Cambridge University is traditionally portrayed as central to the English Reformation: the breeding ground of reformers, the alma mater of the Elizabethan Settlement, and the intellectual bastion of Puritanism. Ceri Law shakes that simple narrative, giving us a university, which, like the rest of Tudor society, was not just about religious disputes and never spoke with one voice. It is a history of conflict within a community whose loyalties and institutional priorities tempered its religious enthusiasms and reactions. There were, she says, “dynamics in these communities that led to compromise and co-existence, dynamics in which spaces for religious difference could, precariously, be found” (182).

The university, she says, was a community, both real and imagined, where membership in it was overlapped by membership in colleges, all bound to the network of alumni that stretched across all major institutions in the nation. Within it, there were all sorts of religious opinions, but loyalties and mutual comprehension created at Cambridge muddled all attempts at precise religious reform. There was a conservative Cambridge as well as an evangelical Cambridge, and she picks out their signs in the Grace Book and the college archives that document acceptance, resistance and reaction.

She begins with the White Horse Tavern Lutherans, so convincingly portrayed by Gordon Rupp, putting them into their proper context, a minority problem at best. Exploring Chancellor Gardiner's ban on the Greek pronunciation taught by John Cheke, she points out that the dispute, which had religious overtones, was also about authority within the university. Gardiner, like a beleaguered university administrator in own day, was demanding good order in the face of youthful ideological enthusiasm.

By the time Henry VIII died in 1547 the university had been deeply penetrated by reformed ideas, but the Edwardian regime did not see Cambridge as particularly friendly to their religious values. Many of its leading Protestant scholars, like Cheke, had migrated to jobs at court, leaving the university with many conservatives. Protector Somerset moved quickly to fix this with a visitation in early 1549, imposition of new statutes, and injunctions voiding all previous statutes that violated scripture or royal decree. Martin Bucer was brought in, and new heads of houses were appointed. Law, deeply immersed in college records, shows how the reforms were imposed and progressed, each college responding in its own way. She finds “continuing strength of conservatism in the university.” (63) The line between conservatives and evangelicals was never precise, and the rapid success of Marian restoration efforts suggests that they were welcomed by many.

Like Edward, Mary paid close attention to the university. With Gardiner now Lord Chancellor, college heads were purged and the 1554 visitation launched. The return to the older worship was rapid, and, she argues, “Catholic reconstruction was fueled by those who had accepted religious change under Henry and Edward, even if they had never embraced it.” (98) Unlike Oxford, there were no Spanish Dominicans needed to implement Marian orthodoxy at Cambridge.

The historiography of the Elizabethan university is dominated by the Puritan radicals who protested the conservatism of the religious settlement, but Law demonstrates that the disorders in Cambridge were not just Puritan in nature. In 1559, Sir William Cecil led a visitation as the new chancellor, assisted by other Cambridge men who had returned to favor. Marian heads were removed but not all of them—perhaps because the visitors faced strong resistance in some colleges. Lacking the records of the visitation of 1559, Law can only speculate on why it was not more thorough—intentional policy or accident? By the visitation of 1564, she says, the conformity of Cambridge was less assured than in either 1553 or 1558.

Her valuable chapter on “Patronage, Control and Religious Order” posits the question of how outside authorities shaped the university, and how the university shaped the Elizabethan state. Obviously, the creation of a system of strong college heads, aimed at curbing the youthful regent masters’ power, was a key moment in 1570, desired from without and supported by many within.

Importantly, Law recognizes that Elizabethan politics was about manipulation of powerful patrons, and that external religious concerns were projected into the university. Patrons with conflicting interests dulled the impact of reform on the university. This made it possible for conservatism to exist, largely unnoted because historians have confused the importance of Cambridge to the godly with the importance of the godly to Cambridge (141).

Cambridge was a Protestant university by the 1580s, but it was never a fully conforming university. It became anti-Catholic, but it was never without Catholics. It was dominated by Calvinists by the 1580s, but never wholly Calvinist. Given the role of the university and the nature of the fellowships, changes were absorbed and incorporated over time as the community lived through them.

Law concludes that religious unity in Cambridge could not be realized. We cannot talk of the university as if it was a person with a belief system. Its conflicts were between people with concerns about status, authority, personal desires, pragmatic concerns and, perhaps, religion. Membership in the university was a life stage, not a career, and as times and people changed, so did the religious debates within it.

Because it is so narrowly focused on the university, her study does not address larger issues that might explain the reluctance for total resistance, such as the ideology of the royal supremacy, permitting men like vice-chancellor Perne to conform to each monarch in turn.

Law's very good study confirms that the English reformation was a long, complicated process that was as much about social change as religious belief. We have needed such a book for a long time, and it will become the standard work on the reformation in Cambridge.