David Loades has long been one of the leading authorities on the brief but historically significant reign of Mary I, the devout Catholic daughter of Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon, who in five short years restored Catholic ceremonial in England, reconciled her schismatic church with the papacy, and burned around three hundred committed Protestants for their refusal to abjure their heretical beliefs. Loades’s work on the first Tudor queen includes the 1979 textbook The Reign of Mary Tudor (which achieved a second edition in 1991), a biography in 1989 (Mary Tudor: A Life), and the coeditorship in 2006 of a collection of essays on The Church of Mary Tudor, with Eamon Duffy. In addition, Loades’s substantial research on various aspects of Tudor religion, court, and politics, and not least his position as director of the British Academy’s John Foxe project from 1993 to 2004, make this a much anticipated work. The anticipation is further heightened by the fact that the history of Marian England is becoming an increasingly contested historiographical battleground. This is one of the first monographs on the subject to be published since Eamon Duffy’s provocative 2009 work Fires of Faith, and Loades and Duffy differ substantially on their interpretation of the nature, success, and significance of Marian religious policy. Loades describes his previous editorial collaboration with Duffy as a “privilege” (viii) and acknowledges a debt to his “pioneering efforts.” The Religious Culture of Marian England also has a different aim from Fires of Faith: while the latter focused on “inquisitors and inquisitorial practices,” Loades professes to be more interested in what was happening outside of that “selective spotlight.” Yet it is impossible to tell the history of the Marian Church without reference to its persecuting aspect, and Loades very clearly charts a different course from Duffy: “It used to be believed that … the persecution was counter-productive in terms of the Church’s declared policy of Catholic reconversion. Recent research has not only cast doubt on that interpretation, but has presented the alternative scenario of a Church winning its battle for hearts and minds. … The truth is probably somewhere between the two” (126).

Loades’s perspective on the burnings, and on the religious culture of the reign as a whole, is an interesting one. Of the burnings, he writes, “in presenting so implacable a face of persecution to the country, the Church was not, in fact, furthering its own mission. In addition, it had probably given to its Protestant opponents a credibility which they might otherwise have struggled to find” (127). But this is not simply the old wisdom about the Marian Church recycled, contra Duffy’s revisionism. In essence, Loades advocates a view of the reign that eschews the contention of polemical debate and political persecution, contending that Mary’s Reformation no less than any other aspect of the process was essentially decided at the parish level. The “social function” of the church could be discharged almost irrespective of its “doctrinal foundation,” “and it was the consensus generated by that function which determined the religious culture both of Mary’s Church and that of Elizabeth which followed” (156). “To concentrate too much on the polemical posturings of divines on either side of the division,” Loades concludes the work by saying, “is to give that division an emphasis which is does not really deserve” (156).

This is an interesting approach, although taken to extremes there is a potential danger of reducing religion to the status of an epiphenomenon, of privileging a functionalist approach to religion as an expression of social continuity, at the expense of the complex and nuanced understanding of beliefs and identities that scholars have spent much of the past several decades revealing. Loades is certainly not guilty of this, and on the contrary, he perhaps does not go far enough in demonstrating the validity of his approach. In other words, those expecting a polemical work from Loades himself are likely to be largely disappointed. With a few exceptions, including those cited above, The Religious Culture of Marian England reads in large part like a thoughtful and learned textbook overview of the English Reformation. With his book divided into eight thematic chapters, and with a postscript on the Early Elizabethan Church, Loades addresses topics such as popular religion and religion and daily life. Most chapters begin with a long historical context for developments in the Marian Church: the chapter on popular religion can stand as a fairly representative example. Fifteen pages long, it begins in the mid-fifteenth century and moves through the ars moriendi and danse macabre, latria and dulia, pilgrimage, the social function of the sacraments, guilds and fraternities, and reforms under Henry VIII and Edward VI. Not until the final four and a half pages does the chapter address changes under Mary. There are some real highlights, such as chapter 7, “The Face of Persecution,” and no historians worth their salt would disagree with Loades’s contention that the context for Mary’s reign is vitally important, in terms of conformity as well as heresy (viii). But Loades’s tendency to spend anything up to three-quarters of a chapter summarizing a century and a half’s worth of context to his primary object of study is often frustrating and means that the reader is occasionally left unfulfilled and hungry for richer and more substantial discussion of Mary’s reign itself. This text is likely to become an invaluable introduction for students and a useful reference work for scholars. But in some ways it also represents an opportunity not fully realized, and while an important contribution, it is unlikely to fundamentally alter the way we currently think about church and religion in Mary Tudor’s England.