Religious Identities in Henry VIII's England (review)

Ever since Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago, 1980) appeared more than a quarter-century ago, historians and scholars of English literature have been engrossed by the subject of the formulation of identity in the early modern period. For the Reformation, in recent work by Patrick Collinson, Eamon Duffy, and Diarmaid MacCulloch, to name only a few, religious experience has been essential in the creation of identity: for the individual believer, as well as for the culture of a society. Mimesis, as it was taught by the Greeks and introduced by the Renaissance into the educational practices of the West, or the great Pauline ideal of edification, have been vital, and influential in their actions on hearts and institutions well beyond the religious inspiration in which they traced their origins.

Now the subject is the focus of another new and important collection of essays: Religious Identities in Henry VIII's England by Peter Marshall, who is among the most prolific of the present generation of younger historians. He is the author of two well-received monographs: The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (Oxford, 1994), and Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002). Most of the eleven essays in Religious Identities have appeared elsewhere, but two chapters (as well as the introduction) are new: chapter 4 on the mysterious shooting of Robert Packington; and chapter 11 on Catholic exiles.

Among the achievements of Marshall's work is to explore what identity meant in the uncertain years after Henry VIII removed his realm from communion with the Roman Church, but before confessionalization provided the means to assess the failures and successes of the doctrinal upheavals, and to categorize them by the examples offered by real lives. As religion was "fluid and indeterminate" during Henry's reign (p. 4), so were identities, Marshall argues, more often than has always been recognized heretofore. The identities of many of England's evangelicals were "forged rather than inherited" (p. 19). Readers of this journal may be intrigued by chapter 9, "Is the Pope a Catholic?" Could there have been "`Catholicism without the Pope,'" and was this what Henry's Church endeavored to be? "Was Henry then a Catholic," Marshall inquires, "and was Henricianism" a species of Catholicism? (p. 170). At the time, Edward Powell thought not. Writing in 1523 to repel the threats that Martin Luther posed, Powell maintained in Propugnaculum summi sacerdotii euangelici, ac septenarii sacramentorum (STC 20140) that Catholicism was inseparable from the papacy, and his adherence to his opinion led him to a martyr's death in 1540. But Marshall demonstrates, by exploring "the textual landscape" (p. 171) from the 1520's to the end of the 1550's, that the word "Catholic" was too valuable to go unclaimed on any side of the widening theological divides. Henry VIII's own opinions might be difficult to define with any certainty, but "Catholic" was both booty for building up the royal supremacy, as it was also an "unstable" identifier (p. 196) in the polemics of the day.

Marshall's thinking is likely to stimulate further work on this vital issue. Religious Identities is not exhaustive, not in the nature of the topics raised, nor in the range of its author's work, for Marshall has not chosen to reprint his entire harvest. He has written other pieces, like his study of the "Geographies of the Afterlife" in The Place of the Dead (which he co-edited with Bruce Gordon, Cambridge, 2000), which are not included here. Nevertheless, scholars and students working in this field will welcome the opportunity to have so many of his essays between a single set of covers.