One of the hallmarks of recent work on the English Reformation has been a strong emphasis on its contested and protracted character. Historians now conventionally see it less as an event than as an ongoing process that extended far beyond the critical decades of the mid-sixteenth century to the tumultuous events of the 1640s and 1650s, and on into the eras of the Restoration and Glorious Revolution. Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke's meticulously researched study of the changing face of English religious worship between 1547 and 1700 illustrates both the value of this long chronological model and the importance of recognizing that religious developments across this period were complex and cyclical rather than uni-directional. Beginning their story with the radical iconoclasm sponsored by the Edwardian regime, they show how the early Protestant drive to dismantle altars and reform the Eucharist was partially reversed in the reigns of its Tudor and Stuart successors. Carefully integrating analysis of theological debate and ecclesiastical politics with evidence of parochial practice and belief, their book sheds new light on the complexion and contours of the Church of England in its first century and a half. Drawing on polemical literature, artefactual evidence, and a formidable quantity of archival records from dioceses around the country, they offer a comprehensive account of how attitudes towards what constituted an appropriate setting for liturgical services and towards the administration of the sacraments evolved and diversified in the wake of the Protestant Reformation.

Some parts of this book cover familiar ground; others address areas of relative historiographical neglect and present fresh interpretations and novel findings. The first chapter re-examines the early evangelical assault on church interiors and Catholic sacramental belief and practice, stressing the coherence of this ‘planned revolution’ against revisionist claims about its haphazard character, together with the extent to which official instructions were often anticipated by clandestine action. Rejecting the idea that Elizabeth I presided over a carefully crafted via media, Fincham and Tyacke underline her ambivalent if not hostile response to the iconoclastic legacy left behind by her half-brother's brief reign, and highlight the tensions that arose in this area as conservatives and advocates of further reform pulled in opposing directions. Building on the work of Peter Lake, Julia Merritt, and others, chapter 3 traces the emergence of avant-garde conformity in the final decade of the sixteenth century and of a campaign to repair and refurbish churches that anticipated, even as it subtly diverged from, the priorities of the Laudian programme to restore the beauty of holiness which flowered in the 1630s.

Covered in three central chapters, the contested developments in styles of worship that marked the Caroline period form the core of the book. These delineate the process by which ecclesiastical opinion on worship underwent a notable shift, which led to the emergence of a systematic policy of ‘turning the tables’, creating an atmosphere of reverence fit for worship, and reintroducing the idea of the Eucharist as a holy sacrifice consecrated on an altar. Reinforcing Tyacke's own celebrated thesis about the theological novelty and disruptive quality of Laudianism, they effectively question Julian Davies's thesis that the progenitor of these changes was King Charles I himself, emphasizing instead the initiative of the circle of churchmen that surrounded Archbishop Laud. Important discoveries here are the role played by the rivalry between Laud and Bishop John Williams in shaping ecclesiastical politics and shifting the boundaries of orthodoxy during the years 1625–40, and the lasting and precocious example set by the chapel royal, college chapels, and cathedrals. Chapter 7 turns to the under-researched era of the revolutionary decades and highlights the survival and then resurgence of Laudianism as it recovered from the brutal attack launched by the Long Parliament against what it saw as a kind of Counter Reformation by stealth. Fincham and Tyacke are clear that Laudian divines like Gilbert Sheldon, Henry Hammond, and Jeremy Taylor must be carefully distinguished from Anglicans and point to the vitality of their efforts to rearticulate the theological and ceremonial emphases that had provoked such controversy before the civil wars. Chapter 8 follows their fortunes after the Restoration, steering a course between Robert Bosher's insistence in 1951 that the Laudian party exerted a powerful influence on the shape of the episcopalian settlement and studies by Ian Green and John Spurr that see it as a spent or insignificant force. Fincham and Tyacke pull back from describing most post-1660 divines as Laudian, preferring the vaguer phrase ‘high churchmen’, but they remain clear that ‘a nexus of ideas’ (p. 306) with roots in the 1630s exerted influence on this generation. Less a close-knit party or faction than a loose grouping, such clerics were more prudent and measured in their efforts to recreate an aura of sacredness, erect railed altars, and reintroduce contentious rituals linked with receiving communion than their Caroline predecessors. This more muted version of the ‘beauty of holiness’ reached its peak in the era of the Tory reaction in the early 1680s (when, as one observer commented, ‘the ghost of little Doctor Laud’ seemed ‘to walk in the church’ again (p. 334)); even the events of 1688–9 failed to check its spread. By 1700, the changes that had catapulted the nation into bitter conflict sixty years earlier had lost their inflammatory resonances and become ‘domesticated’ (p. 354). Once ruthlessly stripped from England's churches, altars were re-established as a standard feature of ecclesiastical décor by the early eighteenth century.

Fincham and Tyacke's book extends our understanding of the religious landscape of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England in several new directions. Revealing the existence of a more finely graded spectrum of opinion than older models of adversarial polarity between puritans and Laudians imply, they draw our attention to clerics who condoned and sympathized with some of the policies and priorities championed by their rivals, combining a robust commitment to Calvinist soteriology with a taste for ritual and imagery. Reacting against the revisionist tendency to depict the laity as the passive recipients of religious changes, Altars restored depicts the latter as active participants in them: the Edwardian Reformation was not a consequence of ‘the machinations of a tiny power elite’, but rather the product of ‘a symbiotic relationship between evangelical leaders and led’ (p. 26). Equally, against an enduring current of historiographical scepticism about the popular appeal and reach of Laudianism, they highlight the evidence embedded in local records that many initiatives for renovation and beautification came from parishioners themselves and/or enjoyed their warm and enthusiastic support. As Fincham and Lake acknowledge, more research is now needed into this shadowy constituency of people who, by the 1680s, looked upon railed altars as an ‘ancient custome’ and revered William Laud as their ‘great martyr'd patriarch’ (pp. 332, 336).

Their book, furthermore, suggestively revises existing assumptions about the evolving nature of the Restoration church. The incremental process by which Laudian or ‘high church’ priorities entered the ecclesiastical mainstream in the post-1660 period partly reflects the exclusion from this institution of those who had previously been the most vocal critics of these policies. Those most likely to object to these trends vociferously were either forcibly ejected from their benefices in 1662 or had voluntarily withdrawn into overt nonconformity. At root, then, it seems to have been the irrevocable fragmentation of the ecclesiastical establishment and the marginalization of Dissent from the Church of England that paved the way for the transformation in religious worship that was perceptible and perhaps irreversible at parish level by 1700. The pluralistic coexistence of competing traditions within the church that had precipitated conflict in the 1630s and 1640s now ceased to be a feature of it, eliminating key elements of opposition to the reascendancy of the altar and associated liturgical patterns. Other more contingent events also proved decisive in this respect, notably the Great Fire of London of 1666, which provided the incentive for the rebuilding of more than fifty churches and an unparallelled opportunity for the ecclesiastical authorities to reintroduce rituals and decorative embellishments that had been expelled and suppressed during the spasms of puritan inspired iconoclasm two decades earlier. The emergence of a generation of divines from the universities schooled in political conformity and influenced by the ceremonial of college chapels helps to explain why these developments failed to prompt the same outrage they had in the reign of Charles I. Nevertheless, questions remain about the chronology and impetus for developments in this period, and Fincham and Tyacke are perhaps less thoroughly convincing about the post-1660 era than they are about the earlier part of the century. There is scope for more detailed investigation of how and why Laudian ideals became normative by the end of the century and their effects on piety and religious life in a society that was now inexorably divided along denominational lines. Whether they connected in any way with the tendencies out of which the Oxford movement would eventually grow in the nineteenth century is another matter that may deserve further speculation.

Future work may well nuance the highly textured picture presented in Altars Restored, but it seems unlikely substantially to revise or supersede it. This is a book of exceptional empirical rigour and admirable clarity that will surely stand as the definitive account for many years to come. The product of more than a decade of research, it represents a major contribution to its field.