This is a much-needed book, which is likely to prove highly influential as an essential companion piece to the first part of Eamon Duffy's Stripping of the altars. Its analysis of the pre-Reformation English Church plugs some of the gaps which were incidental to Duffy's project but are essential for a fuller appreciation of the influences affecting the Church's development in the first decades of the sixteenth century. With these additions, Bernard also challenges Duffy by reigniting the debate about the direction(s) in which the English Church was moving before its future was hijacked by Henry viii.

Bernard describes his book as ‘an essay, a broad view … an exploration of the church in the round’ (p. x) – and it is meant to provoke questions. He starts with an impressive and enthralling first chapter which painstakingly re-examines the Hunne case of 1514–15, and (barring new evidence) surely provides the last word on that sorry affair. The discussion provides reference or starting points for the commentary in the eight subsequent chapters, thematic treatments of core features and components of the pre-Reformation English Church. Their time-scale is variable. The end-point is somewhere in the late 1520s or very early 1530s; but the starting-points can go back centuries, as when tracing the growth of royal influence over the Church. As the concern is to delineate the immediately pre-Reformation Church, the focal point is the decades after 1500.

The first thematic chapter assesses ‘The monarchical Church’. This is not a precise prequel to The king's reformation, which placed Henry viii at the centre of the Reformation process. It surveys the long-term encroachment of royal authority within and over the Church, creating a power relationship open to exploitation but not predestined to generate Reformation. The discussion of ‘Bishops’ in chapter iii examines their role within the Church and the challenges that they faced under the early Tudors. The lower ranks of the secular clergy are similarly surveyed in the following chapter. Chapters v and vi focus respectively on ‘Lay knowledge’ and ‘Lay activity’. The first is a subtle survey and assessment. The second, one of the longest chapters in the book, is less satisfactory. Subdivided, it allows eight pages to ‘confraternities and chantries’ – which seems to undervalue core elements of the economy of salvation – and then devotes twenty-five pages to pilgrimage.

The last three chapters develop the themes which come closest to the template of ‘prelude to Reformation’. Chapter vii, ‘Criticism’, analyses the response to clerical failure and the perception of a need for change. Much is made of ‘anticlericalism’ without treating the term as itself problematic; yet the conclusion that criticism was not truly anticlerical is surely correct. Then comes ‘The condition of the monasteries’, showing that all was not as bad as has previously been painted, but perhaps not quite picking up sufficiently on recent work which has challenged the legacy of David Knowles to offer a more positive evaluation of the regulars' contribution to pre-Reformation English Catholicism. In his last chapter, ‘Heresy’, Bernard turns his guns forcefully on the Lollards and their current scholarly advocates, in a determined denial of Lollardy's significance within the early Henrician Church. The hand may be overplayed. Bernard builds his argument with remorseless rhetoric (somewhat bludgeoning strings of rhetorical questions are a hallmark of his style throughout the book), yet seems to require absence of evidence to be evidence of absence. The main problem may be an excessive polarisation, the assumption that there is (or was) a clear and firm distinction to be drawn between card-carrying ‘Lollards’ and the rest. That goes against much recent work which emphasises the imprecision and indeterminacy of late medieval dissent, inserting an ever-expanding ‘grey area’ between the extremes of ‘heresy’ and ‘orthodoxy’, territory which could become a breeding-ground for new attitudes.

Two pages of epilogue revert to the unifying thread of the volume: the balance of vitality and vulnerability. Bernard and we know that Reformation will come, but he manages successfully to survey a Church and nation unaware that the Henrician Reformation would happen, yet possibly aware that something was afoot – or needed to be. The potential for change is immanent, but never actually imminent – and certainly not inevitably the Reformation that we know. Strikingly, Wolsey attracts little concerted attention, despite being regularly mentioned. Yet, subtly, Wolsey provides linkage between several chapters, hinting at a positive reading of this Church which suggests reforms which did not happen (but could have), choices not made (but might have been), and an alternative trajectory into a different future from the history that we are stuck with.

‘Vitality’ is certainly in evidence; but ‘vulnerability’ seems an odd word to apply in this situation. It is a loaded term – this Church was going to change, and its weak points made it ‘vulnerable’: the word requires weakness. Yet ‘the quality or state of being susceptible of receiving wounds or physical injury’ (to construct a definition from the Shorter OED) does not demand that this vulnerable Church should necessarily become wounded or injured. The English Reformation was not preordained or predestined; it needed a spark. Possible sparks are postulated, but the touch paper is never actually lit. Arguably the Church was ever ‘vulnerable’, no more (or less) in the early 1500s than it had been in the 1100s or in the 1300s. It was always changing and evolving, always being criticised from one quarter or another. The enigma of the run-up to the English Reformation is left unresolved.

Bernard's robust style can be unsettling, as are occasional factual slips which raise eyebrows without undermining confidence. Yet this is undeniably a significant book, which will provoke debate, and challenges. Its tantalising approach – repeatedly alluding to the known future, but ostentatiously avoiding direct engagement with it – reopens the whole debate about the background to and inception of Reformation in England. Undergraduates will certainly welcome it, as a staple for their work on the late medieval Church in general, and as fundamental fodder for ‘background to Reformation’ essays.