This well-structured book focuses on the engagement of English Protestants with the history of the medieval church from whose rites and values they had so decidedly disengaged. The early evangelicals were fascinated by the medieval chronicles, with their stories of monks and saints and miracles and popes, and continually referred to them. Thus in a curious way, continuity with the past was maintained, even as they set about reconstructing the identity of the new post-Reformation nation. The image of the monk, the saint, the pilgrimage, the papacy survived in Protestant propaganda. The narrative is peppered with vivid quotations from John Bale, John Foxe, and others, and the author's thorough acquaintance with the sources and the secondary material is never in doubt. More than 300 primary and 450 secondary sources are listed in the bibliography. This is a very solid piece of work. The introduction reviews the current state of scholarship on the interaction of early modern England with its past, and rightly emphasizes the pertinacity of oral tradition and the “visual mnemonic” of the landscape as well as that of the written word. The saint had always been a liminal figure, a conduit between the living and the dead, the natural and the supernatural, the cosmic and the local, and the changing fashions in pilgrimages and saints reflected this contextual embedding. The reinterpreted lives of the saints now progressed to become crucial building blocks in the new Protestant narrative. The fuzziness of the boundary between miracle and magic in the late medieval church certainly offered Protestant polemic full scope for searing criticism, yet their own “special providences” could validate the intervention of the supernatural in not too dissimilar ways. The boundary between medieval church and Protestantism was a porous one.
The second chapter illustrates the reinvention of the medieval past as a crucial complement to the biblicism of early evangelicals such as William Tyndale and Robert Barnes. Their reconstruction rebutted the claims of Roman Catholic controversialists that the Protestant church had no anchorage in English history. Matthew Parker assembled a formidable library of Saxon and medieval books and manuscripts to document the pre-Augustinian origins of the English church and its original freedom from papal authority. The ex-Carmelite John Bale was a keen antiquary, and his writings, the apocalyptic Image of both Churches and Actes of the Englysh Votaries, proved seminal. His alteration of the date of the appointment of Theodore of Tarsus as Archbishop of Canterbury from 668 to 666 (!) was symptomatic. Bale used the monastic chronicles to condemn the medieval church out of its own testimony. His polemical approach was then echoed in John Foxe's comprehensive and hugely influential survey of the whole of church history, The Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Days (1563).
Chapter 3 reviews the attitude of Tyndale, Bale, and Foxe to the “lying histories fayning false miracles.” Miracles, they affirmed, had ceased with the end of the apostolic age, and alleged wonders since then were in fact the work of the devil. Examples of notorious frauds perpetuated by monastic communities, such as the Blood of Hailes, were used to discredit all miracles, as well as the saints and pilgrimages associated with them, and indeed the Mass itself. The doctrine of transubstantiation became a conjuring trick performed by “Mistress Missa” (63).
Chapter 4, on the cult of the saints, notes that while reverence for relics was already diminishing by 1500, subject to sharp humanist critique from Erasmus and others, the Reformation's systematic collection and cataloguing of the relics, now uprooted from their local context, provided evangelical writers with rich seams of polemical material. Outward iconoclasm could be reinforced by inward. Traditional marks of sainthood such as chastity were also ridiculed, and the disparaging of one particular saint sufficed to discredit them all. The Erastian motives for dismantling the shrine and attacking the reputation of St. Thomas Becket, iconic defender of the Church's liberties, and of St. Dunstan, keen advocate of clerical celibacy, are portrayed in chapter 5. Rather more familiar territory is traversed in the next chapter on the papacy, which was seen as Antichrist. Silvester II, who had the misfortune to be pope at the turn of the millennium, when the devil was allegedly loosed from hell, received close attention from Bale and Foxe as did Gregory VII, champion of papal reform and power. Both were necromancers and magicians. A brief, typically lucid conclusion rounds off the book.
Parish's permeability thesis, that countless medieval values and themes, albeit in inverted form, were carried over into English Protestantism, may be true enough but is something of a trite observation. One could say the same of Russian communism's views of capitalism. The deployment of social anthropological categories, whether to describe the previous role of saints or miracles as community builders or to suggest that the polemics of the reformers were designed to construct a new Protestant identity, has limited traction. The functionalist reading of church history, as Brad Gregory has pointed out in Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) rather evacuates it of its theological content, its existentialist motivation, and its red-blooded reality. The use of terminology is at times questionable: “propaganda,” for example, appears to be used exclusively for Protestant readings of history.
Nonetheless, this book offers a fresh, slightly provocative perspective and as such is to be warmly welcomed, not least as the debates about the periodization of church history continue. A more comparative approach, relating the English Reformation's massaging of history to that of its British and Continental counterparts, could prove illuminating.
