Robert Zaller's monumental study is of the “changing and often conflicting self-perceptions of [England’s] elite” from the Reformation to the outbreak of the “English Revolution” (2). In the opening sentence, Zaller invokes Lawrence Stone's Causes of the English Revolution and consciously adopts Stone's chronological parameters. While he disclaims any intention in the introduction to account for the “causes” of the midcentury civil wars, Zaller's project is to trace the long-term origins of ideological divisions articulated by “the critical elements, crown and Parliament,” which, by the mid-seventeenth century, “had become radically polarized” (4).

Essentially, this work is a vast exercise in the history of ideas, or a study of the languages of politics. Indeed, the plural noun “Discourses” might have been more appropriately used in the title: the chapter headings divide the book into the “Discourse of Monarchy,” “Sacred Discourse,” “Discourse of the Realm,” “Discourse of the Law,” “Discourse of the Stage,” and “Discourse of Parliament” before reaching a climax with “Stuart Parliaments and the Crisis of Legitimacy.” These divisions invite some inevitable overlap and thematic repetition (most obviously in the chapters that explore discourses of law and Parliament), but they exemplify the fruits of interdisciplinarity for the historian of political ideas. The great strength of the work is its exhaustive demonstration of the variety of contexts and voices that expressed concepts of monarchy, state, commonwealth, and constitution in early modern England.

The overriding argument of the work, which threads in and out of very extended discussion of legal, historical, and literary texts and debates in Parliament and the law courts, is that the Reformation set in motion developments in the languages of authority that, by 1629, had produced parallel and incompatible conceptions of political power. This premise is based on the compelling idea that the peculiar circumstances of Henry VIII's break with Rome and the declaration of imperial monarchy in statute law established increasing claims for the authority of both Crown and commonwealth—the latter as conceptualized either in the common law and ancient constitution and/or as represented in Parliament. Zaller's analysis in the “Discourse of the Law,” which focuses around a detailed reading of St. German, Coke, and Selden, is particularly successful in this respect. Zaller rightly emphasizes the “dynamic and expansive” development of the prerogative and equity courts under Henry VII and Henry VIII (267), and the contested use of the royal proclamation, as representative of the expanded scope and new assertiveness of royal authority in the sixteenth century. However, he stresses the ambiguous implications of St. German's writings, which both facilitated the declaration of the Royal Supremacy and enshrined the authority of the common law. It was the fractious nature of this long-standing dynamic that was famously realized under the early Stuarts, in Selden and Coke's (different) conceptualizations of the English constitution and law.

Zaller's exploration in “Sacred Discourse” takes the reader on a long journey over some very familiar territory: the establishment of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement and the range of dissatisfied responses—Puritan, Separatist, Catholic, and, conversely, the development of the ideology of conformist clerics, given philosophical definition in the writings of Hooker. This point of the analysis, however, is to show that the Erastian church gave monarchs—in theory at least—considerable new powers over the consciences of their subjects, but in doing so they problematized the character of political obedience and loyalty to monarchical authority. Even the conflict of Jesuits and Appellants in the 1590s centered around the problem of the extent of their willingness to find accommodation with the Protestant state. In the battle of conscience and obedience, Church papists and moderate Puritans felt more keenly the demands of secular obedience and loyalism than did outright recusants or separatists, who were “only the most visible aspect of a far wider estrangement whose source was in the very essence of the Erastian church” (130). Zaller impresses strongly and convincingly the depth and range of consciences that felt their political loyalty stretched and severely tested by the peculiar nature of the English Reformation.

Zaller's main interest—and, one feels, sympathy—does not lie with those who made strong arguments for the enhancement of royal authority (Sir Robert Phelips's presence and speech at the 1628 Parliament are described as “courageous” and “remarkable” [646]). Despite claims to the contrary, the spirit of Gardiner stalks with a heavier tread as the work progresses, and Zaller's real purpose in the final chapter is to demonstrate that, by 1640, the “sanctification of Parliament,” which has assumed the “charisma” of divine-right monarchy, was assured (706).

The first chapter, the “Discourse of Monarchy,” is, in fact, one of the shortest, when, given the premise of the book, we might have expected it to be one of the most substantial. There is a promising account of the development of royal ceremonial and coronations, but more ample space might have been allotted to different monarchs’ conceptualizations of their own authority. James VI and I's political writing and thinking is invoked throughout the work, but mainly to illuminate his difference with Coke and other common lawyers, or the Commons. No extended attention is given to Elizabeth's articulation of her ideas of monarchy in her letters and speeches or to Charles I's deeper ideological hostility to Parliament and the subversive potential of “popular” politics—shared, after all, by those of his subjects who became royalists and essential to the “polarization” of ideas and political mentalities. Zaller writes very suggestively (in a later chapter) that “absolute” ideas of kingship developed during the waning of Elizabeth's reign because some servants of the crown, particularly Sir Thomas Egerton, Francis Bacon, and Sir Julius Caesar recognized that “the powers of the monarchy needed reaffirmation” (566). However, despite some excellent flashes of analysis of Bacon's developing legal and political thought, he does not flesh out this assertion in a sustained passage, although the concept is crucial to the argument of the whole work.

One of the strengths of this work lies in the sensitivity of Zaller's close readings of individual authors and texts. The works selected, especially those in the chapter on drama, are familiar and canonical, but the interpretation is nuanced and insightful. Turn to the book for a probing and sensible analysis of Sir Thomas Smith's De Republica Anglorum or for a thoughtful reading of passages of Holinshead. Our understanding of ideological divisions is also deepened by the tracing of some minor themes over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a variety of texts and contexts, for example, Zaller demonstrates that divergent accounts either of the unity or of the separability of the king's two bodies were often invoked by those who placed different emphasis on the scope of royal authority and the necessary obedience of subjects. The “exceptionalism” of contemporary attitudes toward England's constitution—the legacy of Fortescue—also surfaces several times, especially in Zaller's accounts in the “Disourse of the Realm” and of the common law: it would be worthwhile to examine Zaller's analysis in response to Jonathan Scott's account of the European context of “England's Troubles” or in the context of the “British dimension” of English politics and political culture that has been so dominant in recent historiography.

Some will find the brushstrokes that paint the wider political context to be rather too broad. The “taming of the nobility” accomplished by the Tudors is confidently referred to as an established fact (20). “Only under James I did it become the norm to lose one's place without forfeiting one's head” (6). Other readers will want Zaller to have engaged more substantially with the subtleties of revisionist and postrevisionist accounts of the role of Parliament and political ideas in early Stuart England, and to have grappled with certain recent contributions to historical and literary scholarship. This work reflects, however, the robust fertility of the current field of the history of ideas in early modern England. As ever, the most difficult challenge lies in integrating the study of the history of ideas and political discourse into a deeper and wider political narrative: or, to use the humanist perspective made famous by Grafton and Jardine, to relate “study” to “action.”