It is now nearly impossible to put early modern Britons into tight denominational boxes. Research on the Reformation in the British Isles has recognized the Reformation as a process and deeply complicated the religious descriptors. This volume reminds us that the intellectual world of reform-minded Britons cannot be bounded by a sea. British theologians were influenced by Continental theologians and had influence on Continental thought. In an intellectual world that wrote and thought in Latin, and in which the vagaries of politics caused little waves of theologians to wash onto other shores, the British reformations do not stand alone.
As Patrick Collinson points out in his delightful contribution, there is a historical tradition that treats England’s Reformation as a political thing. The myth of the Via Media managed to detheologize the English Reformation, defining it as a top-down event. Collinson notes that this is not the case for Scotland and Ireland, which were more cosmopolitan than England, but English-speaking scholars of the Reformation have not paid much attention to Continental theological influences.
Polly Ha attempts a theoretical approach to Continental influence by introducing reception theory, borrowed from literary critics. She admits, however, that “the fluidity and broader approach” of reception theory limits its usefulness of understanding Continental and British reform (xxv). Since contemporaries viewed reform as a continuous process, you can never quite pin down what was received by whom, leaving the excellent scholars in this volume to get on with the sort of detailed, evidence-based studies that historians prefer.
Bruce Gordon begins by reminding us that Archbishop Cranmer dreamed of producing a wholly new Latin Protestant Bible, working with Bucer and Fagius in Cambridge. Part of the larger humanist enterprise, it shared a broad consensus that the Vulgate translation, although flawed in places, retained it authority with scholars. A corrected version had been attempted in several of the Protestant cities before Cranmer tried it, and it remained a desired but unfulfilled dream of the reformers. A Protestant Latin Bible for the learned suggests that Cranmer, although he created the English Book of Common Prayer, was striving to give England an important place among Protestant intellectuals in their Latin conversation about the role of the Bible in reformed culture.
If Gordon’s point about the Latin Bible needs driving home, Elisabeth Leedham-Green’s study of libraries underscores the cosmopolitan nature of a Latin reading public. However, she does find many more Lutheran books in Cambridge than in Oxford but that Cicero outstrips Calvin by three to one in Cambridge.
Rather than looking at probate records for books, John Craig has been collecting evidence of book buying by parishes all over England. Finding, despite the bishops’ attempts to get parishes to buy Calvin’s Institutes or Bullinger’s Decades, it was uncommon for parishes to do so. If they did own such books, they were usually gifts from laypeople. Craig concludes that that is not much evidence for reception on this level, suggesting that English people were taught by the liturgy to see themselves as part of the universal True Church, not by reading Continental theologians.
If parishioners were not buying Continental theology, they nonetheless got doses of Luther. Looking at England in the long Reformation, they find Luther had achieved “a Protestant ecumenicity” as a hero and symbolic figure rather than as a source of doctrinal wisdom (80–81). Peter Martyr Vermilgi, however, is seen by Torrance Kirby as having a direct influence on the Elizabethan church. In one of the best pieces in this collection, Kirby argues that his brief sojourn in England introduced the political theology of Zurich to the architects of the Elizabethan Settlement.
Interestingly, Nicholas Thompson finds Martin Bucer being used in Scotland in the early seventeenth century by William Forbes, who argued for a more ecumenical theology that could cross confessional divides. Taken together, Kirby and Thompson suggest that the influence of Zurich should be looked for like an underground stream in both nations.
Irenical people may have looked to Zurich for inspiration, but not the friends and foes of Geneva. Jane Dawson has discovered the letter book of Christopher Goodman in the Denbighshire Record Office, making her discussion of Knox, Goodman, and the “example of Geneva” fresh. The two returned exiles dreamed of a Geneva-style conversion of the archipelago. Instead, the example of Geneva brought division. Her far-ranging article demonstrates that the ideal of a Genevan reformation was as much a bugaboo as a beacon in British religious debates.
Anthony Milton and Howard Hotson demonstrate in their articles the ambiguous relationship between England and the Palatinate. Milton explores the Palatinates’ close relationship with England in the reigns of Elizabeth, James, and Charles and how the two states exchanged theology and theologians, showing that even after the Calvinist church in the Palatinate was suppressed, a relationship continued. The Heidelberg Catechism was required reading in Oxford, and patristic scholars from the German state, such as Scultetus, inspired Thomas Bodley. But Scultetus carried English ideas and books home, too. Hotson explores the interaction among Jan Commenius, England, and Scotland as he examines how Commenius’s plan for a general reformation of common learning influenced Hartlib and Dury, who influenced the curriculum at Aberdeen and Harvard.
As collections go, this one is first rate. Although it does not really wrestle with reception in a theoretical sense, it provides sound historical explorations of how Continental reformers and ideas influenced England and Scotland.
