I really dislike reviewing books. They always take more time to write than anticipated and, like bills, they always come due at the worst possible times. You get free books, but you often offend colleagues and sometimes make enemies (admittedly, there some colleagues whose books I prefer to their friendship, but these are not the books which garner bad reviews). I agreed to review this book for personal reasons and regretted it almost immediately—until I actually read the volume. Given the contributors, I expected the chapters in this book to be of high quality, but I was surprised at how interesting and stimulating these chapters were. They were good enough, in fact, to make me momentarily forget my aversion to reviewing books.
The late Thomas F. Mayer was a formidably erudite scholar with extensive expertise in both early modern English and early modern Italian history. A striking indication of how extensive this expertise was is the fact that, among his last works, Mayer authored two brilliant prosopographical studies anchored in each society, one on the Sacred Congregation under Urban VIII (in his monograph The Roman Inquisition) and one on English cathedral clergy in mid-Tudor England (in a forthcoming collection Catholic Renewal and Protestant Resistance in Marian England, edited by Elizabeth Evenden and Vivienne Westbrook). Reforming Reformation grew out of a conference organised by Mayer, and both the conference and the volume reflect Mayer’s interests quite closely, perhaps too closely. The volume covers England, Italy, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire in admirable depth, but puzzlingly, not France. (Mayer offers the rather opaque explanation that ‘France had to be excluded for lack of resources’ [p. 1]).
The first section of Reforming Reformation deals with major issues in Reformation historiography. Brad Gregory opens the volume with a lively and insightful chapter, describing the marginalization of radical Protestantism by scholars and persuasively arguing that understanding radical Protestantism is crucial to understanding Protestantism itself. This chapter should be widely read by both teachers and students. Peter Marshall applies the concept of confessionalization to England and argues that, although state confessionalization was incomplete there, England was not really an exception to the concept. Rather, Marshall suggests England was confessionalized, but from below, not by the Crown. This is an erudite and provocative piece but it feels incomplete as it concludes in the first part of Elizabeth I’s reign. Surely any attempt to assess confessionalization in England has to deal with the events of the seventeenth century. Ronald Thiemann criticises Charles Taylor’s narrative of increasing secularization in the early modern period and draws on early modern religious paintings to argue that the Reformation involved a sacralisation of daily life.
Section two contains four rather disparate chapters grouped under the heading ‘From the General to the Particular and Back’. This is quite appropriate for Lu Ann Homza’s chapter, which details the application, by Spanish clerics, of inductive reasoning, ‘local studies’ (in Clifford Geertz’s sense of the phrase) and a heightened sense of historical awareness to the determination of religious and theological veracity. Jodi Bilinkoff, while also dealing with early modern Spain, covers a rather different topic. It has often been a challenge for members of religious orders to shape and polish the hard edges of their founders, in order to create a biographical gem of sufficient lustre (Bonaventure’s bowdlerized version of Thomas of Celano’s biography of St. Francis of Assisi provides a case in point). This challenge appears to have been particularly acute with St. John of the Cross, the co-founder of the Discalced Carmelites, whose uncompromising asceticism and predilection for solitude made him a divisive figure and undermined his effectiveness as a leader of a religious order. In a lively and learned essay, Bilinkoff examines how the six earliest biographies of St. John dealt with this challenge.
In a suggestive essay, Anne Overell analyses ‘soul talk’, an amorphous category, which—at least by her definition—includes not only confession, but all forms of spiritual dialogue, among them The Imitation of Christ, letters of Protestant marytrs, anti-Nicodemite writings and the Books of Common Prayer. A rich essay could have been even richer if Overell had looked more closely at some of the material she discusses. She presents the letters of the Protestant martyrs as being sent from male clerical ‘spiritual directors’ to laymen and laywoman. In reality the currents of correspondence swirled in more varied and complex patterns with laywomen providing spiritual advice to imprisoned martyrs and lay martyrs providing advice on topics such as marriage and spiritual despair. John Edwards links Spain and England together with a chapter on the catechism written by the Spanish Dominican, Bartolomé Carranza, during his sojourn in England as part of the retinue of Philip II. The catechism was commissioned by Convocation and printed in Antwerp in 1558. Elizabeth I’s accession made the work unwanted in England and it was subjected to hostile scrutiny by the Spanish Inquisition but it anticipated, and according to Edwards, influenced the Tridentine catechism.
The final three chapters are closely focused on the Council of Trent and its influence. John Frymire’s essay has two separate threads. The first examines nineteenth and twentieth century historiography of pre-Tridentine Catholicism in the Holy Roman Empire; the second examines the production of Catholic postils in the Holy Roman Empire before Trent and concludes that their publication in ‘massive numbers’ presents a more pastorally oriented Catholic church than has been traditionally depicted. Abigail Brundin details the inconsistent, even erratic, nature of the post-Tridentine Italian indexes of prohibited books. And Marcia Hall demonstrates that there were similarly varied attempts at the censorship of religious paintings in Rome and Venice from 1566-1585.
The essays in this volume attain a high standard of scholarship. They cover an impressive array of topics and places and most are lucidly, some even elegantly, written. It may be too much to say that this volume is essential reading for every student of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, but those that do not read it are missing out on a series of fascinating, as well as erudite essays.
