Winner of the 2018 Wolfson History Prize: An Outstanding Post-Revisionist Grand Narrative of the English Reformation

This superb book will become the standard account of the English Reformation for a generation. In many ways, and surely for teaching purposes, it replaces Christopher Haigh's provocative English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (1993)—a staple of the university reading list for many years and oddly never revised—and stands alongside Felicity Heal's distinguished Reformation in Britain and Ireland (2003), which has a broader canvas, though offers less detail. It is true that the period since 1993 has seen the publication of other important large-scale studies: a great deal of the Henrician and Edwardian Reformations, for instance, is related in D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (1996); a stimulating thematic approach is adopted in N. Jones, The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (2002); and a valuable attempt to synthesize some recent scholarship (even if it does largely ignore periodical literature) may be found in E. Ives, The Reformation Experience: Living Through the Turbulent 16th Century (2012). But none of these authors essays a narrative that seeks to trace and assess religious change over the span, and in the depth, that Marshall does. His achievement is heroic.

The seventeen chapters of Heretics and Believers are grouped into four sections: "Reformations before Reformation"; "Separations"; "New Christianities"; and "Unattainable Prizes." This structure is admirably clear. While the work proceeds in brisk chronological fashion, Marshall nevertheless pauses frequently to give his interpretation—an interpretation that is (to this reviewer's mind) almost invariably informed, nuanced, level-headed and, therefore, convincing. The author admits at the outset (xi) that he makes scarcely any "direct reference" to academic debates; historians' names rarely feature in his main text. Yet experts will probably know to whom he refers—and novices can take advantage of the endnotes for pointers. The Preface sets out his agenda. Marshall insists, unapologetically, that "the conflicts of the Reformation were indeed principally about religion"; in other words, "questions of faith were not merely a convenient covering for more fundamental or 'real' concerns about political power, social domination or economic assets" (xi). That statement might be seen as a swipe at certain post-revisionists, who stress pragmatic engagement, by ambitious and grasping lay-folk, typically members of local elites, with a Reformation essentially imposed upon a religiously conservative populace from above. On the other hand, Marshall rightly has no truck with the simplistic idea that the English Reformation was chiefly an Act of State. In a very limited sense, of course, that analysis has merit: "the lasting changes of the period would not have taken the forms that they did without sustained assertions of state power, assertions that gave a legal and coercive basis to far-reaching changes in doctrine, worship and governance in the English Church." However, he goes on to argue that

virtually from the start, the imposition of the Reformation was the pyrrhic victory of the English state. It was achieved at the cost of eroding the government's power to command, and of empowering ordinary English people to think and reflect—and sometimes to refuse and resist. Not the least among the ironies of the process was that, in raising the monarch to an unprecedentedly elevated official status—supreme head, under Christ, of the Church within England—the Reformation fatally undermined the monarchy's majesty and mystique among significant numbers of its subjects / (xii)

As might be guessed, then, there is no artificial division into sequential "Political Reformations" and an underlying "Protestant Reformation," nor philosophizing about "colligatory concepts." We hear nothing about the so-called "compliance conundrum" because Marshall emphasizes just how much opposition there was, and how much blood was spilled. What we get instead is a compelling story, scrupulously neutral, which successfully knits together religious and political strands, and shows sensitivity to foreign events too, while at the same time integrating insights drawn from a sizeable proportion of the vast...