This is a powerful and persuasive—occasionally polemical—and very programmatic book. It is not so much a literary history of the English Reformation as a ferociously forensic diagnosis of it, seeking to explain how we get from “the illiberal start of the Reformation to its proto-liberal end” (x–xi)—from, as it were, 1517 to 1688. James Simpson does not dissent from the conventional idea that modern liberalism has its roots in the Reformation, but lambasts a Whig-Liberal tradition he sees as deeply mistaken about its own genealogy. The Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century were in nearly every respect profoundly antithetical to modern liberal values: fundamentalist, authoritarian, antihumanistic, and hostile to artistic expression. Any idea that the Reformation was in favor of liberty of conscience, or the right to interpret scripture in one's own way, gets short shrift, and Simpson has harsh words for scholars (like the historian-theologian Alister McGrath) who subscribe to even a modified version of it. There are harsh words, indeed, for Reformation Protestantism itself (68: the “vicious psychic torture” of Calvinist soteriology), though Simpson denies any intention to present an ethical case against the Reformation, regarded here as an inexorable expression of modernization.

An ostensible circle is squared with the help of a concept borrowed from Leon Trotsky: the historically defining condition of Protestantism is a state of “Permanent Revolution.” Always self-conflicted and animated by a particular kind of “kinesis,” early modern Protestantism was driven to target and repudiate earlier forms of itself. It was invariably susceptible to “scope-creep,” defined (38) as obsession with “a further boundary that must be traversed in order that the purity of the movement be reaffirmed and guaranteed.” (A phenomenon familiar to those of us living through the Brexit fiasco in the United Kingdom). Ultimately, Simpson argues, the febrile demands of permanent revolution proved unsustainable, and seventeenth-century English Calvinism generated “self-stabilizing mechanisms.” Reformation iconoclasm, for example, necessitated invention of a new category, “art,” in order to stem destruction of beautiful artefacts. The central, paradoxical, argument of the book is that “the liberal tradition derives from Protestantism by repudiating it” (11).

The case is presented with great clarity, pursued with enjoyable intellectual brio, and tested thoughtfully on an array of authorities, including Bunyan (a kind of literary victim of Reformation), Milton (the conflicted star witness, a progenitor of liberalism in spite of himself), and Shakespeare (a subtle and dogged hero of the tale): Simpson offers sparkling readings of Measure for Measure and Merchant of Venice as plays in which Puritan pathologies—respectively, hypocrisy, and judicial literalism—can be cured only by intensified doses of the disease. Particularly stimulating is Simpson's chapter discussing how a plural concept of “liberties” (medieval, moderate, and respectful of history and tradition) developed into a unitary concept of “liberty,” revolutionary, centralizing, and absolutist. There is an explicitly presentist dimension to the discussion. Simpson fears that modern progressive liberalism threatens to resemble its intolerant and exclusivist evangelical ancestor when it sees itself as a worldview in its own right, rather than as a “second-order belief system” (349), a tool or mechanism for mediating and moderating rival claims to truth and authority.

As a work of cultural history, Permanent Revolution offers important answers, but it also raises some nagging questions. A focus on imaginative writing is justified on the grounds that “works of art register cultural pressure and/or signal cultural change with greater, more luminous clarity than works from any other discursive field” (12). This is certainly plausible, and one can understand why scholars of literature genuinely believe it to be so—but it remains a working hypothesis, rather than a given. One might question, too, Simpson's introductory contention that, with a few exceptions, “Anglo-American historiography of the Reformation remains locked into a five-hundred-year agon [contest], fighting a Catholic/Protestant struggle on one side or the other” (3). Most historians of the English Reformation would, I suspect, struggle to recognize that characterization of their field, one that for twenty years and more has been brimming with “post-revisionist” subtleties.

Some of those subtleties might usefully have been brought to bear on Simpson's account, which is in places both overemphatic and over-schematic. His conceptual model depends upon, or at least deploys, a series of “phases” in English Protestantism: the “Wittenbergian Lutheranism” (34) of Henry VIII's reign giving way to Zwinglianism under Edward VI, before being overtaken by “a yet more radical Calvinist wing” (34). The reality is messier. The ideas of Luther and Zwingli (and of other, still more radical, thinkers) were received in England more or less simultaneously, and English evangelicalism never really had a “Lutheran” phase, not least because of intense personal antagonism between Luther and Henry VIII. Some notorious wrinkles and creases of the Elizabethan church are also smoothed flat. Simpson writes (273) of the “striking Calvinist clarity” of the Elizabethan Settlement (little recognized at the time, or by scholars since), and also of the “forthright statement of Calvinist double predestination” to be found in the seventeenth of the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571. I find it difficult to see how Article 17, which pointedly omits any mention of God's purposive damnation of the reprobate, can be read in this way. Equally questionable is Simpson's contention that, after the first few years of Elizabeth's reign, the struggle against Catholicism ceased to be the most pressing issue for English Protestantism, as “much more dynamic cleavages” (37) emerged within Calvinism itself. Intra-Protestant conflict is of course a crucial theme, but any suggestion that the battle with Rome was old news of a past victory would surely have flabbergasted most Elizabethan and early Stuart Puritans.

Some details and nuances are sacrificed to the demands of the thesis. In George Gifford's Country Divinity (1582), the character of Atheos (not “Atheist”) is precisely not a run-of-the-mill “English Calvinist” (40), but a rural Pelagian who believes “the mercy of God must save all.” Discussing Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, Simpson misses that Harsnett's attack on Jesuit exorcists was a proxy for conformist critique of Puritan activity in this field. In quoting from Thomas Cranmer's coronation sermon for Edward VI, praising the young monarch as an iconoclastic Josiah, Simpson is unaware that the work (as Diarmaid MacCulloch has demonstrated) is a late seventeenth-century forgery—something that in itself invites commentary on English Protestantism's journey from 1517 to 1688.

Pedantry and nitpicking? Perhaps. Permanent Revolution is an ambitious, self-declared “grand narrative” (8–9) concerning itself with causes and consequences in the longue durée, and criticizing the limited purview of both New Historicism and some recent historical writing. Without grander narratives, Simpson announces, history itself “becomes irrelevant” (8). That seems to me, so to speak, a slightly illiberal view of the matter, and a narrowing of the range of reasons for why we study the past. But there need not be a quarrel: in Reformation studies, as in other fields, proselytizing grand narrative and skeptical revisionism have enjoyed a mutually enriching historiographical relationship; long may it continue.