There has recently been a deplorable tendency for scholarly books to bear a broad, general title but to have, in fact, very narrowly conceived contents, approaching the title's topic only through the study of one village or the writings of one author, for example. This isn’t one of those books. Happily, William Wizeman gives his readers exactly what the title promises: a comprehensive overview of the theology and spirituality of the English church during the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–58). Wizeman has read virtually every relevant printed text from the period, in Latin and English, and has organized the contents into chapters on revelation, Christology and soteriology, ecclesiology, the sacraments, devotional piety, and eschatology. The sources include not only the standard collections of homilies and theological works, but also ballads, primers, and new editions of pre-Marian works. Examining these printed works closely matters, argues Wizeman, because leading figures in Mary's church recognized the damage that print had done in Henry's and Edward's reign and felt that they had to make it central to their strategy for reclaiming the English people for Catholicism.

Each chapter is largely descriptive, presenting a detailed and nuanced summary of what the various authors wrote on the topic at hand, including extensive quotations from the works. However, each chapter is also constructed to support the larger arguments of the book. These writers, according to Wizeman, did have some minor disagreements, but essentially presented a coherent and consistent theology and spirituality. Their vision of the English church under Mary was not a reactionary one, trying to return things to the status quo ante 1533. Rather, Wizeman sees them promoting a reenergized church, in many ways reformed along humanist (although not Erasmian) lines, in accord with (and often anticipating) developments in Continental Catholicism. He also argues that their writing contained strikingly little polemic but was much more concerned with promoting a positive theology and spirituality in the face of Protestant criticism.

Books such as this are inherently tricky to assess. One difficulty is that it is hard to read these chapters without thinking about what actually happened. Whatever the Marian writers published concerning the virtues of monastic life, for example, we know that very few of the former monks chose to return to monastic life, and the attempted monastic revival was a colossal dud. I am not criticizing Wizeman for failing to discuss this; he makes clear that his is a book about the writings of the Marian church—its spiritual and theological vision—and that is fair enough. However, as a result of peering only through one lens, the Marian church looks rather more together than it in fact was. For balance, one ought to read Wizeman's book in tandem with another recent volume (to which Wizeman contributed): The Church of Mary Tudor, edited by Eamon Duffy and David Loades (Aldershot, 2006). One also ought to read Duffy's Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers (New Haven, CT, 2006) along with Wizeman's treatment of the Marian primers. Whatever Wizeman may say about the changes in their content from earlier days, the fact remains that medieval primers remained in wide circulation and the Marian versions never achieved the popularity of the earlier volumes. How much does it matter if a “new” more Christ-centered approach distinguished the new primers if people continued to use their grandparents’ more saint-focused ones? Again, let me stress that I am not faulting Wizeman for not addressing this. We are deeply in his debt for such a thorough study of the Marian theological and spiritual writers, but we are equally fortunate that the recent outpouring of high-quality scholarship on this period makes it possible to get a fuller picture of the Marian church than can be got from looking solely at those writers’ works.

A further difficulty with a book based on largely unfamiliar printed texts is that it is hard to know how much to trust one author's reading of the texts without having read them oneself. This is particularly relevant here because the book is a full frontal assault on Lucy Wooding's interpretation of many of the same works in her Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford, 2000). Wizeman has selected material from the writings that seems to prove that many of Wooding's assertions on issues such as the role of good works in justification, the attitude toward transubstantiation, and the continuing role of the cult of the saints are badly flawed. There is no reason to question whether a fine scholar such as Wizeman has quoted accurately. However, we are left with, literally, a he-said/she-said situation. Are Wizeman's quotes accurate representatives of the Marian consensus, as he claims? Whose reading of the “big picture” should one trust? Wizeman's arguments seem more convincing, but the person who has had the last word usually has an advantage. More remains to be done, at less partisan hands, to resolve this.

Even if some aspects of the argument cannot be taken as settled, this is still an easy book to recommend. There is material in every chapter that is quite interesting. For example, Wizeman demonstrates that there are many ways in which the Marian church was actually ahead of the Council of Trent, such as the replacement of pyxes with tabernacles and the establishment of seminaries. He also has important things to say about the use of the Fathers, the influence of Gabriel Biel, and Marian writers’ difficulties with Scholasticism. His discussion of the theology of faith and grace in these works is exceptionally clear, which is no mean achievement. Most of all, he does make an effective case that the authors whose works he studied were primarily pastoral and not polemical in their intent.

Wizeman's prose is sometimes repetitive and a bit mechanical. However, he has perhaps made a strategic choice to make complex theological issues as accessible as possible by keeping the prose very lean, and frequently repeating key points makes it hard for readers to lose track of them. On balance, it was the right choice. Even an advanced undergraduate would be able to comprehend his arguments and evidence with relative ease. As noted above, we are in the midst of an unusually rich period for publications on the Marian church. William Wizeman's sometimes combative but always meticulous scholarship is a major contribution and deserves to be widely read and discussed.