Accounts of religion, once reliably classified in U.S. universities and divinity schools under such designations as church history, historical theology, or even religious-intellectual history (the defensive label of choice in this reviewer's graduate program), are now almost always to be found under the big tent marked cultural history. The field change in nomenclature provides us with a happy case of truth in academic advertising and not simply because the older terms raised the question of denominational partisanship (or, alternately, in the case of the religious intellectual, pleaded perhaps a bit too much detached rationality). The label fits so well because the broad boundaries of cultural history more adequately encompass analyses of the interdependent negotiations of politics and philosophy, the relations between elite and popular classes, and the processes by which belief shapes and is shaped by believers. Any persuasive study of religion must cover these categories.

The books under review here can be categorized as cultural histories and fulfill all the diverse promises of that designation. The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland locates Protestant initiatives—preaching, Bible-centered piety, and doctrinal Calvinism—as they emerge, only gradually triumphant, after a long and sometimes bruising battle with traditionally sacred practices and beliefs. One preliminary conclusion to be drawn, then, from Margo Todd's findings is that Scotland's experience was more analogous to the England of Eamon Duffy's or Christopher Haigh's depictions than has been acknowledged heretofore. Preaching during the English Reformation, on the other hand, would seem to set the Duffy and Haigh thesis against itself. Susan Wabuda belies her book's title a bit, perhaps, by arguing ultimately for what she calls the “supplementary” role played by preaching in a religious age, and a culture, not yet defined by the sermon. Supplementary being better than nonexistent in this case, she reminds her readers that late medieval English religious sensibilities were never solely dependent upon the sensual, and in so doing she sets a traditionalist stage for the emergence of a successful word-centered Reformation.

Both authors, then, deal with the issue of protestantization in counterintuitive and innovatively contextualized ways. Simultaneously giving a real, not watered-down, Protestantism its due and putting it in its place, Wabuda and Todd are able more persuasively to explain the mysterious process by which nations were evangelized. And in so doing, both do not merely challenge but turn virtually inside out cherished commonplaces, old and new, about early modern Britain's Reformations.

Wabuda takes on the assumption—set resolutely in place, it would seem, by the careless anti-Catholic polemic of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and never since completely dislodged—that late medieval England was a sermon-free zone. She makes the commonsensical but often overlooked case that, while no sine qua non, sermons nonetheless played an important role as one aspect of the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century's enthusiastic and multifaceted devotional life. Locating preaching in this larger universe of traditional practice allows Wabuda to take on a more recent historiographical assumption that the robust religious culture of late medieval England stands as evidence that the Protestant Reformation was not so much embraced by as imposed upon the reluctant and unhappy people of early modern England.

And take it on she does, politely but firmly. Wabuda does not dispute the vibrancy of England's old religion but instead argues for the innovatory work of priests operating well within the bounds of tradition. Preaching during the English Reformation is mostly concerned with the contexts of preaching before the 1540s, an era when the success of the new ideas from the Continent (or, for that matter, of a native heresy advocating most of the same principles: the Scripture in vernacular, the priesthood of all believers) was in no way a foregone conclusion. The intrinsic attraction of Protestant doctrines does not function, therefore, as an initial explanatory mechanism here. “Catholicism in England,” Wabuda argues forthrightly (and indeed, her prose style rarely brooks nonsense), “was undermined … by aspects of its own success” (p. 9, emphasis mine). These successful aspects included new devotional practices—as well as restrictions on vernacular Bible reading that, ironically, created a more literate laity, hungry for biblical instruction and for the preaching of the Word.

Wabuda argues that well before Protestant Reformations took firm hold in England, sermons played three major roles in religious life: as Scripture-based homilies that were a regular (if neither official nor mandated) feature of the Mass, as quarterly sermons established by canon law, and as public sermons often conducted from the outdoor venues provided by the great market crosses. She reminds us that the busy mendicant orders of the later Middle Ages, especially that of the Franciscans, provided a wealth of licensed parochial preachers for early sixteenth-century bishops worried about an influx of heretical ideas into the country. And while the friars’ sermons may sometime have earned the Lollard rebuke that they were based upon nothing more than silly miracle stories and hackneyed old saints’ tales, they were as much if not more concerned with countering the preached heterodoxy of English Lollards or Luther mongers—demonstrating that the antisermon sermon was a staple of English controversial piety at least a century before Jacobean court preachers such as Lancelot Andrewes made the eloquent pulpit tirade against sermon-centered piety his métier.

A traditional culture of devotion thus provided the crucial underpinning for later Edwardian and Elizabethan evangelical reform. Wabuda's well-argued study is truly postrevisionist, insofar as it sharply reorients the Dickensian view of the English Reformation by way of a discriminating appropriation of Duffy and Haigh, a mildly indulgent nod to Elton, and an unfeigned appreciation for both churches under the early Tudors. In her estimation, the English Reformation was successful because it advanced—not merely packaged—new, desirable, but potentially destabilizing doctrines in old, familiar ways. What was accomplished was no less novel for all the familiarity of its delivery system. Faced with the old historical contest of continuity versus change, she declines the zero-sum game. About time, I’d say.

Margo Todd best explains why such an approach is suited to the task of religious explanation, and, more specifically, why the Reformation was a success in England and Scotland. “Truly radical cultural change,” she claims, “depends, ironically enough, on continuity. The two exist in a symbiotic tension … far from obliterating all that was time-honoured, the kirk managed to achieve a balance between preservation and innovation” (p. 22). In The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland, she thus revises a stubbornly long-standing commonplace, one that claims the Scottish Reformation enjoyed a more effective and efficient break with tradition than England's simply because it was accomplished against, rather than at, the will of socially conservative monarchs.

In Todd's reckoning, Scotland's Reformation was both a popular and a protean affair, a long process requiring modification, politic retreat, and the occasional retrofit by both ministers and people. Her book is a masterful achievement, employing anthropologically informed standards to what she calls, engagingly, “the problem of religion in the pew.” Her range of sources is astonishingly impressive, and her use of the archive never dwindles into cataloging or mere description. This is in part due to the fact that she detects the sound of human voices in the faded ink of the many kirk session minutes, commonplace books, sermons, statutes, depositions, diaries, and letters she has consulted.

In Todd's view, Scotland achieved “as remarkably successful a Reformation as anywhere in Western Europe” (p. 15), but this is not to say it was a cakewalk. Indeed, given her unsentimental description of Calvinist Protestantism—“rigorous and invasive discipline, [an] abolition of image and religious festival, [and] stern doctrinal demands” (p. 21)—and her discussions of the resistance of ordinary Scots to many of the requirements of the Gospel, it would seem a daunting task to explain the Reformation at all. But explain she does, persuasively and thoroughly, and this is where her meticulous look at kirk session and ecclesiastical records comes to the fore.

What was truly remarkable was not, perhaps, the Reformation itself but, instead, the vigilant communication that was set up and subsequently flourished between all levels of presbytery and parish. Granted, Todd argues, the oversight of the kirk sessions was intrusive and onerous. And yet such a rich network of local contact fostered understanding as well as discipline, making possible the tough negotiation, pliant modification, and popular “re-forming” (p. 20) of Reformation principles and ideas, thus ensuring their eventual popular success. Here we see Todd revising the old “reformation against the crown” thesis to suggest that presbyterial discipline might not have succeeded because it was so comprehensively rigorous but because its all-encompassing connectivity allowed it an effective responsiveness.

In this vein, Todd is particularly persuasive when tracing familiar appropriations of Protestant doctrinal and sacramental initiatives. While the sacraments were reduced to two, elaborate preparations for communion—fasting, confession, the distribution of tokens—justified the long Sabbath (communion Sundays could start as early as 4 A.M. in some parishes) that followed, which featured sermons Todd likens to “emotional roller-coasters” (p. 99). Penance became a tightly scripted, costumed, and choreographed performative act, seemingly aimed to replace the outlawed rituals and plays of an earlier age (although it took several generations to convince the guilds to stop performing their mysteries). The old priesthood who once magically transformed the elements on the altar transmogrified into a band of hot-talking, miracle-promising preachers and charismatic advisors who inspired an adulation that bordered on the mystical. After reading this book, one would be hard-pressed to call the religion of the Scots austere.

The two books under review here, which take as their subject the religious cultures of early modern Britain, are therefore cause themselves for rejoicing—subtle yet direct, deeply informative while remaining highly analytical, both are exemplary, well-written, and absorbing representatives of an essentially multifarious genre. Refreshingly, and perhaps most important, they both argue for the success of Britain's conversion to Protestantism, a claim that has often been under concerted attack in recent years. That they can is due in part to the fact that both authors apply the paradoxical and constantly renegotiating standards of the age to the religious cultures they analyze. It's a distinct pleasure to review books of such high quality and unfailing interest, and so I offer no qualifications of what JBS readers might consider my rather indiscreet admiration of them both.