The Dissolution is remembered largely as a legal and material enterprise, the suppression or surrender of foundations and the sequestration of their infrastructure and properties. These acts, which are the best described of a process that is poorly documented overall, have tended to eclipse the human dimension. It is easy to be drawn into the assumption that the men and women whose traditions were swept away by the crown between 1536 and 1540 were as battered and beaten as the orders and institutions that they had filled. Yet recent research has revealed the Dissolution generation in very different colours. We know now that many of them were young in their religious life; many more of them were learned – the men, graduates, the women more than conventionally literate and bookish – than the immediately preceding generations. It is also increasingly clear that they were active contributors to the religious culture of wider society, sharing in the shifting tastes and outlooks of the post-1517 era, and steering them not only through the pulpit and the printing press but also in the private household. Mary Erler herself has done much to focus this new image, her forensic efforts with the few books for which a provenance can be traced recovering lively relationships between the old cloisters and a rapidly changing world. Here she extends the enquiry into the moment of crisis itself, to follow how, and how far, professed men and women held on to their positions and outlooks when so much of the home, occupation and society that they had known was cast about.

The response of the religious to the Henrician Reformation has only ever been pursued patchily – and for the most part, unpersuasively – by means of prosopography and the far from perfect science of the close reading of wills. Erler prefers her practised method of book history: each of her six case studies centres on a text, printed or in manuscript, from which, painstakingly, she teases out a distinct drama, a (remarkably) connected cast of actors – regulars, and in each case, the clerical-lay network in which they operated – and at least some hint of their cultural and social, and perhaps political and confessional, attitudes. By contrast with her earlier work, here it is not the habits of reading that pull these personalities from the shadows but the context in which the text arose: the audience addressed by Simon Appulby, the last anchorite of All Hallows, London Wall, and Richard Whitford, Syon Abbey's most prolific published author; the networks within which the last of the London Franciscans compiled their well-known chronicle of the revolution, and the superiors of leading nunneries negotiated their interest through the troubles; and the creative exchanges which carried new work, such as Crowley's 1550 Piers Plowman, through the press in what was an uncertain climate for printers. Her method also brings to attention the form and function of female writing, still largely neglected in respect of religious or lay women. Of course, it was not only books that were exchanged by women but also vigorous and at times voluminous correspondence. The letters of the superiors Katherine Bulkeley (Godstow), Morpheta Kingsmill (Wherwell), Joan Fane (Dartford) and, above all, the extraordinary Margaret Vernon (Sopwell, St Mary de Pré, Little Marlow and Malling) – which she prints in her appendices – prove in Erler's hand to be richly suggestive both for personal responses to the politics of the Dissolution and the dynamics of gender relations in the second quarter of the sixteenth century.

Erler suggests that her case studies show that those religious who experienced the Dissolution were not simply ‘left behind as remnants of a cast-off system’ (p. 13). Certainly, each of her personalities confirms the impression that the agency and attitude of regular religion, its representatives and institutions were active in Henry's England. Simon Appulby's Fruyte of redempcyon (1514) found a new currency after 1530 as the crown and its bishops struggled to stem the Tyndalean tide. Richard Whitford's energy for publication scarcely dipped even in the difficult years after 1536, and his final title, Dyvers holy instrucyons, would seem to stand as a warning to any inclined to argue for a fundamental discontinuity since it appeared a full two years after Syon itself had finally fallen to the crown. Yet Erler struggles, rather more than she is inclined to acknowledge here, to find in (m)any of these cases, and the texts at their centre, unequivocal signs of a continuing, close engagement with the fast-moving political and confessional scene. Erler does admit that the Greyfriars chronicle is not a developed discourse on religious change. What it does express is an enduring attachment to the place and people of past association. The same may be said of most of the women whose books and letters she has examined: it is hard to see the political engagement of such abbesses as Bulkeley, Shelley and Vernon as little more than circumstantial. When the game was up, it was their affinities with their former sisters which seemed to define them above all, and they settled into a semi-communal (but not actively monastic) retirement. In the same way, Whitford's final book carries a cloak of contemporaneity, but as Erler delineates, all but one of its texts were reissues of what he had delivered ‘unto the people years ago’ (p. 137). Dyvers holy instrucyons is a retrospective for a career which had been most creative in a wholly different era, when the king had a cardinal and even contemplated the Holy Roman crown. Still, these books and letters do reinforce Erler's point that the last generation of the professed were by no means unreflective apologists for the old mumpsimus: even the Greyfriars welcomed the royal supremacy and the monastic women were quick and adept in working under the new, centralising mode for the management of perpetual foundations which – as Erler confirms here – was established, and working well, almost a decade before 1534. How far their personal patterns of observance, and their spiritual sensibility, had shifted from their original monastic formation is not clearly answered by Erler's texts. Where there is a hint of confessional novelty – for example, surrounding Katherine Bulkeley – it is founded in the social, and more specifically family, context in which they were firmly held both during and beyond the term of their cloistered life. It may be the result – and the weakness – of Erler's preferred methodology that what is seen most clearly from these books and manuscripts and the documents that Erler weaves around them is the formative power of material and familial status. As such one might almost conclude that despite their ringside view of the Dissolution, the experience, and response, of the religious was much like that of their friends and neighbours: contingent, circumstantial and for the most part lacking in ideology.

This is not to diminish the value of Erler's method. What she has drawn out so successfully from her selected books and documents should surely stimulate activity in an area beyond London and the landmark houses that have long been her focus. We can distinguish the Dissolution generation more clearly here but our understanding of it has only just begun.