The relationship between the late-medieval English heresy known as Lollardy and orthodoxy is far from resolved, despite continuing attention from both historians and literary scholars. Robert Lutton's new study is a welcome addition to the field precisely because it breaks down the binary between Lollardy and orthodoxy to offer a detailed and compelling portrait of the complexities of religious belief and practice early sixteenth-century England. Lutton frames his study as an explicit response to the extremely influential work of Eamon Duffy, specifically his recent work, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, CT, 2001), which tells the story of the Reformation through the voice of the vicar, Sir Christopher Trychay, and his churchwardens’ accounts. Like Duffy, Lutton uses one parish (this is, in other words, a determinedly local study) to take up much broader questions about the shape of “traditional” religious practice, but unlike Duffy, Lutton is far more concerned with detailing the variety of religious practice than with finding a unitary vision. Although Lutton ends his study in 1535, he suggests that the Reformation was not quite the death blow to medieval piety that Duffy has imagined, that medieval piety already contained within it strands, such as the Christocentrism of the Jesus Mass, compatible with Reformation beliefs.

What makes Tenterden such a useful counterpoint to any account of a unified medieval piety is, of course, its place in the history of the Lollard heresy. The continued presence of Lollards in this area is well documented, and Lutton focuses particularly on the trials held by Archbishop William Warham in 1511–12. But Lutton is interested not only in offering an account of the Lollards as an isolated group but also in setting their beliefs and practices against those of their neighbors. Indeed, one of the strengths of this study is its focus on the relations between heretical and orthodox beliefs and practices, on the “changing nature of orthodoxy” (2), as Lollard beliefs emerged in the 1420s, faded in the later part of the fifteenth century, and then reemerged in the early part of the sixteenth century. Lutton's work thus stands as a kind of “second-wave” of Lollard studies: first, Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988), and Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London, 1984), reclaimed the Lollards as a worthy object of study by arguing for the coherence of their views; more recent work, like Lutton’s, can now return to what connects these views to “orthodoxy.”

Central to Lutton's response to Duffy is the nature of his evidence. Where Duffy used the churchwardens’ accounts, a use that generated a unitary and priestly perspective, Lutton uses wills, supplementing them with visitation presentments, heresy proceedings, property deeds, and taxation returns in order to argue for a more diverse and more lay-oriented piety. The prologue and first chapter helpfully situate his work in relation to Duffy and the “revisionist” work on late medieval religion, which has argued for the homogeneity of medieval piety. Here Lutton explains the reasons for his focus on testamentary giving: wills give insight into the family's role in shaping piety (one can trace the persistence of certain practices across generations) and the social aspects of piety, such as the relationship between social standing and religious practice. This opening is extremely useful for anyone interested in recent debates on writing the history of late medieval and Reformation religion. The following two chapters present the data on testamentary giving: first for Tenterden, in chapter 2, and then for Small Hythe, which was within the parish of Tenterden but functioned as a distinct unit, in chapter 3. Lutton then turns to the divergences from “traditional practices”—the particularly frugal giving of certain families in chapter 4. Here he establishes a relationship between social mobility and parsimony in religious bequests. The final chapter then addresses religious dissent, the survival of Lollard ideas in Tenterden, linking Lollardy to the “parsimonious piety” discussed in chapter 4. What emerges in the analysis of his data is not only the role of kinship and social standing in determining religious practices but, interestingly, the geographic influences on piety: for example, the isolation of Small Hythe and its identification with St. John the Baptist in the wilderness. Although these chapters present a wealth of information, they seem to have been written with a more limited and more specialist audience in mind. I would have appreciated a few pithy anecdotes to illustrate the statistics with some of the drier details assigned to an appendix.

The particular strength of this study is Lutton's discussion of the Jesus Mass, which was a new form of devotion in the late medieval period, extremely popular at the end of the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth. In its Christocentrism, it provides a bridge between late medieval piety and the humanism of the early sixteenth century and, specifically in Tenterden, between the orthodox families and the Lollard dissenters. It appealed to families “who had tended to neglect other forms of religious devotion” (72), such as gifts to chantries or saints, thus suggesting that devotion to the saints had already begun to fade, at least in Tenterden, before the introduction of Reformation ideas. Lutton notes that he will take the Jesus Mass up at greater length in a future study, which we can anticipate as persuasively expanding the important work he has done here.