This is a book and a collection of articles put together as a proof of concept. The first 159 pages consist of Crankshaw and Gross's discussion of ‘Reformation, Life-writing and the commemorative impulse – the power of the individual’. The remainder of the volume consists of nine essays on Reformation people and why they are commemorated over time.

The editors begin by asking what medieval commemoration looked like. The answer is hagiography and tales of chivalric honour. These changed under the influence of humanist models. Virtu became the ideal, celebrating the individual's belief, but the purpose of commemoration remained consistent. The confessionalised heroics of an Anne Askew or John Gerard strengthened the faithful, although their values were disputed by contemporaries and evolved over time.

Crankshaw and Gross are writing neither Reformation history nor memory study. They are considering lives remembered across time. Noting that remembering required print, and that printed reputations could provoke printed responses, they provide a very useful table of autobiographical and biographical works through 1718. Individuals were remembered for various purposes according to time and place.

The table of printed works only goes to 1718, but reputations are still evolving. Crankshaw and Gross, theorising the influence of film and fiction by concentrating on Thomas More, suggest that modern mediums have the power to ‘make’ a modern reputation for figures who, in many ways, would otherwise be very alien. Reformation people may be reinvented to serve modern needs.

William Sheils, writing on Catholic saints and English identity, 1535–1935, looks at how the reputations of More and John Fisher ping-ponged through time until the post-Emancipation English Catholics and Anglo-Catholic Anglicans fashioned them into national heroes. In the case of Thomas More, the hero of A man for all seasons and a villain in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, revision continues: ‘reputations ebb and flow, but sanctity does not’ (p. 181).

Recognising the fluidity of reputation over time, confessions, scholarly interests and public enthusiasms, the editors also set out to ‘redress the gender imbalance evident in many older accounts and to intersperse essays on famous figures with discussions of people less likely to have been encountered’ (p. 112). Why were people we would value now void of reputation then? Rachel Basch contributes a chapter on Margaret Cranmer, Anne Hooper and Elizabeth Coverdale, women who dared to marry reformers. Ignored themselves, they kept alive the reputations of their martyred husbands.

If they are unknown, their contemporary Anne Askew is very well known. Susan Wabuda sorts out why Askew, through John Bale's published account of her examination, acquired an enduring reputation for confessional conviction. In the process, she shows us how Askew became a Protestant saint. As Wabuda says, ‘cause, and not courage alone, made the martyr’ (p. 278).

Askew's reputation, created by Bale and Foxe, was dormant until the 1980s revival of interest in women's voices. The archbishops of Canterbury were never forgotten but their reputations suffered varied fortunes. Ashley Null considers Thomas Cranmer; David Crankshaw takes up Parker's legacy; and Felicity Heal looks at John Whitgift. They were all commemorated, but disputes within the English Church across the centuries have stoked revisions of their reputations.

Cranmer, of course, was either a Protestant hero or Catholic heretic to his contemporaries. Ashley Null analyses Gerlach Flicke's 1546 portrait of him. It shows Cranmer as a solifidian pastoral bishop. Null moves away from reputation to a discussion of Evangelical piety and Cranmer's use of the Greek Fathers. The article does not track his bubble reputation so much as point out what scholars have misunderstood.

Crankshaw's Matthew Parker crosses all the centuries since Parker's death in 1575. He begins with Parker's epitaphs. He had three, each very different. Celebrated as a churchman and scholar in his own day, he was vilified by the Cromwellians. After that, he was mostly remembered as a book collector, historian and propagandist for the Elizabethan Church. As Crankshaw says, ‘Parker's day job … barely got a mention’ (p. 296). Parker had the hard job of putting the Elizabethan Settlement into place, earning him the opprobrium of those who wanted further reform and hated bishops. Like all good administrators he bore the cross of those who wanted him to do more, faster and in their fashion.

Naturally, historians like Strype and Burnet, favourers of episcopacy, defended Parker, but he was also treated shabbily by Le Neve. In the nineteenth century Froude dismissed him as corrupt. Modern historians treat him more as historian and book collector than as ‘the post-Marian founder of the Church of England’.

Parker's neglect as a churchman is matched by the neglect of John Whitgift. Felicity Heal points out that he has had no biographer since John Strype in 1718. Whitgift the man has been lost in controversies that surrounded him. His memory has been shaped by the partisans of the various versions of the Church of England. Modern historians, like Patrick Collinson and Peter Lake, have contributed to this myopia, and Brett Usher took Burghley's side in portraying him as a loose cannon. Whitgift's reputation awaits another correction.

The final three contributions take up the reputations of Catholics Anthony Munday, John Gerard and Robert Persons. Munday, of course, was a literary man who wrote on life at the English College in Rome, perhaps as a spy, perhaps as a postulant. Elizabeth Evenden-Kenyon asks whether he was an ‘eloquent equivocator or contemptible turncoat?’ Contemporaries saw him as both, and later scholars have not resolved the mystery. His writings and translations can be read in more than one way, leaving us with no agreed version of his life.

Peter Lake and Michael Questier give us a fine study of the politics surrounding John Gerard's Autobiography. It, like William Weston's, was a defence of Jesuit missionaries against the calumnies being spread by the Catholic Appellants in the Archpriest Controversy. They were intentionally ‘creating and sustaining’ Catholic memory (p. 415). They prove how reputations might be created by the subjects themselves without taking up how Caraman revived them in the twentieth century.

Victor Houliston takes Robert Persons and tells the story of recusant history as reflected in reactions to his life. Persons (spelled ‘Parsons’ if the author is Protestant) probably wrote scandalous polemics against Leicester and a Conference about the next succession. He certainly wrote an effective Ignatian spiritual guide known as the Christian directory, popular with Protestants. Not surprisingly, he was both loved and hated by contemporary English Catholics for his radical support for violence against the Elizabethan regime. The Appellants in the Archpriest Controversy despised him as a supporter of Spain. John Donne called him the Devil's instrument. Strype and Burnet agreed, and by the nineteenth century Persons was appearing in popular literature as a Jesuit bogeyman. Modern historians have been more open to his virtues. In their hands, says Houliston, his ‘scheming becomes diplomacy, treason becomes resistance, stubbornness becomes resilience and militancy realism’ (p. 439).

This fine collection gives historians of religion much to ponder. As we watch the heroes of the English Reformation swing from fame to oblivion, obloquy to praise, oblivion to revival, condemnation to apology, we must ask what our parts are in this process of reputation building. Why do we find these people worthy of remembrance? Are we writing ourselves onto the way we remember them?