In Being Elizabethan, Norman Jones offers an ideological and intellectual history of Elizabethan England drawn from the tradition established by E. M. W. Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture (1956), providing an ideological snapshot into the collective “mind” of the early modern English. Jones's readable volume appeals to scholarly students and a general audience in an attempt to recreate a picture of how the people around Shakespeare would have thought about their world. The book's subtitle, “Understanding Shakespeare's Neighbors,” intimates a direct link to Shakespeare and his works, but it is something of a misnomer, as only a handful of plays are briefly mentioned, and Shakespeare himself goes largely undiscussed.

Jones deliberately moves away from the kind of history that is grounded in the doings and actions of so-called Great Men. He is more interested in beliefs and practices across not only politics and religion (the predominant topics of such histories), but science, education, geography, historiography, economics, and language. As might be expected from such a comprehensive list, Jones's work does not delve deeply into these subjects, but such is not his intent. At its core, Jones's book is about how people in Elizabethan England were active members of communities as well as families. Using evidence from art, letters, published works, wills, and bequests, Jones highlights the ways in which people sought to provide for their communities—guilds, schools, parishes, occupations, and localities—as well as families and friends.

Within these communities, Jones places specific emphasis on the hierarchy of social order, citing Sumptuary Laws, degrees, classes, and what he calls “sorts” (67). He is particularly interested in the Elizabethan anxiety about whether or not one was able to alter one's “sort” based on achievement or education (such as Simon Forman, mentioned in the final chapter) and how one presented one's self within or in excess of one's natural “sort.” Although he acknowledges exceptions to these rules, Jones creates a portrait of early modern England that appears mostly homogenous (albeit socially stratified), with members of the society moving along in their prescribed pathways.

One of the limits to Jones's approach is that he bases his assertions on extant documents, monuments, and other physical evidence. This grounds Jones's work in specific artifacts, and he makes use of illustration as well as quotation in illuminating his examples. However, it leaves out those who chose not to record—or who did not have the means to do so—their thoughts and lives. If what we do have can act as any indication, this means that we are far more likely to view those with wealth and strong, pious intentions (those who recorded the virtues of themselves and others) or desires. Jones addresses popular and artistic culture only in his chapter on the prominence of language, “A Generation of Hearers,” which breaks down the ways in which English art diverged from the forms found on the European mainland, including brief descriptions of plays, poems, portraiture, and music.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter is the fifth, “Seeing the World Anew,” in which Jones aptly demonstrates the wide variety of scientific and social cultural shifts that coincided in the period. The sheer breadth of alteration drives home the era's significance: geography, ethnography, food, astronomy and astrology, time and historiography, and anatomy all found themselves facing revolutions in terms of method and understanding. Jones's characterization, although necessarily lacking in toothsomeness, provides a sense of the overwhelming nature of scientific, mercantile, and intellectual expansion that irreversibly altered the pattern of English thinking from 1558 to 1603.

This chapter sets up several significant moments in the volume that help to explicate some of the most important ideological shifts not only of the Elizabethan half-century, but of the early modern period leading into the modern more generally. For instance, Jones focuses on the debate between communalism and individualism as it arose in economic terms in the chapter “Moral Economies.” Jones shows prototypes of both the Protestant work ethic (the expectation that hard work yields not only an economic but salvific reward) and prosperity theology (the idea that financial plentitude is a sign of godliness). It is thus probable—although Jones does not say so explicitly—to locate the modern Western economy in early modern debates about moral economics. The debate about these “moral economies” would eventually produce a longitudinal and international discussion about individual rights versus collectivism, and led ultimately to a separation between church and state.

Yet for all his frequent reference to religion, doctrine, and belief, given the religious fracas that characterized most of the Elizabethan reign, Jones's depictions often appear far more harmonious than the pervasive anti-Catholic and anti-Puritan persecutions of the era suggest. He uses terms such as “discomfort,” “tension,” and “angst” (9), which minimize the often lethal nature of religious conflict. That said, at the start of the final chapter, Jones acknowledges that “[t]o be an Elizabethan was to live in a time of dissentions” (281), although he does not fully characterize what this meant. Although Jones is absolutely correct to note the trajectory, the process was far more bloody and violent than he explicitly suggests.

Despite this, Jones clearly shows a shift in the flavor of religious praxis from Catholic through a period of doctrinal hybridity and into a more “pure” Protestantism. Although Jones relies on individualized anecdotes and examples throughout the volume, they establish the overall trend away from Catholicism and toward Puritanism that was evident throughout the period. However, as is often the case with any significant longitudinal study, the sweeping trend must necessarily neglect the complexity that made up the reality, and the picture Jones paints suggests more homogeneity than was the case. Being Elizabethan nevertheless demonstrates how the sea changes of the era became the jumping-off point for many “modern” elements of social and political culture: specifically, a trend toward secularization and the rise of individualism, two things tightly bound together by Elizabethan religious reform.