Heretics & Believers:
A History of the English Reformationby Peter MarshallYale University Press, 2017“The Reformation,” writes University of Warwick history professor Peter Marshall in his amazingly good new doorstop volume Heretics & Believers: A History of the English Reformation, “changed what it meant to be a Christian in England.” And unlike a great many histories of that seismic change, Marshall's book firmly identifies the progress of that change as happening from the ground up, as it were: deep-rooted sociological and even psychological changes in the ordinary English churchgoer finding complicated and distorted reflection in the broader royal and governmental actions that tend to preoccupy the attention of historians of religion. It's singularly unhelpful, Marshall argues, to think of the English Reformation as something imposed from above. Rather, it was the outgrowth of strange and fitful events that were “unpredictable, and not infrequently implausible, but … not unfathomable.”This is a richly textured account of the convulsions that ran through all levels of English life in the sixteenth century. “There is no simple explanation,” Marshall writes, “for why in the sixteenth century growing numbers of English Christians came to believe that true discipleship of Jesus meant demanding that the sacred figure of the rood be pulled down from its lofty perch, broken into pieces and burned to ashes.” Refreshingly, Heretics & Believers adheres to this warning for all of its 600 pages; readers are never given anything resembling a simple explanation for any aspect of the vast cultural upheaval that claimed the lives of martyrs, stripped the altars, shifted near-incalculable heaps of wealth, and fundamentally altered the nature of England's relationship with the Europe of the day.And consistently, Marshall's focus is on the reactions of the populace, not the princes. This lends the whole of the book a flavor of intimacy that dispels the forbiddingly theological nature of the subject and aligns quite well with Marshall's terrifically readable prose style:
What ordinary English people thought about popes and the papacy is an elusive but not impenetrable question. We should not expect to find what could not have existed: a late medieval equivalent to the modern Catholic personality cult of the papacy, sustained by the possibilities of air travel, photography and instant mass communications. The Pope was, in every sense, a distant figure. But distance need not imply dislike or indifference … In light of later events, it is remarkable how few rumbling of anti-papal satire or complaint are to be heard in England around the turn of the sixteenth century. Conceivably, the absence of overt hostility is a marker of the relatively low importance of the Pope.
“Rome,” he quips, “was not always where the heart was.”Heretics & Believers takes its place comfortably on a shelf of recent brilliant popular treatments of the broader Reformation story, from Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation: A History over a decade ago to Carlos Eire's Reformations: The Early Modern World – 1450-1650. And it's icing on the cake that Yale University Press has turned the book out in such a lovely hardcover US edition, complete with Thomas More's pious – and visibly worried – family on the dust jacket.
