The negative impact of the Protestant Reformation on the many forms of English art has been such a time-honored topos as to have attracted a long history of its own. Many contemporaries, Protestants as well as Catholics among them, bewailed what they saw as a wanton and even barbaric destruction; succeeding generations have echoed their cry ever since. Numerous mid-twentieth-century historians of art and religion in England (including, as a sampling, E. H. Gombrich, Margaret Whinney, A. L. Rowse, Ellis Waterhouse, William Gaunt, and John Phillips) either pursued particular aspects of that theme or developed variations on it without stopping to question some of its core assertions. In consequence, the assumptions remain that, for example, Protestant zealots of the Tudor and also Civil War eras were single-minded in their vandalism, an official proscription of religious art gave rise to the vast predominance of secular portraiture in its place, and England's unique form of Protestantism thereby set back the evolution of English art, and its reception of “Renaissance style,” for generations to come.

Only in the past decade or so has this verdict been convincingly challenged in at least some of its parts. The volume at hand, deriving from conference papers delivered at Sussex in 2005, seeks to address the current lack of a single-volume summary of the new approach. This it does, bravely and sometimes brilliantly, whetting the appetite for that broad survey that must surely come.

It must be said at once that this is not a seamlessly even volume either in its subject matter, which embraces painting, prints, sculpture, and decorative arts but entirely omits architecture, or in the scholarly depth of its contributions. Some essays call to mind the one-bite amuse-bouches that fine chefs use to advertise their specialties at culinary fairs, and they offer alluring hints of extensive monographs moving toward completion. Other essays serve up longer, more complete and complex courses. The book's production is similarly uneven, with a laudable number of images (several in color) balanced against poor production values, a confusing, tripartite index, and an ungainly look and feel. One wonders why such an important volume could not have found an appropriately skillful publisher.

But scholarly books are not written for their looks, and appearances must not deter us from reading on. This is an important collection. It brings the same sort of fresh thinking to the art history scholarship on the Reformation era as has characterized recent Reformation historiography in its other dimensions. It pays due attention to the new cultural history, and especially the contributions of anthropology and literary studies, without becoming tediously mired in literary theory.

The thirteen essays that form its core have been divided into four sections (“Portraiture,” “Interiors,” “Print,” and “Commemoration”). These are very usefully wrapped between two introductory chapters at one end and a characteristically eloquent and informative afterword by Maurice Howard at the other. The editors’ own introduction itself proves slightly anemic. While strong on setting the historiographical context, it wanders off into two case studies and a summary of the book's contents, where more of a manifesto trumpeting the new approach and at least some discussion of current thinking on, for example, material culture and public versus private space seem warranted instead. The second introductory essay is Philip Lindley's lengthy and learned scene-setting discussion of the visual arts in the pre-Reformation Church.

The “Portraiture” section (Tarnya Cooper, Karen Hearn, Richard Williams, and Pamela Tudor-Craig) reminds us that Protestantism was by no means incompatible with portraiture in and of itself and that many post-Reformation portraits, especially those done for residential rather than ecclesiastical spaces, continued to express religious themes. It also makes an implicit case for the possession of portraiture among the middling elites as well as the more familiar ranks of the aristocracy and the court circle. “Interiors” (Andrew Morrall, Richard Simpson, Tara Hamling, and Barbara Uppenkamp) reminds us that portraiture was not as wholly privileged over other visual media as one has sometimes assumed, and that religious and moral themes lived on in abundance in the decorative arts well after they had been proscribed from ecclesiastical venues. This section also draws its evidence from a much wider social and geographic range than did earlier scholarship, which tended to draw its evidence from courtly and aristocratic sources. The section titled “Print” (Brian Cummings, Raphael Hallet, and Helen Pierce) demonstrates both a continuity and an adaptation of religious intent in printed images. And “Commemoration” brings two extensive and thoughtful essays: one on the cult of the Protestant martyr as exemplified in Thomas Lant's thirty-six-foot-long frieze on the funeral procession of Sir Philip Sidney (Elizabeth Goldring), and one on the impact of the Puritan Reform on the form of funeral monuments (Margaret Aston), along with Howard's satisfying overview of the subject and the volume.

These essays do indeed make a powerful case for a new history of post-Reformation English art and, indeed, of the Reformation itself. They do not describe the full extent of such a putative history, as many subjects have necessarily had to be overlooked even in this sixteen-essay collection. But they do foretell many of the directions that such a summary would take. Far from the long-standing, sweeping, and condemnatory verdict on the destructive effect of the Reformation on the production of English art, we begin to see a story of continuity, adaptation, and innovation—not just in painting, but in virtually every visual medium of the era, and not just among the elite and court circle, but throughout the realm and its sundry social divisions. Ironically, the very diversity of subject matter at hand here shows just how difficult it will be to summarize the whole. In the meantime, this collection will do nicely as both inspiration and patchy road map for such an undertaking.