As the first volume of the Oxford History of Anglicanism, this collection of twenty-five essays by leading scholars takes the brave, if awkward, decision to renounce the label ‘Anglican’ on the grounds that, prior to 1662, the Church of England lacked a stable theological identity; it was an institution, not an ‘ism’. As one essay wittily notes, whereas on the Continent the different Churches, each with a distinctive theological platform, competed for Christian souls, in England, Christians espousing very different theological platforms, competed for the soul of the English Church (p. 35). Hence, whereas prior studies of the fledgling Church of England championed one or another churchmanship as the true ‘spirit of Anglicanism’ – whether Hooker's ceremonious and rationalist traditionalism favoured by Tractarians, the post-1980 Calvinist consensus model, or the mid twentieth-century big-tent non-confessional via media – the current volume portrays the period between about 1520 and 1662 as a ‘struggle between competing claims’ to be ‘the authentic and representative voice of the Church of England’ (p. 8). Yet, although the essays do on the whole avoid privileging any one churchmanship as the orthodox mainstream, most do betray the shaping hand of the past four decades of front-line scholarship, and if they do not fully embrace the Calvinist consensus model, see the Tudor-Stuart Church as unequivocally Reformed in doctrine and self-understanding.
This stance has both strengths and weaknesses. Among the former are surely a history of Anglicanism that includes, although not without qualification and nuance, the Presbyterian and Congregationalist experiments of the Interregnum and New England Churches. Indeed, the essays dealing with these are among the most informative, thoughtful and balanced in the volume, especially in their wrestling with the question of where on the spectrum of change continuity gives way to rupture. A second obvious strength is the situating of English Protestantism in relation not only to Geneva but to the multiform Reformed Churches of the Continent, a broadening of focus that discloses, among other things, the centrality of Zurich to the Elizabethan conformist position, of Cologne and Strasbourg to the Edwardian.
Perhaps the volume's main weakness is bound up with this concentration on the English Church's Reformed character. The existence of Catholic conformists goes unmentioned; indeed, one could not tell from these essays that there were any Roman Catholics, conformist or otherwise, left in post-Reformation England. The Lollards get a single passing mention, and while their significance may be less than A. G. Dickens claimed, they still might deserve a paragraph or two. A second problem is the unacknowledged tension between the volume's stern disavowal of the irenic, non-confessional via media version of Anglicanism of mid twentieth-century historiography and (sometimes on the same page) its depiction of the Ecclesia Anglicana as ‘an inclusive national Church’ (pp. 7–8), that ‘cast a wide enough net to pull in people of vastly different doctrinal leanings’ (p. 43), its piety betraying ‘a surprising degree of eclectic confessional permeability’, its parishes commanding ‘the allegiance and commitment of people of all shades of religious opinion’ (pp. 15–16). This does sound rather irenic and non-confessional; one wonders whether any other Reformed Church could conceivably be depicted in such terms. A third (possible) weakness concerns the foregrounding of conflict and polarisation. Most of the essays, that is to say, present Tudor-Stuart church history as a longue durée clash between conformist and Genevan imperatives; none gives serious consideration to recent scholarship (for example, that of Ian Green and Christopher Marsh) arguing for a fairly harmonious religious landscape.
Yet these weaknesses are more than offset by the volume's myriad excellences. These include, besides the strengths already mentioned, several essays that offer concise restatements of the groundbreaking scholarship of the past half-century (for example, Lake's Moderate Puritans and Milton's Catholic and Reformed); several more presenting succinct overviews of important but often neglected topics like the workings of the church courts, the role of Convocation, and the Protestant episcopal churches of Ireland and Scotland. Other essays challenge, or at least nuance, the currently received picture of the post-Reformation English Church, some by arguing for an avant-garde conformity antedating not only Tyacke's Laudian coup d'etat but even Lake's Anglicanism-inventing Hooker, others by documenting a renewed attention to ceremony, liturgy and the beauty of holiness outside of and seemingly unrelated to Laudian or proto-Laudian circles. Yet the volume's single most valuable contribution may be its utterly splendid bibliographic footnotes, which not only adhere to the standards of modern scholarship but include, quite literally, hundreds of fascinating-sounding and potentially-important items published within the past decade.
Since almost all the contributors are leading scholars, the volume contains very few factual errors (and, as far as I can tell, no proof-reading ones). While some of the errors are trivial, it seems worth pointing out that ‘an abiding self-identification as a scion of the primitive Church of the apostles’ was distinctively Genevan, not ‘Anglican’ (p. 37); as a later essay notes, from Jewel on the English Church proclaimed its continuity with the first five centuries of the Christian era (p. 290). In addition, the claim that the Cambridge anti-Calvinists of the 1590s were ‘following the lead of … Jacobus Arminius’ (p. 60) is chronologically untenable; the Cambridge anti-Calvinists probably owed a good deal to the Philippist Lutheran Niels Hemmingsen, but Arminius’ views on predestination seem to have been unknown prior to his 1604 clash with Gomarus. Finally, that Hooker's theology was ‘firmly … Calvinist’ (p. 308) is, to say the least, controverted; this was certainly not how contemporary English Calvinists like Walter Travers and Andrew Willet saw it.
Lastly, whether Anthony Milton's introduction is a tour de force of synthesising brilliance or the contributors agreed in advance on the overall shape and significance of the English Reformation, the essays hang together remarkably well; in contrast to most multi-authored volumes, the picture that they collectively paint is a coherent one.
