This is a big book which tells a big story. Unlike many academic books it is not weighed down with all sorts of footnotes in the text. Instead it tells the story of the English Reformation from the perspective of those who could be called heretics and believers at all levels of society. All the references are there at the end of the book in copious notes for those who want to follow up a reference, but clearly for this author the story was the most important matter. The story is told well and even though I knew the story I found the telling of it riveting and enthralling. Marshall weaves the story well and tells it in a very readable and accessible manner. This book would be good reading for academics and the general public alike.
The whole story is there from the perspectives of kings and queens, popes, cardinals, bishops and priests, as well as those who could be found in the field, village, city and alehouse. It is not a story of the important people alone. The very ordinary person features and this is what makes the telling so readable and exciting. It is full of the human person and the story allows us to get alongside all sorts of people.
The story is balanced but warts and all. There is no attempt to argue the case for one side or the other. It is just the story of the English Reformation – told well. So well told is the story that it won the prestigious Wolfson History Prize.
The story begins with Reformations before Reformation debunking the myth that the Reformation began with Henry VIII. It goes on to tell the story of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I, interweaving the lives of the monarchs with the lives of hundreds of other important and less important people. It seems to have a light touch but that is a deceptive judgment since within the story is the magisterial treatment of this important time in English history and the life of the church, including of course the Church of England.
Perhaps the most important part of the book for me was the final Postscript (pp. 574-79). Here Marshall sums it all up in a way that also presents a vision for the Anglicans of today. There is a sense of frustration with the machinations of church life as someone looks back over a long and detailed story and tries to see within all that the power of something more universal and lasting. For Marshall this is not a judging of whether or not the Reformation was virtuous and he leaves that judgment to others. He does not comment on whether the Reformation was a failure – again left to others. For Marshall the story of the Reformation is a ‘teasing out of answers’ involving ‘attention to various long-term continuities in English religious culture, and sometimes leads to the paradoxical conclusion that the Reformation succeeded as an agent of social transformation precisely because of how little it actually managed to change, and how slowly it managed to change it’ (p. 575). Marshall’s approach, therefore, is one of revisiting the story and teasing out these themes and answers. He does this remarkably well as he points to stabilities and continuities, such as the remarkable fact that despite all the changes people continued to worship together in the same church buildings as their ancestors had done for hundreds of years. And yet Marshall is also of the view that the Reformation in England ‘was nothing if not a volcanic eruption of change, whose seismic impact remains fundamental to an informed understanding of almost all the country’s subsequent social and political developments’ (p. 575). This suggests that the story that Marshall tells has great importance and so deserves to be told and told so well.
Marshall’s conclusions about ‘a splintered world of faith’ (p. 575) at the time of the Reformation and shortly after presents a challenging message for the Anglican Communion today. It is the struggle that is important for Marshall, which played out in a vibrant national conversation where few voices were excluded and so the struggle of the sixteenth century becomes the struggle of the twenty-first century. Marshall reminds us of the paradox of Thomas More at his execution telling those who would shortly see him dead that Paul, the Pharisee, who approved the stoning of Stephen the saint, became a saint himself. It is the heretic and the believer that will all merrily meet in the heavenly kingdom. This is a message for all to consider in an Anglican Communion where some are too ready to exclude others because they do not fit a predetermined mindset of belief or moral behaviour. In God’s eyes all are equal and so taking strong stands on the strength of our own hermeneutic is sometimes a great problem since it limits the more universal knowledge of God. It seems to me that Marshall believes this and counsels tolerance, peace, forgiveness and love for the church. This is a message for those who want to separate themselves from others on the basis of their own righteousness and judgments. It is a message those who are presently fracturing the Anglican Communion need to hear as they prosecute an exclusive message.
Marshall has written a superb book which challenges me to hear the story of the Reformation again and to consider the impact of the continuities and discontinuities again. The book brings me to the consideration of the fundamental issues that bind Anglicans together, sometimes called koinonia, and indeed all Christians together and how those issues of God-given fellowship and communion are more universal than particular and very human judgments. The English Reformation tells this story and has importance for the church of today.
