Stewart Mottram's Ruin and Reformation in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Marvell adds to a growing literature on ruined buildings and iconoclasm during England's Long Reformation. Its chief insight is that Protestantism did not necessarily involve iconoclasm and that many English Protestants opposed the dissolution of the monasteries and saw the ruins it created as a warning about what could happen to the new Church of England. Mottram reads canonical literature alongside lesser-known texts, examining their depictions of literal and figurative ruins. The latter predominate in the first three chapters (on Spenser and Shakespeare), which spend less time on ruined buildings in the target texts than on related issues and “the language of ruin”; actual architectural ruins appear in the ancillary texts. The last two chapters spend more time on ruined buildings.

Chapter 1 focuses on the September eclogue in Spenser's pastoral poem, The Shepheardes Calender (1579), which Mottram regards as part of a polemic against the misuse of former monastic lands. Since many of those lands now lie fallow and unplowed, and since their new owners receive associated fees without plowing that money back into the local community, they fail to fund godly ministers whose preaching would spiritually plow parishioners’ consciences.

Chapter 2 reads Spenser's poem The Ruines of Time (1591) in the context of a hitherto unrecognized source: William Vallans's chorographical poem A Tale of Two Swannes (1590). Spenser's poem reflects on ephemerality of human achievements, elegizing the militant Protestant writer Sir Philip Sidney, who died fighting the Spanish in the Netherlands in 1586. A personification of ancient Roman Verulamium mourns not just the loss of her own city's glorious buildings, of which not even ruins survive, but of modern Protestant heroes like Sidney and the Earl of Leicester. In the midst of her lament Verlame calls the Thames “that gentle river” whose “pure streames” were “with guiltless blood oft stained” (lines 141–45). Mottram sees this as a coded reference to many innocent victims of persecution over the centuries, especially Saint Alban, the martyr for whom Verulamium's successor city was named—regarded by many as a proto-Protestant martyr. Vallans, for example, describes the saint as the “first [who] did spend his blessed life, / In [j]ust maintaining of our Christian faith” (A4r). Mottram argues that Vallans's description of other ruins, the ruins of Waltham Abbey, provides “a silent rebuke to the excesses of reformation” (64) and that Spenser's poem implies a similar rebuke to the metaphorical ruins of saints’ lives in monastic manuscripts. In other words, dueling Catholic and Protestant writings about saints like Alban distort biographical facts for polemical purposes.

Chapter 3 shows that Shakespeare's late tragicomic romance Cymbeline (1610) argues for non-persecution of British Catholics. Mottram makes the case by using the contexts of the Essex Rising of 1601 and of Ben Jonson's court masque Prince Henry's Barriers (1610). According to Alexandra Gajda, on whose work Mottram draws, Essex marched on London not to stage a coup and replace Elizabeth, but rather to ensure that Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, was not poisoning the Queen against James VI's right to succeed her. Welsh Catholics apparently flocked to Essex's banner because they expected greater toleration from James—expectations he would eventually frustrate. According to Mottram, since Shakespeare was friendly with Welsh Catholics—though not a Catholic himself—he viewed James's post-1605 treatment of Catholics with dismay, and urged that he stop persecuting such loyal subjects. The main ruin in Cymbeline is not a building but Cloten's headless body, which Lucius describes as a “ruin” (4.2.355). Instead of functioning as a metaphor for the truncated or wounded body politic that could result from parliament's rejection of James's Union plan, Cloten's corpse figures the maimed body ecclesiastic created by persecuting domestic Catholics. Jonson's masque, whose sets combined Gothic with Roman architecture, apparently argued for a reconciliation of Roman Catholics and Protestants under James's benevolent direction: “by combining Roman with Gothic architecture in his design for St George's portico, Jones gestures towards King James's discourse of crusade as an exercise in ‘arms defensive’ which draws strength from unity in religion”; “Cymbeline ends with a similar meeting of the Roman and Gothic in Cymbeline's closing command that ‘A Roman and a British ensign wave | Friendly together’” (128–29). Shakespeare rejects the hints of coercion and military force in James's plan to reunify Christendom. Instead, Cymbeline’s concluding scene of Roman and English reconciliation, in which the eponymous king resumes tribute payments to Rome, urges James to reconcile with British Catholics.

Chapter 4 argues convincingly that Denham's depiction of the ruins of Chertsey Abbey in his topographical poem Cooper's Hill (1641–42) aligns itself with the Church of England's opposition to the destruction and defacement of churches and cathedrals threatened and partially carried out by parliament. Recalling Edmund Waller's poem on the rebuilding of St. Paul's Cathedral, Denham speaks not as a Catholic or Laudian but simply as a loyal, obedient member of Charles I's church, interested, like the Earl of Strafford (whom Denham defended in parliament and in his orientalist tragedy, The Sophy), in preserving the edifice, literal and figurative, of the English church.

Chapter 5 examines Marvell's sprawling country house poem Upon Appleton House (1651), seeing the ruins of Nun Appleton Priory in Yorkshire, stones of which had become part of the house of his patron, Thomas, Lord Fairfax, as a metaphor for the English church, which ought to be Presbyterian but is threatened by radical sectaries. All of Fairfax's estate at Nun Appleton (especially the gardens and ruined priory) functions as a microcosm of England. The poem's extended section on sixteenth-century nuns’ attempts to corrupt Isabel Thwaites in the priory—foiled by Fairfax's ancestor William Fairfax—would seem to tell a story of heroic Protestant reform but, in fact, tells one of greed in which William plundered and misused the monastic building and lands. If both Marvell and Thomas Fairfax were Presbyterians—and the latter surely was—the poet mirrors his patron's Presbyterian opposition to needless destruction of old fabrics and rituals—a nightmare that might become reality if leveling sectaries, like those working Fairfax's fields, got hold of the English church. Since, as Mottram reminds us, Fairfax was governor of the city of Hull, the poem casts it, too, as an embattled enclosure, threatened more by royalists than by sectaries.