Reading the essays in this rich collection leads one to conclude that the idea of heresy may well be the single most useful point of entry into the two tumultuous centuries of religious change addressed in this volume. The editors do not offer quite so sweeping a claim in their introduction, and yet the cumulative weight of one meticulously documented essay after another shows how fruitful a close examination of heresy can be. The creation of heresy, inasmuch as it involves defining what is permissible and what is not, obviously invites consideration of the establishment and maintenance of political authority. However, the dozen authors represented here, a mixture of historians and literary scholars, move beyond the political mechanisms of heresy to investigate hermeneutical strategies, theological controversies, gender concerns, theories of belief, modes of literary representation, theories of the state, and more. In sum, the editors have assembled a collection that provides a useful entrée into the study of religion in early modern England.
As is the case with most essay collections, there is no single argument that unites these methodologically and chronologically diverse pieces, though Loewenstein and Marshall offer that they “are interconnected by their concern with the complex and often unstable understanding of ‘heresy’ during the periods of religious change and upheaval in early modern England” (3). This instability is much on display as Peter Lake revisits some familiar territory to examine heresy in the context of early Stuart Puritanism, identified here as “that ambivalent and complex relationship between a certain strand of reformed Protestantism and what came to be regarded as ‘authority’ in the English church and state after the Reformation” (82). Defining Puritanism in this way allows Lake to juxtapose the images of Puritans as dissenters with their well-documented tendencies toward order and control. Not only does this capture the tensions inherent in Puritanism as both a reforming and an ordering movement, it serves as a microcosm for the question of heresy-making within Protestantism itself. Furthermore, Lake's examination of the boxmaker John Etherington shows how the London Puritan underground created conditions wherein fluid definitions of orthodoxy and heresy were found not only between antagonists but also over the lifetime and in the thought of a single person.
Efforts to define heresy may be directed toward excluding and punishing, but they may also be put in the service of toleration. J. A. I. Champion examines the efforts of Thomas Hobbes to define heresy as “a historical construct rather than an identifiable theological error” (232), a case he makes in large part by examining the early church. Hobbes believed that diversity of opinion helped rather than hindered the discovery of truth. Such diversity among the first Christians “was driven by philosophical foundations rather than spiritual error” (229). That all of this might make Hobbes sound more at home among nineteenth-century debates about early Christianity only goes to highlight how revolutionary and influential he was. Champion also considers the rebuttal offered by Oxford scholar and bishop of Lincoln Thomas Barlow, whose task of refuting Hobbes was made more difficult by the need to defend the propriety of Protestant dissent against Catholicism. The upshot was that both writers made the case for toleration, though for quite different reasons. John Marshall discovers in John Locke's well-known Letters Concerning Toleration a similar project of redefinition of heresy wherein Locke sought to disentangle heresy from longstanding association or equation with immorality. Unlike with the case of Hobbes, the early church writers here provided the basis for the “identification of heretics as diseased and poisoning murderers, seditious communists, ‘libertines,’ and ‘sodomites’” (254) that Locke sought to refute. At one point Locke defined heresy as “a separation made in ecclesiastical communion between men of the same religion” (269), thereby turning the whole enterprise on its head: the heretics became the ones who did the excluding and separating, either by casting others out or willfully departing. For Locke, toleration was the most practical, reasonable, and moral course.
The essays examined here highlight two key themes of the collection—the relative nature of heresy definitions and the multifaceted arguments that led to toleration—but the remaining contributions also deserve careful study. They include David Loewenstein writing on the examination of Anne Askew; Carrie Euler on Anabaptism under Edward VI; Christopher Marsh with a gendered read of the Family of Love; John Coffey on the Puritan revolution; Ann Hughes on Thomas Edward's Gangraena; Nigel Smith on anti-Trinitarianism; Thomas Corns on the Digger Gerrard Winstanley; John Rogers on Milton's unorthodox Christology; and N. H. Keeble on Richard Baxter and John Owen. The arrangement is chronological, beginning with the reign of Henry VIII and extending down to the Glorious Revolution and the Act of Toleration, with three-quarters of the topics falling in the seventeenth century. Certainly there is no shortage of possible subjects in which to consider heresy in and around the English Civil War, the Interregnum, the Restoration, and so forth, but one might have wished for more attention to the sixteenth century and especially the 1550s and 1560s, when the rapid shifts from Protestant to Catholic and back again advertised the very instability of the idea of heresy under consideration in the volume. But to say as much is simply to wish for more, not to criticize what is here, which is a tribute to the editors' success at assembling such a compelling collection.
