutics, which is treated at length in the final chapter. The broad scope of the book up to this point comes at the price of a rather fragmented and episodic structure, in the course of which some issues (for example, the Lutheran Book of Concord, p. 318; the Dissolution of the Monasteries, pp. 331–32; the Marian restoration, pp. 362–63) are treated so superficially as to give little sense of their context or significance. Yet at the same time, an initial impression of comprehensiveness is misleading, insofar as there is much discussion of the British Isles, Germany, and Switzerland and very little on the rest of Europe. Formal confessions of faith are summarized at (sometimes excessive) length, but consideration of the social dimension of religious change is distinctly thin. It must also be said that the scholarly apparatus is not always flawless (missing page references, much citation of Web resources of sometimes uncertain dependability) and that there are a number of slips and errors, some perhaps a result of careless proofreading. Thus, we find a confusion of Zwingli and Müntzer (p. 178), a suggestion that St. Thomas More was a religious exile at Louvain (p. 266), the claim that the Edict of Worms predated the Diet there (p. 292), or that Cardinal Thomas Wolsey died in prison in 1530 (p. 323). Unwary readers are likely to gain the mistaken impression that the Council of Trent met for the first time in 1551 (p. 397). Terminology is not always deployed with sufficient precision—it is probably forgivable in a textbook to describe all the Reformed areas of Southern Germany and Switzerland as “Calvinist” (p. 363), but it is frankly confusing and misleading to use the term as a synonym for Puritan in the English context (p. 415). It is also going some way beyond acceptable shorthand to describe King Henry VIII as “newly Protestant” (p. 277) in 1535. Too often, the book draws on a secondary scholarship that is distinctly out of date, something that colors the treatment of such issues as the Marprelate Tracts, the significance of Richard Hooker, or the character of Scottish Calvinism. Taken in the round, this is an idiosyncratic and uneven book, sometimes opinionated, often insightful. Teachers of the Reformation will find much of interest here, but they might want to think twice before recommending it to their students.