A few years ago at an academic conference, a friend and I were lamenting the way our subject is plagued with fat and, often, superfluous books. We wished more people would write shorter, focused pieces, but admitted they are often harder to do well. ‘You know who the real master of the short essay is?’, my friend said, ‘Peter Marshall. He writes those perfectly formed pieces which skewer an idea in just a few pages.’ I could only agree.
Marshall, a professor of early modern history at Warwick University, did his best to shake off this reputation in 2017, by producing a riveting narrative history of the English Reformation (Heretics and Believers) whose 650 pages manage to leave you wanting more. But this volume shows that my friend’s judgement still holds. It gathers together eleven previously published articles into one very agreeably priced volume, which ought not only to make these articles (some of which first appeared at rather obscure addresses) more accessible to scholars, but also to win them a wider readership.
Marshall writes mainstream Reformation history, but this book is evidence that he has also explored some more eclectic byways. It gathers a series of studies of death, purgatory, ghosts, angels and fairies, and of how stories and beliefs about them – including, sometimes, very vivid direct encounters with them – shaped the world of the living during England’s Reformation and post-Reformation periods.
He divides the essays into five on heaven, hell and purgatory (‘Humans in the Spirit World’) and six on angels, ghosts and fairies (‘Spirits in the Human World’), but the collection could be sliced another way: we have a series of thematic studies which track some major issues through the period (shifting understandings of the doctrine of Hell, or what Protestants thought about guardian angels), alongside a series of essays which look at particular case studies, digging into specific events. A short review is no place to summarize all eleven essays, so let me give one example of each type.
We might expect that an article titled ‘Geographies of the Afterlife’ would not deliver on its promise, but happily, this one addresses one of those questions which children learn not to ask at Sunday school: where exactly are heaven and hell? Or at least, where did English Christians in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries believe them to be? The medieval inheritance, we quickly learn, was of heaven, hell and of course purgatory as physical places which could be located geographically, but never uncomplicatedly so: it was never clear if this sort of language was truly meant literally, as any attentive reader of Dante knows. So when Protestants set out to mock the ‘spurious geographical locations, and spatial relationships’ of the Catholic afterlife, they were to some extent creating a caricature in order to reject it. In fact, not least spurred by the expanding geographical horizons of the age of exploration, both traditions were moving away from literalism in this period: a move which may seem self-evidently reasonable to modern eyes, but which had major implications for a whole series of eschatological doctrines from the question of soul-sleep to the problem of whether hell-fire was a metaphor (and if so, for what). Did Christ actually ‘descend’ to Hell, and if so in what sense? These are the sorts of unsettling questions which could eat away at an entire religious culture.
By contrast, the final article in the book, ‘Ann Jeffries and the Fairies’, addresses a question which ought not to exist at all, or perhaps only as a minor curiosity: why did serious people in the 1690s care about fairies? The essay pulls at the loose thread of a very odd book published in 1696 which described how Ann Jeffries, a Cornishwoman, was kept alive for half a year exclusively by magical bread provided by fairies, ‘small people clad in green’. This bizarre account was not made more credible by the fact that the supposed events took place fifty years earlier, nor by the stubborn refusal of the now-elderly Jeffries to co-operate with the book’s author in any way. Marshall digs into the original case, which – at the time, in the late 1640s – had become briefly notorious and landed Jeffries in prison: a very rare case of a female visionary of the Civil War era who inclined towards conservatism and royalism. But in the 1690s, the case had a different resonance. Now it was about one of the most ill-advised gambits in the religious establishment’s running battle with scepticism: the attempt to conscript folk belief to their side, in order to demonstrate the existence of a world of spirits. As the 1696 book and others like it showed, actually refuting these very widespread beliefs was not at all easy. But the sceptics did not need to use reason to make their case. Ridicule worked as well or better, and while a great many late seventeenth-century English people may have believed in fairies – quietly, sheepishly, late at night – they also knew that such beliefs were laughable and not to be admitted openly. And so England’s invisible worlds were not argued out of existence, they were mocked into silence. If you want to see how important they nevertheless remained, read this book.
