Parish Communities and Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester, 1590-1690 (review)

Parish Communities and Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester, 1590-1690. By Daniel C. Beaver (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998) 462 pp. $49.50

This excellent monograph links local social structure and the organization of a regional community to the crises of political, religious, and personal/spiritual life that racked England during the century under examination. The explanatory approach is complex; society is complex. Beaver searches for ways of explicating the interrelationships between secular and religious institutions, between the ties of family and kinship and of authority and hierarchy, and between the "larger" crises of war, society, and monarchy in a small region of western England. The book, however, is unduly long; repetitions and discursive reflections eventually blur the analysis. It also lacks a bibliography.

Beaver begins with an updated version of what once would have been offered as a "structural-functional" examination of life in the Vale of Gloucester (page xiii has a useful map). The competing or complementary pull of such tensions, or social vectors, as family and locality or of personal networks and the political-social framework of the late Tudor and Stuart polity are probed by closing in on such "events" as death, burial, and testamentary benefaction. As throughout the book, Beaver maintains a delicate balance between case studies and theoretical propositions (drawn largely from anthropology and sociology, with some regard for critical theory and the psychology of religion). Most of the details are from archives in London (the Public Record Office and Lambeth Palace) and the Gloucestershire Record Office--history from the ground up, in which regional materials call the narrative tune. For example, the "failure of neighborliness" is fleshed out by following a quarrel between Isabell Sheene, widow, and Susanna Vicaridge (58); child care and threats involving an accusation of witchcraft were at the root of it.

Most of the book ("Social Process, 1590-1690") is an examination of the social and ideological foundations on which religious and political conflicts--of kingdom and region--were resolved (which often meant "fought") in Tewkesbury and the nearby villages and hamlets. In theory, the Elizabethan settlement had created a comprehensive church. However, by its lights, the parish church and its ruling clique of men had to be accepted by any and all as the focal point at which God and State came together in a union that promoted the glory of the former and the stability and domination of the latter. Any further search for a personalized religion would serve only to undo that knot and open the doors for a church of conscience (rather than of structure and measured form), to anarchy or tyranny (the Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell represented either or both), and to the sort of individualization sought by Quakers and others who wished to opt out of the social, as well as the religious, unity of the realm.

Though our sympathies may tilt toward the men (and women) of conscience, rather than their social and economic superiors, such a reading has too much of the Whig view of history to lead us through the pathways of details, of daily give and take, and of the perceived need for stability. Not until the 1690s, after the Glorious Revolution and a move to greater tolerance in law and for conscience, was the parish relieved of the need to be defended as the bedrock without which civil society could not hold. Beaver's five chapters on "Social Process" lead us chronologically and thematically through this struggle.

Joel T. Rosenthal
State University of New York, Stony Brook

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