From Cranmer to Sancroft: Essays on English Religion in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (review)

In Patrick Collinson's From Cranmer to Sancroft, two archbishops stand as the stern-faced alpha and omega for a collection of essays written by the pre-eminent historian of early modern religion in England. Those clerical bookends are apt, for Collinson is interested in trajectories—in beginnings and perhaps, in the case of English Christianity, ends. John Bossy once famously wrote of Elizabethan Catholicism that it was "a progress from inertia to inertia in three generations," and Collinson, in homage, states that Protestant dissent in early modern East Anglia "travels full circle from minority enthusiasm to minority enthusiasm in five or six generations" (p. 26); this volume, for its part, could be said to move from complex if weak archbishop to complex if weak archbishop, with a rich reserve of dissenters, separatists, and international Calvinists residing in between.

Collinson is interested in the metaphor of the cord, in this case as it applies to contradictory perceptions of the early modern English church as composed of one strand—the national and encompassing body of the faithful—woven in with a second strand, the "godly remnant or holy huddle" (pp. 26, 172). These threads nevertheless held together for a time, as dissent was also conjoined with the conservative church, particularly in regions such as Suffolk, where "the paradigmatic alliance of godly magistracy and ministry . . . gave the cord the strength to take the strain" (pp. 36, 40). The fraying and breaking of that cord, however, would occur when separatists, for example, "pull[ed] out of the cord one of its two strands" (p. 28), with many of them acting on their decision by emigrating to New England; the events of the 1640s and 1650s, of course, also unloosened the rope, even if continuities remained between lateseventeenth century dissenters and elements of the grassroots Puritanism that existed before.

The much-debated group known as the Puritans is further explored in most of the book's essays, particularly in Collinson's assertion that the movement did not represent an opposition to the Elizabethan and Jacobean settlements but the most "vigorous" strain within it. Still, Puritans evade easy categorizations—assured, despairing, hypocritical, Calvinist, non-Calvinist, conservative, radical; indeed," [the] coherence of our concept of Puritanism depends upon knowing as little about particular Puritans as possible" (p. 105). In their acute predicament of entanglement in the cord—between belief in the godly minority and the larger English church from which they did not wish to separate—Puritans, for Collinson, chose integration "rather than sectarian disintegration," as outward conformity was balanced with attendance of semi-separatist conventicles, despite increasing pessimism about the larger church (p. 135). By the late-seventeenth century, and in the wake of the mid-century upheavals, the church had "contracted to the limits of the conventicle" alone (p. 168); as Collinson puts it, if the Puritan mainstream had once been "a great glacier advancing to engulf the whole landscape," it then "surpris[ed] itself by disintegrating and calving icebergs into a chilly sea" (p. 168).

Although Collinson emphasizes contingency and circumstance behind religious developments, From Cranmer to Sancroft describes a series of failures that take on the inevitability of a larger tragic drama based on characters (or in this case groups) that aspired to "impossible dreams" (p. 81). Archbishops Thomas Cranmer and William Sancroft, who are analyzed in separate essays, are appropriate embodiments of the book's tone of ultimate decline. Although Cranmer's theological inconsistencies and recantations are explained with incisiveness and sympathy, the archbishop nevertheless left behind a legacy of ambivalence and division. Sancroft, for all his humanism and tenacity in holding office, also acted unheroically and sealed his fate in the aftermath of James's deposition in 1688; in refusing the loyalty oath to William III, Sancroft chose not to stay within the system, for example...