In a candid introduction, Keith Thomas reflects on the fact that the historical profession is currently devoted to “splitting” rather than “lumping.” His use of categories deployed by J. H. Hexter over thirty years ago (used primarily to attack Marxist historians) serves to remind the reader of how methodological orientations appear to come and go. In this way, Thomas prepares us for a work of history striving to placate rather than provoke controversy, one which is focused as much on “striking resemblances and continuities” (6) as change over time. Originating in the Ford Lectures given at Oxford eight years ago, the book presents its case in a series of subjects related to its overall theme of fulfillment. Though Thomas calls himself a lumper, he has not shaped his argument according to an explicit historical theory. Rather more like an ethnographer constructing a collective portrait, Thomas has set out to “hear people talking” (5) about their personal beliefs and values between the years 1530 and 1780. Mining a rich array of sources (philosophical, religious, literary, legal, and epistolary), he shapes a narrative about fundamental cultural cohesion: English people adhered to a handful of basic beliefs that impinged directly on the social fabric and gave communities their sense of shared purpose and conventions. Intellectual differences may have multiplied in profusion throughout this period, but such disputes were also part of the landscape. Without once invoking the word “Englishness,” Thomas has given that illusive trait its history.
Because “fulfillment” was not exactly an early modern concept, a point Thomas readily admits, he has had to construct his own categories of ends. Six general aspirations form the basis of the book: military prowess, work and vocation, wealth and possessions, honor and reputation, friendship and sociability, and fame and the afterlife. But before delving into these pursuits, Thomas devotes his first chapter to parameters (“An Age of Limited Possibilities”), in which he sets out generally held beliefs and conventions. Communities depended on prescribed roles of gender and station, adherence to a common faith, and an acceptance of duties associated with all three; any deviation from norms, he points out, would have been discouraged by local communities. The pervasive power of prescriptive virtue, according to the terms Thomas sets out, would have trumped all evasions of or objections to convention. “Youths who had no masters, single women who lived on their own, new arrivals who concealed their places of origin, persons who expressed unconventional opinions on religious or political matters: all might find themselves in trouble” (28). Thomas underscores the conservative power of context (perhaps too heavily) so that we may comprehend the glacial speed at which attitudes and values change.
Thomas's choice of military prowess as a starting point, enhanced by the luminous book jacket illustration (The Knight's Dream by Antonio de Pareda), tells us much about an implicit trajectory in the book's presentation. Military (masculine) honor borrows from classical notions of virtues as ends-in-themselves: Thomas grounds his argument in the English Renaissance, an intellectual foundation that persists throughout the book, in which elites cherished humanist values. The intellectual movement fell on fertile soil, quite literally: the medieval aristocracy was “the most agriculturally-minded aristocracy in Europe,” freeing elites from a dependence on “the spoils of war” (46). It also seems to have oriented them toward a particular kind of civility that placed a premium on moral and intellectual achievement. “‘We … say of a man that is valiant,’ an Elizabethan preacher asserted, that ‘he is a man of a great mind’” (60). So by the beginning of the early modern period, the English aristocracy shared a definition of virtue lauded by the gentry, namely, high-minded self-improvement. Education and civic virtue prevailed over competing notions of nobility and military prowess. We learn later (not in a contradictory way) that religion was “the central intellectual activity of the age” (230); classical and Christian virtues lived in harmony in early modern England. Fundamental intellectual roots of social cohesion thus become apparent in Thomas's first chapter.
Thomas more or less bars the door against individuality and ambition in the chapter on work; those ever-watchful communities would have found that sort of behavior anathema. But men of state provide entertaining examples of overwork, which must indicate that, at least in the short run, they found work assignments ends in themselves. Cardinal Wolsey wrote “Letters for twelve hours at a sitting, never rising once ‘to piss nor yet to eat any meat’” (96). He was outdone by parliamentarian John Pym, whose work day stretched from 3 a.m. till midnight. In this contest of discipline, the pennant goes to a top Chancery lawyer, who died of overwork at age 39, never having slept as much as five hours at a time (96). The laboring classes were not so edified: were they working for subsistence, or material goods? Thomas presents recent research to enable us to think about this question, while reminding us of legal and social evidence suggesting that menial labor was hardly fulfilling in any sense of the word: servants continuously left one position for another, supervision was necessary for almost all laboring occupations, and eighteenth-century commentary understood conglomerations of laborers as the seedbed of insubordination, not to mention idleness (97). Ever the optimist, Thomas notes that whistling on the job was “very common in the early modern period,” and, outstanding in the category of song, dairymaids were noted as “the happiest people in the world” (97–98).
In later chapters, a growing awareness of personal, as opposed to public, needs and satisfactions appears in numerous observations. The selflessness of military pursuits gives way to a recognition of material and social rewards issuing from other occupations. Friendship constituted an end that early modern people were keenly interested in scrutinizing; over time, they rewarded friendship with intellectual legitimacy, regarding it as a high-minded pursuit of value equal to that of other humanist aims. We hear Bacon assent to friendship “without respect of utility” and Roger North describe it as one of life's “inexpressible enjoyments” (199). Hume and Smith see friendship as emerging from the fetters of patronage into a state of disinterestedness that gave it a new kind of purity in the new age of commercial society. One of the only notions of friendship going downhill, as it were, was that of male friendship, which devolved from Platonic ideals to something more “low-key and convivial” (213). There were competing notions of same-sex male friendships, which Thomas points out with some ballast from recent scholarship. But marital friendship tops off this treatment, providing a kind of capstone for Thomas's implied point about the profane nature of the newer ends. When associated with sociability or material comforts, ends-in-themselves become commonly accessible, less confined to the high minded, and more forgetful of the afterlife. Enlightenment philosophers proclaim happiness in this life as an end in itself, opening the door to a more egalitarian and comprehensive notion of human satisfaction. We can expect the cautionary human skull to disappear from the margins of eighteenth-century portraits.
Readers may quarrel with the absence of historical agency in these pages, despite the considerable scholarly apparatus in the footnotes, or the lack of recognition of political or social factors that impinged on the many voices gathered together here. The book nevertheless satisfies in ways that no monograph can ever match. Here is ready access to the past, filled with familiar and anonymous voices, busy with assertions, speculations, and intellectual differences. Anyone with an affinity to the early modern period will not be able to resist the charm and engagement of this volume. Unlike most other works of history, this one repays repeated visits, even while it provokes the same kind of unsettled rumination that goes on in its pages.
