Historians have long grappled with, and debated over, a clear understanding and assessment of the English Reformation. David Hoyle's new work, Reformation and Religious Identity in Cambridge, 1590–1644, provides an excellent contribution to the field. Hoyle's focus on Reformation and religious identities during this period, in the form of a Cambridge microhistory, adds a wealth of insight to the history of the town and university, providing a window onto English history of this era. Hoyle ably surveys the debates and divisions in Cambridge religious life, along with the ensuing debates and divisions in historiography on the subject. Contemplating whether the key struggle of Cambridge Reformation and religious identity was one of Calvinism versus Arminianism, Puritanism versus Anglicanism, or something else, Hoyle suggests that although these divisions and movements certainly did exist in Cambridge, the complexity of varieties of belief and disagreement requires a more carefully nuanced understanding. He seeks to cast the framework more broadly, arguing that “the presiding concern” or “main theme” was “religious identity” (5). This was expressed in the agreement and disagreement over the history of the Church of England and in the struggle to define and establish this history. Hoyle places his assessment of this struggle within his narrative of the contexts of Cambridge religious life.

Hoyle serves as canon residentiary at Gloucester Cathedral and director of ministry in the diocese. As with all historians, presuppositions affect both choice of descriptive language and historical evidences to form an overall argument; Hoyle's absorbing narrative style binds both to form a compelling script sympathetic to an Arminian Episcopalianism. Cambridge figures with presbyterian or independent sympathies, particularly regarding their view of the church and church discipline, stand somewhat beyond the pale as “radical puritans,” but particularly evident is his dislike for what he terms “cold and lofty … experimental predestinarianism” (3) and the “chilling orthodoxy” of “the godly sort in the university” (76). This included “the new dogmatism” of particular atonement (33), which Hoyle sees as a departure from Calvin's theology.

At the outset, Hoyle's theological assessment appears to follow a “Calvin against the Calvinists” approach. Coming to interact with Richard Muller's debunking of this hypothesis (30), he seems to shift to accept Muller's conclusions. This ambiguity heightens as the remainder of his work effectively follows the initial approach. Hoyle's descriptions of the post-Reformation “reformed orthodoxy” at points tends to caricature, with little evidence of extensive reading of the works of Calvin and later reformed theologians such as Thomas Cartwright and William Perkins. If Perkins could only “attempt to put a human face to a hard doctrine,” why then his “large personal following” and the “wide … appeal of this theology” (65)? Perhaps in part because there was a great deal more to the entire theology than the stumbling block of God's sovereignty. Hoyle's account of the Synod of Dort fails to refer to the contextual history of the Dutch Reformed Church and United Provinces, giving the too easy appearance of one-sided injustice against the Remonstrants. A more generous approbation of individuals such as Lancelot Andrewes, William Barrett, and Peter Baro provides the contrast in Hoyle's historiography: despite their contemporary tag as extreme or radical in theology at points oppositional to the “reformed orthodoxy,” they are situated as simply being part of a diverse milieu, receiving a greater impartiality. The criticism of caricature may also be laid in terms of the descriptive narrative of the pursuit of divinity studies at Cambridge: Was it dominated and motivated by pomp, pride, and politic? Or was the motivation for many deep conviction and sincere pursuit of God-honoring religion, for the good of their church? In part these concerns reflect the deep challenge of historiography: the historian's bias, the creation of narrative, and the pursuit of historical accuracy and truth.

These concerns noted, it must be said that Hoyle skillfully buttresses his thesis, adeptly maneuvering through animated twists and turns of Cambridge history. Bringing to light lesser known figures and occasions, Hoyle provides nothing less than a captivating, significant addition to the historiography of Cambridge, town and university, taking into account diverse streams and strands of theological persuasion. He provides helpful reminders that the boundaries of religious conformity and dissension saw ebbs and flows reflective of not only theology, personality, or politics but all of these. Hoyle's arguments that the rise and eventual predominance of Arminian theology and high church tradition from a period of dominant reformed orthodoxy simply reflected the reality of the broad constituency of the Church of England and that the failed attempt to agreeably define the nature of the Church of England precipitated “the awful crisis” (230) of Cambridge in 1643 is perhaps ultimately a twenty-first-century conclusion. The seventeenth-century answer, by any party, might simply be of course it did—the truth was at stake.