Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Protestants
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 9/20/1971
WEBSITE: http://alecryrie.blogspot.com/
CITY: Durham, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
https://www.dur.ac.uk/theology.religion/staff/profile/?id=5066 * https://www.presbyterianmission.org/story/book-review-protestants-faith-made-modern-world/ * http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/165635
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL EDUCATION:
Attended Trinity Hall, Cambridge University: St. Andrews University, M.A.; St. Cross College, Oxford University, D.Phil., 2000.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, religion historian, minister, theologian, and educator. Birmingham University, instructor in history, 1999-2006; Durham University, professor of the history of Christianity, 2006—. Minister in the parish of Shotley St. John, Durham, England; reader in the Church of England.
AWARDS:Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, 2015-18.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Henry VIII and his Afterlives: Literature, Politics, and Art, edited by Mark Rankin, Christopher Highley, and John N. King, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 2009; Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources, edited by Laura Sangha and Jonathan Abingdon Willis, Routledge (Oxford, England), 2016; Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe, edited by Katie Barclay, Ciara Rawnsley, and Kimberley Reynolds, Palgrave Macmillan (London, England), 2016; The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformation, edited by Ulinka Rublack, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 2017; and A Social History of England 1500-1740, edited by Keith Wrightson, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 2017.
Contributor to journals and periodicals, including Historical Journal, Past & Present, Midland History, English Historical Review, Sixteenth Century Journal, and the Journal of Ecclesiastical History.
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, coeditor; St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History and Studies in History, member of editorial board.
Also author of a blog.
SIDELIGHTS
Alec Ryrie is a writer, scholar, religion historian, theologian, and educator. He is a professor of the history of Christianity at Durham University in Durham, England. Prior to that, he was an instructor in history at Birmingham University. In addition to his scholarly work, Ryrie is also a minister in the parish of Shotley St. John, Durham, England and a reader in the Church of England.
In his scholarly work, Ryrie specializes in the history of Protestant Christianity. particularly as it existed in England and Scotland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he noted on the Durham University Website. He researches and writes on the “culture and politics of religious reform in England and Scotland,” he stated on the Durham University Website, and examines the “emergence and development of Protestant and radical beliefs, identities, and spiritualities” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Ryrie has served as editor or coeditor of several volumes of religious history, covering topics ranging from the origins of English Protestantism to the ways that individuals worshiped in early modern Britain. In The Beginnings of English Protestantism, Ryrie and coeditor Peter Marshall assemble a collection of essays that “challenges the accepted truth developing in English Reformation historiography over the last thirty years,” commented Janice Liedl, writing in the Canadian Journal of History. The editors asked nine prominent scholars to “address a serious historiographical deficit: the now-reigning
revisionist narrative of the English Reformation has up to now paid little attention to the process, from the 1530s to 1558, by which English Protestantism actually won the loyalty of a significant minority of the English population,” reported Albion contributor Baird Tipson. More concisely, the traditional review of the character of and reasons for the Reformation— “that the medieval church was corrupt and many people demanded change—is no longer accepted,” observed Standford Lehmberg in a Renaissance Quarterly review.
The contributors to the book “do much to illuminate what have been some of the dark corners of the changing church,” commented Lehmberg. Tipson concluded that “serious students of the sixteenth century will deepen their understanding of the early English Reformation by careful study of one or more of these essays.”
Ryrie is also the author of a half-dozen books covering the history of religion in England and throughout the world. They include The Origins of the Scottish Reformation, The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Steward Realms, 1485-1603, and Being Protestant in Reformation Britain.
In Ryrie’s earliest book of religious history, The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation, which was based on his doctoral thesis, he “examined how early evangelical reformers in England dealt with the peculiar political pressures of Henry VIII’s reign, and argued that this period was decisive in forming the politically radical strand of English Protestantism’s character,” Ryrie stated on the Durham University Website. His “excellent book” explores the period from 1530 to January 1547 and the death of Henry VIII, and “finds the era marked by a strong tension for those who sought reform of the church—the strain of maintaining fidelity to the Christian Gospel while also displaying loyalty to their king,” commented Donald K. McKim in a review in the journal Church History.
The Sorcerer’s Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England tells the story of Henry, Lord Neville, who was accused of trying to murder his wife and father with magic. Henry was imprisoned for the attempt, but the real perpetrator was an individual who styled himself a physician and sorcerer and who called himself Gregory Wisdom. Wisdom, based on Ryrie’s research, was neither physician nor sorcerer; he was, in fact, a con artist, thief, and criminal who preyed on Henry and others with his tales of magic, conjuring, angels, and spirits. Worse, it seems that Wisdom might have actually believed his spells and magic would work the miracles he promised. Ryrie “skillfully illuminates an age when political upheaval and the turmoil of belief that accompanied the Reformation” were significant enough to make the outlandish “magical claims of a fraud like
Wisdom seem plausible,” observed Larry Milliken, writing in Library Journal. “Murder and magic, peers and prostitutes, are brought together in a Tudor story that glitters with wit and erudition. Ryrie has produced a veritable nugget of gold,” commented History Today writer Leanda de Lisle.
Ryrie examines the history of a major religious group in Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World. Protestants, Ryrie notes, tended to be a contentious group, in keeping with their religious break from the Catholic church. This tendency may have given early Protestants a reputation for arguing about anything, but it also “produced three great gifts for the modern world: free inquiry, democracy, and apoliticism,” noted Booklist reviewer Ray Olson. In three sections, Ryrie presents a “biography of Protestantism itself, rather than any particular Protestant figure or sect,” observed a Publishers Weekly writer. He examines subjects such as the earliest beginnings of Luther’s reformation, the effects of Protestantism in Nazi Germany, the status of Protestantism in nineteenth-century America, the development of evangelical fundamentalism, and Protestantism’s role in the civil rights movement.
In an interview on the History News Network, Ryrie explained why the history of Protestantism, as well as its current status, should be considered important to modern society. “Historically, Protestant Christianity was decisive in forming western civilization as we know it, especially in the United States. You can’t imagine modern individualism, democracy, or freedoms without it—and it has given us some other legacies which we might not like so much,” Ryrie told the interviewer. However, Ryrie makes it very clear that it is not only important to be interested in Protestantism from a historical perspective, it is also vital to understanding, and dealing with, the world of the present and the future. “There are a billion Protestants in the world today, and in Africa, China, Latin America and other places the numbers are rising fast. Protestantism is going to be one of the key forces shaping the world this century, and we’d better understand it,” he told the History News Network reviewer.
“Rarely has an author of such deep faith offered such a tolerant, engaging history of any religion,” commented a Kirkus Reviews writer.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Albion, winter, 2004, Baird Tipson, review of The Beginnings of English Protestantism, p. 635.
Booklist, March 15, 2017, Ray Olson, review of Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World, p. 4.
Canadian Journal of History, December, 2004, Janice Liedl, review of The Beginnings of English Protestantism, p. 575.
Catholic Historical Review, July, 2007, Mark W. Konnert, review of Moderate Voices in the European Reformation, p. 642; winter, 2014, Laura Sangha, review of Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain, p. 141; summer, 2015, Laura Sangha, review of Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain, p. 647.
Church History, September, 2003, Donald K. McKim, review of The Beginnings of English Protestantism, p. 656; March, 2005, Donald K. McKim, review of The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation, p. 166.
English Historical Review, April, 2004, Christopher Haigh, review of The Beginnings of English Protestantism, p. 508.
History Today, December, 2008, Leanda de Lisle, review of The Sorcerer’s Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England, p. 73.
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2016, review of Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World.
Library Journal, September 15, 2008, Larry Milliken, review of The Sorcerer’s Tale, p. 72; March 1, 2017, Ray Arnett, review of Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World, p. 88.
Publishers Weekly, February 13, 2017, review of Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World. p. 70.
Reference & Research Book News, November, 2005, review of Moderate Voices in the European Reformation.
Renaissance Quarterly, autumn, 2003, Standford Lehmberg, review of The Beginnings of English Protestantism, p. 874; winter, 2004, Susan Wabuda, review of The Gospel and Henry VIII, p. 1493.
ONLINE
Durham University Website, http://www.dur.ac.uk/ (November 5, 2017), biography of Alec Ryrie.
History News Network, http://www.historynewsnetwork.org/ (April 7, 2017), “Alec Ryrie Explains Why He Decided to Write a Book About Protestants,” interview withe Alec Ryrie.
Presbyterian Mission, https://www.presbyterianmission.org/ (March 31, 2017), Gregg Brekke, review of Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World.
4-7-17
Alec Ryrie explains why he decided to write a book about Protestants (interview)
Historians in the News
tags: Protestants, interview, Alec Ryrie
10 18 3
by Alec Ryrie
Alec Ryrie, Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University, is the author of the new book, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World.
Why does the story of Protestantism matter to us today?
Historically, Protestant Christianity was decisive in forming western civilisation as we know it, especially in the United States. You can’t imagine modern individualism, democracy, or freedoms without it – and it has given us some other legacies which we might not like so much. But it’s not just a subject of historic interest. There are a billion Protestants in the world today, and in Africa, China, Latin America and other places the numbers are rising fast. Protestantism is going to be one of the key forces shaping the world this century, and we’d better understand it.
What do you mean when you say that Protestants ‘made the modern world’?
The first Protestants didn’t set out to create the world we live in now, but some key features of that world come directly from them. The ideal of free enquiry and free speech; the assumption that we’ve got a right to challenge our rulers, and that in spiritual terms we’re all equal; and the notion of limited government, that there are freedoms of conscience over which no political authority has any jurisdiction. If you want, you can push that to say that Protestants created modern democratic capitalism, though they didn’t do it alone. More to the point, if you look at all the really decisive ideological conflicts of the modern age – for and against religious toleration, slavery, colonialism, nationalism, fascism, Communism, women’s rights, civil rights – in all of those you’ll find Protestants at the heart of the argument: and on both sides. Protestants love to argue. The world we live in is the world their arguments made.
Who counts as a Protestant in your telling of the story?
I think you’ve got to be inclusive. Ever since Martin Luther in 1517, the movement has been divided, sometimes viciously, but a family that quarrels is still a family. That tendency to split and argue is one of the things that makes Protestantism such a dynamic force. So the story I tell includes pretty much anyone who claims a Christian identity and descends from that first moment of Reformation protest: Quakers, Unitarians, Mennonites, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, as well as ‘mainline’ Protestants. I’m not expecting those people to like each other, but there’s a real kinship: the same kind of spirituality, the same unmediated encounter with God’s grace. Incidentally, that’s why I think Mormonism is a special case. It’s obviously got Protestant roots, but it’s gone in such a radically different direction that I think we have to see it as a new religion.
At different times Protestants have been accused of being political revolutionaries, of supporting tyrannies, and of withdrawing from politics altogether. Which of those accusations do you think is fairest? In social terms, is Protestantism a conservative or a progressive force?
All of the above! Part of Protestantism’s strength is its adaptability, so it can make itself at home in societies as different as apartheid South Africa or Maoist China. But the reason its political effects can seem so contradictory is that it’s not a political movement. It’s a spiritual one, and that’s what shapes Protestants’ politics. They will work with kings or dictators if they think that’s going to be good for the Protestant cause as they understand it. Or they’ll resist and overthrow them if that’s what seems necessary. So they’ll make alliances with political progressives or conservatives, but they’re always provisional alliances: the political goal is subsidiary to the spiritual one. That’s why we’ve got that third theme, of withdrawal: Protestants’ main political ambition, very often, is just to be left alone, to worship and preach freely. Sometimes that itself is pretty revolutionary.
OK, but which side is Protestantism on in our modern political divisions?
Both sides, obviously. Liberals and conservatives each want to lay exclusive claim to it, but the only way a deeply Protestant country like America gets to be split down the middle is if there are Protestants on both sides.
One of the fundamental things that both sides share is that Protestant rejection of authority: a refusal to kowtow to establishments. Ever since Martin Luther declared that every believer is a priest, Protestants have kicked against exclusive priesthoods. It used to be the churches. In the early United States, it was lawyers and medics; now it’s scientists and economists – experts who think they know best. Protestants, who know they stand equal before God, have always bristled at claims that other people understand things better than they do – and are ready to suspect that ‘experts’ are self-serving and corrupt. It’s an attitude that can go badly wrong when expertise is really necessary, and it can let wishful thinking shout down inconvenient truths. But I prefer it to subservience and just taking things on trust.
The flip side is the readiness to defy government. Ever since the Reformation era, Protestants who don’t like what their rulers are doing have felt that it’s their responsibility to take action. They stand equal before God, and so they can’t shrug off the duty to challenge things that they think are wrong. It’s an attitude which in the past has led to revolutions and wars – and it was one of the drivers of the Civil War. In modern times, that restless Protestant conscience has fired anti-apartheid campaigns in South Africa and pro-democracy campaigns in Taiwan. In America it’s been at work across the political spectrum, from civil-rights to anti-abortion campaigners. Right now it looks like the defence of migrants and refugees, a classic Christian cause, might be stirring it up again.
Why is the end of the world such an important theme for so many Protestants?
Ever since the Reformation there have been Protestants who have been convinced that the end is just around the corner, and multiple disappointments haven’t shaken that. Of course it’s only rational to suspect that this world – or at least humanity – might come to an end before too long, but I wish more Protestants were also open to the other possibility: that they are still the ‘early Church’. I think it comes, again, from that sense that we each stand directly before God, mixed with a dose of typically human self-importance. It makes us ready to believe that the place we stand just happens to be the very crux of history.
Very, very occasionally, a few fanatics try to hurry things along. But it’s much more common for Protestants who think the end may be coming just to withdraw from the world around them – if the ship’s sinking, no point trying to repaint it, better just to get people to the lifeboats. And at least as common as that is the opposite attitude: if the voyage is nearly over, we want the ship and its crew to be in tip-top condition, gleaming and ready for inspection. So I think the important question is not, do people think the end is coming, but, what are they going to do about it?
Why have women had such prominent positions in Protestant history, even though most Protestant churches have not allowed women to take leadership roles?
The pattern holds good right round the world, and as far back in history as we have decent statistics: about 60% of Protestant congregations, give or take, are women. Protestant churches emerged in very patriarchal societies, and many of them still make a theological case that only men can preach or be chief pastors. That’s made it easier to ignore the fact that Protestantism is a majority-female movement, and the critical roles that some remarkable women have played in its history. I hope my book will help redress that. Why there are so many more female than male Protestants is a deep question. There’s certainly a commitment to the spiritual equality of the sexes which goes right back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that has to be significant. It’s been a revolutionary feature of Protestant missionary work. It’s also true that Protestantism has usually spread through families and the private sphere, traditionally women’s territory, rather than through workplaces and public life in the way that (say) Marxism once did. A lot of male Protestants have worried that their religion is becoming ‘feminised’, but if that’s true, it’s not a problem. It might be a really good adaptation to a fast-changing world.
How did Protestantism go from being a strait-laced, scholarly religion in north-western Europe to the dynamic world faith it is today?
It was never all that strait-laced. Protestantism has always been, at its core, a love-affair with God; that keeps bursting into the open. Yes, it started in a university, but they didn’t have our silly modern distinction between head and heart back then. But there have been times when Protestantism has been in defensive mode, digging trenches against enemies like Catholicism or secularism. There was a lot of that in the seventeenth century, and again in the twentieth, with Fundamentalism. It makes sense: sometimes you need to play defense. But when it’s expanding, like with Methodism in the eighteenth century or Pentecostalism today, it becomes much more fluid. That’s when we find Protestants trying out new tunes for the old songs.
Why is the story of slavery and abolition so important to Protestant history?
It’s important in itself: Atlantic slavery was one of the greatest crimes in human history, and Protestants were deeply implicated in it as well as, eventually, playing the decisive role in abolishing it. But it’s got a wider significance too, because it shows Protestants’ ability to change their mind. Until the 1780s almost all white Protestants thought slavery was like poverty: an unfortunate fact of life. That seems to be what the Bible teaches, after all. Less than a century later there was a very strong Protestant consensus that enslavement of any kind is an intolerable evil, and Protestantism had become decisively multiracial. So ever since then, Protestants have been open to the possibility of that sort of moral awakening: some long-accepted norm might need to be abandoned, with or without Biblical backing. That sort of instinct has given us everything from Prohibition and civil rights through to anti-abortion and gay-rights campaigns in our own time.
Why is Protestantism expanding so rapidly right now in China, Africa and Latin America?
Obviously you can’t generalise: each case is special. But there are some common themes. These are all societies which are changing incredibly fast: urbanisation, massively disruptive economic shifts. Old certainties are disappearing. Protestantism’s amazing adaptibility means it can change along with people more readily than almost any other religious tradition. It’s not a Western or colonial import any more, and hasn’t been for generations. The Pentecostal or revivalist churches that are leading the charge are especially well placed. Their focus isn’t on Heaven or Hell after death, though they certainly teach that. They concentrate on here and now, offering prayer, miracles, moral and personal renewal, social support networks and a haven in a fast-changing world. Even if they can’t always deliver, they do it often enough to change lives.
You’ve described this book more as a history of Protestants than of Protestantism. We know about Luther and Calvin, but who are some of the other key people in your story?
There are the names that people know, the political and church leaders from King Henry VIII through John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards to Billy Graham and Martin Luther King, Jr. But it’s the ‘ordinary’ believers who often turn out to be the most extraordinary of all. So I kept coming back to people like Rebecca Protten, who started life as a slave on Antigua, became a Moravian missionary, was imprisoned for refusing to renounce her faith and became one of the first ever ordained Protestant women; or Pandita Ramabai, a campaigner for women’s rights in early 20th century India who ended up leading one of the first Pentecostal revivals; or Joshua Himes, the publisher from Rhode Island who not only helped to persuade tens of thousands of people that Christ would return in 1844, but then devoted himself to helping those people pick up their shattered lives afterwards when it didn’t happen. Protestant elites usually looked down on those sorts of people, but they’re usually the ones who drove the history, not the big-name thinkers.
What have been the most inspiring or the most surprising things you have learned in the process of writing this book?
It’s mostly the individual stories that stay with me. Like Buzz Aldrin discreetly celebrating communion right after he and Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, or the North Korean security men meeting in the 1990s to pray in secret and agonising about how best to use their positions to protect fellow-Christians. People who aren’t heroic or saintly, but just ordinary believers trying to do what they think is right in their particular situation. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they don’t.
On a bigger scale, I guess I didn’t expect World War II to be so central to the story. I now think that, in America and Europe, that war completely reset our moral compasses. The Nazis gave us all a new definition of evil, which made the old religious definitions look out of date. A big part of the problem for Christians in the West since then, especially white Christians, is that it’s really hard both to embrace those new values of inclusiveness and also to affirm that what you believe is the one true faith. Buzz Aldrin later worried that he was wrong to have celebrated a Christian sacrament on the Moon, because he was supposed to be there representing all humanity. We’re probably not ready to solve that dilemma yet, but when the time comes I’m guessing the answer will be not a Christian Right or a Christian Left, but a turn away from politicised religion towards spirituality. The old Pentecostal principle that all politics is rotten certainly seems tailor-made for our age.
You are yourself a minister in your local country church. Has working on this book changed your own relationship with your faith?
Maybe it would be better to ask my parish that. But it’s certainly given me a sense of perspective: understanding how our community’s hopes and struggles fit into a worldwide and centuries-long picture. We all tend to think that we’re normal, and it’s good to be reminded that we’re not. I do now more naturally think of myself as part of this vast, quarrelsome tradition, which has enough stirring examples to encourage me when that’s what I need, and more than enough dreadful warnings to keep my feet planted on the ground. And it’s brought home to me one eternal truth, not just of religious history but of all history: whichever way you think the tide is flowing, whatever you think is going to happen next, you are certainly wrong.
Professor Alec Ryrie
Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion
Telephone: +44 (0) 191 33 43926
Room number: Abbey House 204
Contact Professor Alec Ryrie (email at alec.ryrie@durham.ac.uk)
Biography
I am a historian of Protestant Christianity. My specialism is the history of England and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but I have interests in the emergence and development of Protestant and radical beliefs, identities and spiritualities more widely in that era and beyond. My recently published book Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World gives an overview of the history of Protestantism as a whole from Luther to the present. I am also one of the co-editors of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History. My blog occasionally discusses how I hold all this together.
Historical theology is one of Durham's traditional strengths. Within the Department, my own work complements that of my colleagues Krastu Banev, Susan Royal, Mike Snape and Clare Stancliffe, and I also find things to argue about with Lewis Ayres, Douglas Davies and Mathew Guest. Through the University's Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, there are also links with specialists in related fields in the departments of History, English and elsewhere. I co-convene the History of Christianity seminar.
I am on research leave for the years 2015-18 (serving a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship) and will not be teaching undergraduates during this period (my colleague Susan Royal is covering our teaching in Reformation, and doing so superbly). I am continuing to teach selected doctoral students, however, and in 2017-18 I am offering a MA module on England's Religious Revolution, 1640-60.
I am happy to supervise research students on subjects relating to religion, theology, culture, society and politics in late medieval and early modern Britain, and on many topics relating to the wider European Reformation. My recent and current research students' projects include:
the career and theological milieu of Archbishop Matthew Parker
Anglican concepts of episcopacy and authority
Church and child in early modern England
the work of early modern English theologians including Richard Hooker, Thomas Goodwin, Ralph Venning and John Flavel
the careers of chantry clergy in the sixteenth century
the devotional significance of shifting ecclesiastical material culture in the English Reformation
the reformation of the liturgy under Henry VIII
religious deviance in the Elizabethan diocese of Durham
apocalypticism in Restoration England
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant views of Lollardy
the theology of death and dying in early modern Scotland
Calvin's eucharistic theology
the printing industry and religion in the reign of Edward VI
the material culture of the sixteenth-century parish church
My research interests have focused on the culture and politics of religious reform in England and Scotland. My doctoral work, eventually published as The Gospel and Henry VIII, examined how early evangelical reformers in England dealt with the peculiar political pressures of Henry VIII's reign, and argued that this period was decisive in forming the politically radical strand of English Protestantism's character. My work on the early English Reformation drew my interest to the very different path of events in the neighbouring kingdom of Scotland. My second book, The Origins of the Scottish Reformation, examined how the culture and politics of Scottish Protestantism slowly took shape, arguing that the process was contingent and shaped decisively by the use and threat of violence.
In 2013 I published Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (OUP), a study of the spirituality of English and Scottish Protestantism c. 1530-1640, winner of the Society for Renaissance Studies' book prize and of the triennial Richard L. Greaves Prize. This grew in part out of the AHRC Research Network on worship in the early modern world which I administered during 2008-09. Several of the papers from the Network's conferences are published by Ashgate as Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (ed. Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie, 2012) and Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (ed. Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie, 2013).
The work on my recent history of Protestantism has taken me into the realm of public history, with several broadcast and print media contributions in both Britain and the United States. In particular, much of that book was prefigured in my lectures as Visiting Professor in History of Religion at Gresham College for 2015-17, which are available in full through their website.
I am currently (2015-18) serving a three-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship . My project focuses on the experience of doubt, scepticism and 'atheism' during the period before such things became intellectually respectable, with a particular focus on mid-seventeenth century England. I hope during 2019 to publish a book on this theme, for which my working title is An Emotional History of Atheism.
My other interests include:
the history of religious radicalism and its spirituality
religion and the history of the emotions, a theme explored in a 2016 edited volume titled Puritanism and the Emotions in the Early Modern World (ed. with Tom Schwanda)
Puritanism, its meaning and character
the porous frontier between religion and magic in this period, which was one of the themes I explored in a microstudy published in 2008: The Sorcerer's Tale described one individual's career in the medical, criminal and magical underworlds of Tudor London.
religious moderation, religious violence, and the commemoration of martyrs, which I have explored in several articles and in an edited collection, Moderate Voices in the European Reformation (ed. with Luc Racaut, 2005) .
My other publications include The Age of Reformation (2009; 2nd edn 2017), a textbook on religion, politics and society in the British Isles in the Tudor age.
I am on the editorial boards of St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Ashgate) and the Royal Historical Society's Studies in History. Since 1997 I have been a Reader in the Church of England, and I am licenced to the parish of Shotley St. John (diocese of Newcastle).
I studied History as an undergraduate, at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, before completing a Master's in Reformation Studies at St. Andrews and a D.Phil in Theology at St. Cross College, Oxford (completed in 2000). From 1999 to 2006 I taught in the Department of Modern History at Birmingham University.
Research Interests
History and theology of the English Reformation
History and theology of the Scottish Reformation
Piety, prayer and spirituality in Protestantism
Moderation in the Reformation era
Magic and faith in early modern Europe
Publications
Authored book
Ryrie, Alec (2017). Protestants: The Radicals who Made the Modern World. London: William Collins.
Ryrie, Alec (2017). The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485-1603. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Alec Ryrie (2013). Being Protestant in Reformation Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ryrie, Alec (2009). The Age of Reformation: The Tudor and Stewart Realms, 1485-1603. Harlow: Pearson.
Ryrie, Alec (2008). The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ryrie, Alec. (2006). The Origins of the Scottish Reformation. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Ryrie, Alec. (2003). The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chapter in book
Ryrie, Alec (2017). Reformations. In A Social History of England 1500-1750. Wrightson, Keith Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 107-128.
Ryrie, Alec (2017). Scripture, the Spirit and the Meaning of Radicalism in the English Revolution. In Radicalism and Dissent in the World of Protestant Reform. Heal, Bridget & Kremers, Anorthe Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 100-117.
Ryrie, Alec (2017). The Nature of Spiritual Experience. In The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations. Rublack, Ulinka Oxford: Oxford University Press. 47-63.
Ryrie, Alec (2016). Facing Childhood Death in English Protestant Spirituality. In Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe. Barclay, Katie, Rawnsley, Ciara & Reynolds, Kimberley London: Palgrave Macmillan. 109-127.
Ryrie, Alec & Schwanda, Tom (2016). Introduction. In Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World. Ryrie, Alec & Schwanda, Tom Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. 1-12.
Ryrie, Alec (2016). Religion and religious change. In Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources. Sangha, Laura & Willis, Jonathan Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 170-186.
Alec Ryrie (2013). The fall and rise of fasting in the British Reformations. In Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain. Natalie Mears & Alec Ryrie Farnham, England: Ashgate. 89-108.
Alec Ryrie (2012). Sleeping, waking and dreaming in Protestant piety. In Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain. Jessica Martin & Alec Ryrie Farnham: Ashgate. 73-92.
Ryrie, Alec. (2010). The Afterlife of Lutheran England. In Sister Reformations: The Reformation in Germany and England = Schwesterreformationen Die Reformation in Deutschland und in England. Wendebourg, Dorothea. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. 213-234.
Ryrie, Alec (2009). The slow death of a tyrant: learning to live without Henry VIII, 1547-1563. In Henry VIII and his Afterlives: Literature, Politics and Art. Rankin, Mark, Highley, Christopher & King, John N. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 75-93.
Ryrie, Alec & Ó hAnnráchain, Tadhg (2008). Les îles Britanniques et l'Irlande. In L'Europe en conflits: les affrontements religieux et la genèse de l'Europe moderne vers 1500-vers 1630. Kaiser, Wolfgang Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. 287-319.
Ryrie, Alec. (2002). Counting sheep, counting shepherds the problem of allegiance in the English Reformation. In The Beginnings of English Protestantism. Marshall, Peter. & Ryrie, Alec. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 84-110.
Edited book
Ryrie, Alec & Schwanda, Tom (2016). Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-1800. Palgrave.
Jessica Martin & Alec Ryrie (2013). Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain. Ashgate.
Natalie Mears & Alec Ryrie (2013). Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain. Ashgate.
Ryrie, Alec. (2006). Palgrave Advances in the European Reformations. Palgrave Advances. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Racaut, Luc. & Ryrie, Alec. (2005). Moderate Voices in the European Reformation. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Marshall, Peter. & Ryrie, Alec. (2002). The Beginnings of English Protestantism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Journal Article
Ryrie, Alec (2016). ‘PROTESTANTISM’ AS A HISTORICAL CATEGORY. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26: 59-77.
Ryrie, Alec (2010). The Psalms and Confrontation in English and Scottish Protestantism. Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 101: 114-137.
Ryrie, Alec (2009). Calvin and Ecumenism. One in Christ 43(2): 25-34.
Ryrie, Alec (2009). Paths not taken in the British Reformations. Historical Journal 52(1): 1-22.
Ryrie, Alec (2008). The Reinvention of Devotion in the British Reformations. Studies in Church History 44: Revival and Resurgence in Christian History: 87-105.
Ryrie, Alec. (2006). Congregations, Conventicles and the Nature of Early Scottish Protestantism. Past & Present 191(1): 45-76.
Ryrie, Alec. (2005). England's Last Medieval Heresy Hunt: Gloucestershire 1540. Midland History 30: 37-52.
Ryrie, Alec. (2004). Reform without frontiers in the last years of Catholic Scotland. The English Historical Review 119(480): 27-56.
Riordan, Michael. & Ryrie, Alec. (2003). Stephen Gardiner and the Making of a Protestant Villain. The Sixteenth Century Journal 34(4): 1039-1063.
Ryrie, Alec. (2002). Divine Kingship and Royal Theology in Henry VIII's Reformation. Reformation 7: 49-77.
Ryrie, Alec (2002). The strange death of Lutheran England. The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53(1): 64-92.
Media Contacts
Available for media contact about:
Middle Ages & Early Modern History: History of Tudor England
Religion: History of the Reformation
Theology: History of the Reformation
Middle Ages & Early Modern History: History of the Reformation
Middle Ages & Early Modern History: Reign of Henry VIII
Selected Grants
2015: Monks in Motion: A prosopographical study of the English and Welsh Benedictines in exile, 1553-1800 (£185190.20 from AHRC)
Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern
World
Ray Olson
Booklist.
113.14 (Mar. 15, 2017): p4.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World.
By Alec Ryrie.
Apr. 2017.464p. Viking, $35 (9780670026166). 280.
Believers, not institutions, constitute Protestantism, and "Protestants will argue ... about almost anything." Over the
course of centuries, Ryrie maintains in this engaging overview, such contention produced three great gifts for the
modern world: free inquiry, democracy, and apoliticism. None were Protestant principles at first but emerged as the
movement continued. Luther's stress on the authority of the individual conscience led to a permanent openness to new
ideas. That openness licensed toleration, at first, and eventually, free speech and religious difference to every person. If
those egalitarian principles led, as they did, to revolts against intolerant rulers, the development of a desire to be left
alone tempered rebellion by insisting on limited government, which explains why some Protestants accept some
tyranny. The book's three parts cover successive ages: "The Reformation Age," from Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII to
Pietism in Germany, Methodism in England, and revivalism in British North America; "The Age of Transformation,"
on slavery under Protestantism, the proliferation of sects, religious liberalism, and the fracturings of Protestantism in
Hitler's Germany and in the U.S. after WWII; and "The Global Age," on massive Protestant growth and influence in
South Africa, Korea, and China as well as around the world by means of modern Pentecostalism. Closing with cautious
glimpses into futurity, this sweeping and thought-provoking book may prove a bible of the Protestant quincentenary.--
Ray Olson
Olson, Ray
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Olson, Ray. "Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2017, p. 4. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490998334&it=r&asid=cc36836f57b15cfae07588a028aeba45.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490998334
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 2/28
Ryrie, Alec. Protestants: The Faith That Made the
Modern World
Ray Arnett
Library Journal.
142.4 (Mar. 1, 2017): p88.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Ryrie, Alec. Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World. Viking. Apr. 2017.528p. maps, notes, index. ISBN
9780670026166. $35; ebk. ISBN 9780735222816. REL
Ryrie (history of Christianity, Durham Univ.; Being Protestant in Reformation Britain) effectively surveys 500 years of
church history while illuminating the breadth and impact of the protestant faith. The first section traces the impact of
the Protestant Reformation of the 1600s on Europe and America. The author also focuses on the transformation of
global Protestantism during the 19th and 20th century by highlighting areas such as the millenarian movements,
liberalism, slavery, and how the two World Wars affected and were impacted by the protestant churches. Later chapters
cover the global nature of Protestantism by examining racial struggles in South Africa, the movement's influence in
South Korea and China, and the global Pentecostal experience. Some of the unique themes and sections within this
book are those that explain the pietism movement in England, the rise of Adventist movements including the Jehovah's
Witnesses and Christian Science, the struggle over the slave trade, the German Church in World War I and II, South
African apartheid, and Korean Christianity. VERDICT This multifaceted work will appeal to readers of both history
and theology. Recommended for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, 10/17/16.]--Ray Arnett, Fremont Area Dist. Lib., MI
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Arnett, Ray. "Ryrie, Alec. Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World." Library Journal, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 88+.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483702147&it=r&asid=74ae3c944c6c4452acf8ba49a018c5f2.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A483702147
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 3/28
Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern
World
Publishers Weekly.
264.7 (Feb. 13, 2017): p70.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World
Alec Ryrie. Viking, $35 (456p) ISBN 978-0-67002616-6
This volume is an excellent addition to the publishing lists for the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Lutheran
reformation. Ryrie (Being Protestant in Reformation Britain), an expert on the Reformation and winner of the Society
of Renaissance Studies' 2014 book prize, aims for a biography of Protestantism itself, rather than any particular
Protestant figure or sect. In pursuit of this, Ryrie divides his work into three sections: reformation, the historical roots
and early years of Protestantism; transformation, the philosophical development and geographic spread of the
Reformation; and globalization, the most recent
stages in the development and international adoption of Protestantism. The sections and chapters are thematic rather
than strictly chronological; one chapter, for example, follows the fortunes of Protestantism in Nazi Germany. The next
chapter then goes backward, chronologically speaking, to move the story to 19th-century America, the rise of
evangelical fundamentalism, and the civil rights movement. Ryrie is careful to anchor the reader throughout; even nonspecialists
will never get lost in the tangle. He also provides a glossary of "types of Protestant" for easy reference as
well as an excellent set of endnotes. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World." Publishers Weekly, 13 Feb. 2017, p. 70+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482198240&it=r&asid=1b72270ab6003b4cc386008fa928130b.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482198240
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 4/28
Ryrie, Alec: PROTESTANTS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Ryrie, Alec PROTESTANTS Viking (Adult Nonfiction) $35.00 4, 4 ISBN: 978-0-670-02616-6
A learned, lively look at the various faiths lumped together as Protestant, from Martin Luther in the 16th century to
today. Theologian and professor Ryrie (History of Christianity/Durham Univ.; Being Protestant in Reformation Britain,
2013, etc.) takes an inclusive view of the term Protestantism, encompassing mainstream Lutherans, Methodists,
Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists as well as the less-pervasive Unitarians, Seventh-day Adventists,
Quakers, Mennonites, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the burgeoning varieties of Pentecostal denominations whose members
often speak in tongues. (The author classes Mormons as a new religion despite their Protestant roots.) Ryrie views the
spectrum as an extended family tree with a common trunk but diverse branches. At bottom, though, a family that
quarrels about right and wrong remains a family. The author credits Protestants with playing significant roles in the
spread of free speech and the placement of conscience ahead of government dictates throughout Europe and across
what eventually became the United States. In more recent times, Ryrie documents the influence of Protestants in
portions of South America, China, South Korea, and South Africa. He does not shy away from the ugly roles of
Protestants in the dominance of apartheid and slavery, but he explains how the better natures of Protestants opposing
those inhumane practices mostly prevailed. Throughout the sweeping narrative, the author offers his well-considered
opinions about how the Bible fits into the teachings of various Protestant denominations. He offers insightful
explanations of why some Protestants consider the Bible inerrant, while other Protestants consider it filled with
contradictory stories that nonetheless lead to a deep communion with God. In the final chapter, Ryrie deals candidly
with contemporary political and social issues roiling Protestant denominations, including women in the ministry,
homosexuality, whether to support the legalization of abortion, and how to combat secularism. Rarely has an author of
such deep faith offered such a tolerant, engaging history of any religion.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Ryrie, Alec: PROTESTANTS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473652436&it=r&asid=524d6d74da10fc9abcdda7932c0230d3.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473652436
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 5/28
Ryrie, Alec. The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud
in Tudor England
Larry Milliken
Library Journal.
133.15 (Sept. 15, 2008): p72.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Ryrie, Alec. The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England. Oxford Univ. Dec. 2008. c.212p, illus, index. ISBN
978-0-19922996-3. $24.95. HIST
When he came across a foolish young 16th-century aristocrat's confession of attempting to murder his wife and father
by sorcery, Ryrie (church history, Durham Univ.; Britain Reformed: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain 1485-
1603) discovered a fascinating way to introduce readers to the deeply entangled worlds of Tudor-era magic, medicine,
and religion. The young man had himself been conned, and it is the story of the con man, a would-be physician and
magician named Gregory Wisdom, that's at the heart of this book. Ryrie shows how Wisdom fits into the murky
boundaries between medicine and fraud (he lacked university credentials) and probably met other con men frequenting
Tudor England's notorious gaming houses and brothels during a time when the deadly new disease, syphilis, was
increasing the demand for "medical" help. Ryrie discusses Widsom's medical schemes and how the belief in magic,
whether the esoteric magic learned from Renaissance scholars or the more mercenary practices of small-time conjurers,
was common even as successive Tudor rulers tried to control it. Ryrie's book skillfully illuminates an age when political
upheaval and the turmoil of belief that accompanied the Reformation could make the magical claims of a fraud like
Wisdom seem plausible. With detailed notes. Recommended for academic libraries.--Larry Milliken, Drexel Univ.,
Philadelphia
Milliken, Larry
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Milliken, Larry. "Ryrie, Alec. The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England." Library Journal, 15 Sept. 2008,
p. 72. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA186821256&it=r&asid=0730d486e9ce7758db9a7dc30aef3a0a.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A186821256
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 6/28
Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern
Britain
Laura Sangha
The Catholic Historical Review.
101.3 (Summer 2015): p647.
COPYRIGHT 2015 The Catholic University of America Press
http://cuapress.cua.edu/journals.htm
Full Text:
Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain. Edited by Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie. [St. Andrews Studies
in Reformation History.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2013. Pp. xii, 250. $124.95. ISBN 978-1-40942604-2.)
It is a commonplace that in early-modern Britain religion fundamentally shaped daily life, yet we still know little about
what went on in the parish church, the arena where British people received their religious education and where the
principles of the Protestant faith were hard-wired into the minds of the laity. This welcome collection of essays, whilst
acknowledging the difficulty of trying to recover the ways in which religion knitted with people's lives, seeks to fill in
some of the blanks by exploring the "lived experience" of worship in Britain.
The collection is not intended to share any unifying vision, but there are some recurring aspects. As may be expected, a
particular concern for the contributors is the liturgy. For example, Hannah Cleugh does an admirable job of elucidating
the mismatch between official doctrinal positions concerning soteriology and the theology conveyed in the Book of
Common Prayer. Judith Maltby investigates set, conceived, and extempore prayers in England, suggesting that the
minimalist liturgy of the Directory during the Interregnum probably led to a downturn in quality of worship, though it
was also an unprecedented opportunity for liturgical experimentation.
Close attention is paid to continuities, particularly with the Catholic past. On occasions, bitter theological controversies
did not always translate into radically divergent lay experiences. Alec Ryrie shows that the attempt to reform and retain
the well-established practice of fasting resulted in something "remarkably similar to what had gone before," an
experience shared by Puritans, conformists, and Laudians alike (p. 108). Reversing the model, Jonathan Willis
demonstrates that Catholics and Protestants of all shades enjoyed a shared inheritance of musical discourse that
acknowledged both the dangerous and seductive power of music but extolled its ability to edify and ennoble the soul.
Here theological consensus resulted in divergent practice.
We also encounter migrations across the blurred divides of the sacred and secular, and public and private. This is the
case in two fascinating chapters that perhaps bring us closest to lay experience. Christopher Marsh's exploration of bell
ringing demonstrates the growing popularity of the activity for "recreation," particularly amongst groups of male
youths. Marsh suggests that ringing in a sacred setting might be seen as a new outlet for socio-religious instincts that
had previously been channelled into guilds and church ales. John Craig charts the ways in which the mechanics of
prayer changed over time, noting the meanings that were associated with ritual gestures. In the practice of capping and
kneeling the secular and sacred were one, for the Elizabethan requirement that men kept their heads covered during the
service allowed them to doff their hat both to their social superiors and to do courtesy when the name of Jesus was
spoken.
The extent to which lived experience of the parish was constantly evolving is particularly striking, a reminder that
despite the prescriptive pattern of worship set out in the Book of Common Prayer, there was still plenty of room for
flexibility and irregularity. There were decisions to be made about gesture and etiquette, timely ringing of bells, the
place of music, and the ornamentation and orientation of church furniture. But it was not just local clergymen,
churchwardens, and parishioners who complicated the meaning of "conformity"; the local bishop or the incumbent
monarch might also intervene to introduce the relative novelty of special forms of prayer or even alternative liturgies, as
Natalie Mears shows in her chapter on nationwide worship. We are left with the impression of an interaction or
continuing conversation, where change took place both in response to "official" dictates but also according to lay
preferences and popular fashions, resulting in an ongoing process of adjustments, amendments, and experiments in
worship.
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 7/28
This is a varied and engaging collection that does much to improve our understanding of what happened in the earlymodern
parish church, and the themes delineated here suggest many fruitful avenues for future research into a topic of
fundamental importance.
LAURA SANGHA
University of Exeter
Sangha, Laura
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Sangha, Laura. "Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain." The Catholic Historical Review, vol. 101,
no. 3, 2015, p. 647+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA428095142&it=r&asid=41fddb2e6b8e6cad93112040dddb409a.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A428095142
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 8/28
Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern
Britain
Laura Sangha
The Catholic Historical Review.
100.1 (Winter 2014): p141.
COPYRIGHT 2014 The Catholic University of America Press
http://cuapress.cua.edu/journals.htm
Full Text:
Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain. Edited by Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie. [St. Andrews Studies
in Reformation History.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2012. Pp. xi, 285. $134.95. ISBN 978-1-40943131-2.)
This is an excellent and illuminating collection that not only deepens our understanding of lived religion in Protestant
England and Scotland; it also showcases some of the innovative new directions and methodologies employed by those
studying early-modern religious cultures. The volume explores the myriad ways in which people prayed when they
were not in church and serves as a companion volume to Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie's edited collection Worship and
the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (Burlington, VT, 2013). Indeed, the relationship between private devotion in
the household and public worship in the parish church is a persistent refrain in the volume. For instance, in the volume's
opening chapter Ian Green characterizes domestic devotion as a blend of official or clerical recommendations with
personal preferences and priorities. Jane Dawson's chapter on the Scottish context similarly demonstrates that the
Christian duty to practice private devotion was closely supervised by the Kirk, whose elders sought to shape the
household into a "domestic seminary."
Following these overviews are chapters that explore where people prayed and how they prayed, revealing the sheer
variety of opportunities available to contemporaries; the volume's interdisciplinary approach allows for wide-ranging
coverage of these. Literary scholars Micheline White, Jessica Martin, and Alison Shell explore the texts that people
used to structure and focus their devotions, revealing strong continuities with earlier pre-Reformation practices whilst
also indicating the strategies adopted by evangelicals to persuade people to adopt new devotional habits. Prayer as a
means to change embedded practices is also an issue with which Ryrie engages in his admirable chapter on devout
activities associated with sleep, a chapter that is also a reminder of the evangelical principle of strict spiritual discipline
during every moment of life, waking or not. Many of the chapters survey the devotional aids available to the laity to
assist and guide their spiritual regime--advice literature, prayer manuals and handbooks were thick on the ground, and
devotions utilizing the Psalms were evidently extremely widespread, as both Beth Quitsland and Hannibal Hamlin
show. In her innovative chapter focusing on the place of visual and material artifacts in household devotion, Tara
Hamling persuasively argues that domestic practice also continued to rely on visual and material props, which served as
visual emblems of godly identity and agents of comfort as well as practical aids to memory.
Kate Narveson and Jeremy Schildt tackle the place of scripture in private devotion, each acknowledging that the
evangelical ideal of universal access proved problematic in practice due to the complexity and opaqueness of the Bible.
Schildt traces the ways in which the laity could traverse scripture and apply its lessons to their daily lives, whereas
Narveson focuses on the clergy's concerns that the laity were not equipped to encounter the Word without professional
training in exegesis. The call for scriptural literacy was therefore accompanied by tactics to bolster deference to clerical
authority and to ensure that the laity read the Bible in the right way--not in order to interpret it but to confirm the
ground of doctrine that had been laid down elsewhere.
Narveson's and Schildt's chapters highlight that the flexibility of an individual devotional regime was constrained by
official expectations and anxieties. The volume reveals that Protestant clergy in England were just as keen to script and
oversee domestic worship as their counterparts in the Scottish Kirk. Erica Longfellow demonstrates that, despite the
widely proclaimed Protestant duty of private
prayer, many clergymen remained deeply ambivalent about it and thought public worship superior. Solitary prayer in
particular was thought not only to deprive the supplicant of congregational support and the sustaining presence of the
church; it was also considered dangerous, an encouragement to melancholy, and a likely source of religious delusion.
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 9/28
As a whole, the volume vividly evokes the difficult intellectual and theological balancing act that the evangelicals faced
in enacting their reform program. It makes a significant contribution to the ongoing scholarly process of demarcating
religious cultures in post-Reformation England in greater depth and detail, illuminating how religion was experienced
by early-modern folk. The private devotional practices discussed in this volume contain strong elements of continuity
with the Catholic past; where prayer is rarely individual and solitary but more often communal and outward facing;
where the "godly" are the people most likely to exploit the physical environment to represent, call to mind, and
celebrate the Word; and where clergymen were rather more reticent and anxious about lay access to scripture than one
might expect.
University of Exeter LAURA SANGHA
Sangha, Laura
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Sangha, Laura. "Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain." The Catholic Historical Review, vol. 100,
no. 1, 2014, p. 141+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA361186880&it=r&asid=c4829c9bab55dd1ddc45d0f4eaecd5d1.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A361186880
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 10/28
The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor
England
Leanda de Lisle
History Today.
58.12 (Dec. 2008): p73.
COPYRIGHT 2008 History Today Ltd.
http://www.historytoday.com/about-us
Full Text:
The Sorcerer's Tale
Faith and Fraud in Tudor England
Alec Ryrie
Oxford University Press 224pp 12.99 [pounds sterling]
ISBN 978 01999 229963
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The study of alchemy can pay off. It does so for the sorcerer in Alec Ryrie's tale, and it has for Ryrie himself. Murder
and magic, peers and prostitutes, are brought together in a Tudor story that glitters with wit and erudition. Ryrie has
produced a veritable nugget of gold.
The tale opens with young Henry, Lord Neville, in prison, accused of conspiring to murder his wife and father with
magic. He is, however, less the villain of this crime than a victim of a conman: a member of London's criminal
underworld who was also a physician and sorcerer. Gregory Wisdom, as he appears to have been called, is almost as
shadowy as the spirits he conjured, but following his trail through the sources shines light into the darkest corners of
Tudor London.
Peopled with wizards and cardsharps the sense of turbulent life in this gangland is reminiscent of Terry Pratchett's
fantastical Discworld series: although often bizarre, it is so human you feel you could walk into it. Ryrie can be as
funny as Pratchett too--but make no mistake, this is serious history. It is the deep research that has unearthed numerous
fascinating details of the sorcerer's world that makes this tale so vivid.
Wisdom had first got his hooks into Neville by claiming he could persuade angels to make a ring to bring him luck at
cards. In describing the theories behind such a ring Ryrie introduces us to the trickery, and also the learned side of
magic. Upmarket sorcerers were mathematicians, physicians, masters of ancient texts. Yet, it becomes clear that
Wisdom, the conman and thief, believed his spells might work.
Ryrie argues it was the confusion loosed at the Reformation that gave magic its particular popularity in Tudor England.
Catholicism has become associated in our minds with magic, but this sorcerer was a (not very Godly) Protestant, and
we are reminded that the persistent claim that sixteenth-century Protestants were the precursors of rationalism,
pluralism and tolerance is a myth.
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 11/28
The Sorcerer's Tale is as brief as Dava Sobel's Longitude, and, like that bestseller, has the feel of an extended essay: an
ideal little book for the general reader, or the would-be magician.
"Nils Gilman's Manderins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America is an eye-opener. Beautifully
written intellectual history, it describes how US foreign policy was taken over in the 1950s by idealistic social scientists
determined to take on the USSR and win what they saw as a global struggle for the hearts and minds of the Third
World. A world away is John Randolph's elegant study of a generation of Russian intelligentsia, The House in the
Garden: the Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism. tie charts the deep connections of thought and ideas
across early nineteenth-century Europe, and probes sensitively into how thought emerges from milieu, from rooms and
fields and the dynamics of household."
Mark Mazower
Leanda de Lisle's book The Sisters Who Would Be Queen will be published by Harper Press in January 2009.
de Lisle, Leanda
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
de Lisle, Leanda. "The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England." History Today, vol. 58, no. 12, 2008, p. 73.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA190331660&it=r&asid=5519b9fc8cda845e45be3f2161920f91.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A190331660
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 12/28
Moderate Voices in the European Reformation
Mark W. Konnert
The Catholic Historical Review.
93.3 (July 2007): p642.
COPYRIGHT 2007 The Catholic University of America Press
http://cuapress.cua.edu/journals.htm
Full Text:
Moderate Voices in the European Reformation. Edited by Luc Racaut and Alec Ryrie. [St. Andrew's Studies in
Reformation History.] (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2005. Pp. xiv, 219. $94.95.)
As the editors of this volume point out in their introduction, a book bearing this title might be expected to be rather
brief. The Reformation is not normally thought of as a time of moderation. This volume presents a series of essays
which attempt to illuminate some of the more obscure corners of the world of the Reformation in which people tried to
avoid or reduce the intolerance and violence which erupted from religious schism. (This is, however, something quite
different from our modern conception of religious liberty or toleration.) One of the difficulties here, of course, is the
very definition of "moderate," for it is very much a moving target. One must always ask, "Moderate in relation to
what?" Moreover, as the editors rightly observe, there can be no single definition of moderation, for "moderation had
many layers and many flavours" (p. 4). It is the particular strength of this collection of ten essays that each contribution
shines its light on a different corner and illuminates a different flavor of moderation.
This moderation took a number of different forms. Diplomatically, as explored by Alexandra Kess, the Du Bellay
brothers steered the foreign policy of Francis I toward alliance with German Lutherans, both as a means of countering
Charles V, and also of keeping the flame of religious reform within France. Elizabeth Tingle's chapter on the Breton
city of Nantes explores the reality of religious division in everyday life, concluding that to the city fathers, order and
stability were more important than orthodoxy and conformity Alain Tallon argues that the Gallican Church in France
provided a moderate alternative model to papal absolutism, one that was never realized, however, as confessional
boundaries hardened and as French clergy expressed their resentment of royal control.
Indeed, this hardening of confessional boundaries is one theme that runs through a number of the essays. Kenneth
Austin examines the little-known figure of Immanuel Tremellius, an Italian Jew who converted first to moderate or
evangelical Catholicism in the 1530's, and then to an undoctrinaire or "lukewarm" Calvinism. It was not so much that
Tremellius changed his views, but rather, a changing world induced him to find the religious space in which he could
comfortably live and work. Likewise, in her examination of the Imperial Court under Maximilian II, Elaine Fulton
explores the notion of "aulic Catholicism," of a reformed Catholicism that would preserve Habsburg control over their
territories from papal power-mongering, and that was based on the principles of moderation and compromise over nonessentials.
An interesting parallel to the Gallican church examined by Alain Tallon suggests itself here, although,
unfortunately, it is not pursued. The French Catholic theologian Rene Benoist, in his efforts to bring religious literature
(including a French Bible) to ordinary people, hearkened back to reforming trends in pre-Reformation Catholicism, but
increasingly ran counter to the Catholic Church's response to the Protestant Reformation.
Any discussion of moderate voices in the Reformation must inevitably focus on the Church of England and its
legendary via media. Louise Campbell argues that the moderation of Matthew Parker, Elizabeth I's first Archbishop of
Canterbury, was not seeking a middle position between Rome and Geneva, but rather strove for compromise among
Protestants over adiaphora, "things indifferent," which were neither commanded nor forbidden by scripture. He and his
supporters were animated by a concern for order and stability, and by a humanist ethos which valued persuasion over
coercion. Ethan Shagan further illuminates some of the difficulties and dilemmas posed by this notion of adiaphora. In
things indifferent, is the final arbiter the magistrate or the individual conscience? If the former, does not compulsion
belie the Protestant message of Christian liberty? If the latter, where is the possibility of a comprehensive national
church? There was a whole range of positions on this issue among both Puritans and "Anglicans." This fact brings us
once again back to the reality that "moderation" is very much in the eye of the beholder. Michael Riordan examines the
careers and beliefs of four mid-level functionaries in the English Royal Household in the mid-sixteenth century. Their
careers indicate that not only was there room in the religious middle, but that even in the dramatic religious shifts of
mid-Tudor England, monarchs of various religious persuasions were prepared to employ these men in important posts,
despite their sometimes opposing religious views. Nor would it be accurate to picture these men purely as political
opportunists of no real religious conviction, who were willing to conform to whatever was demanded of them in order
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 13/28
to maintain their power and positions. In an intriguing suggestion, he states that men such as these may have been more
the norm than the exception, a reality which has been obscured by the nature of Reformation polemics.
Graeme Murdock examines yet another variant of moderation in looking at Protestants in Habsburg-controlled Royal
Hungary in the early seventeenth century, as a number of Calvinist theologians and clergymen reached out to Lutherans
to form a united front against an increasingly potent reformed Catholic Church. They were, however, rebuffed by their
Lutheran counterparts, with the result that Hungarian Protestants were increasingly on the defensive "in the face of a
rising tide of persecution from both the monarchy and Catholic hierarchy" (p. 195).
In his conclusion, Mark Greengrass returns to the varieties of moderation, and to their fundamental ambiguity. Indeed,
it is difficult or impossible to come up with any overarching conclusions regarding moderation in Reformation Europe,
precisely because of the varieties and ambiguity of that moderation. Although it is put as such nowhere in this volume,
moderation in the age of the Reformation may perhaps best be defined negatively, by what it was not, rather than what
it was.
This book is a very welcome addition to the growing historical literature on Reformation Europe which looks beyond
the polemics and the admittedly abundant episodes of intolerance and religious violence to what was very likely a
majority of people who, although they thought of their opponents as damnable heretics, were content to leave their
judgment to a higher authority.
MARK W. KONNERT
University of Calgary
Konnert, Mark W.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Konnert, Mark W. "Moderate Voices in the European Reformation." The Catholic Historical Review, vol. 93, no. 3,
2007, p. 642+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA168215126&it=r&asid=891e6f4a9d323068e6e0a2e0c49ae1d3.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A168215126
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 14/28
Moderate Voices in the European Reformation
Reference & Research Book News.
20.4 (Nov. 2005):
COPYRIGHT 2005 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
0754650219
Moderate voices in the European Reformation.
Ed. by Luc Racaut and Alec Ryrie.
Ashgate Publishing Co.
2005
219 pages
$94.95
Hardcover
St. Andrews studies in Reformation history
BR307
Partisans of Catholic and Protestant factions did tend toward extremism during the rather nasty centuries-long divorce,
but historians since then have aggravated the problem by looking specifically for and at those writers who most
exemplify one position or the other, and so have tended to silence-by-omission any moderate voices that were raised.
Here British historians, with help from a colleague in Paris and another in Zurich, tease out the voices that called for a
mean between opposing sides. Among their topics are Matthew Parker and the 1559 settlement, Immanual Tremellius
and the avoidance of controversy, and Rene Benoist and scripture for the Catholic masses.
([c] 2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Moderate Voices in the European Reformation." Reference & Research Book News, Nov. 2005. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA138493359&it=r&asid=fc1de6be4602b621c152b1965b087b0d.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A138493359
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 15/28
The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the
Early English Reformation
Donald K. McKim
Church History.
74.1 (Mar. 2005): p166.
COPYRIGHT 2005 American Society of Church History
http://www.churchhistory.org/church-history-journal/
Full Text:
The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation. By Alec Ryrie. Cambridge Studies in Early
Modern British History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xx + 306 pp. $65.00 cloth.
The perennial tension between Christian faith and the state was acutely felt by English reformist Protestants during the
last years of Henry VIII's life. Ryrie's excellent book examines the closing stage of Thomas Cromwell's Reformation
(1538-40) to Henry's death in January 1547 and finds the era marked by a strong tension for those who sought reform
of the church--the strain of maintaining fidelity to the Christian Gospel while also displaying loyalty to their king. He
argues this was the dominant note for evangelicalism in this period, which functioned as a prelude for an aggressively
Protestant emphasis by Henry's son and successor, Edward VI. Ryrie shows the modifications in English evangelicalism
that took shape during these years, both theologically and socially. These expressed themselves in the ways institutions
and individuals adapted to changing realities.
Significantly, Ryrie questions earlier scholarly views, such as by A. G. Dickens in the 1960s, that English Protestantism
advanced quietly during the last years of Henry's reign and that this enabled Somerset to engineer its status as the
official English religion with relative ease when Edward became king. Ryrie shows that the issues are more complex.
Henry's latter years are an important prelude period of fluidity and ambiguity during which evangelically minded
reformers had to navigate with the hope that their king would look with favor on their activities, while they maintained
moderate views on doctrine and political conformity. These evangelicals saw themselves in an international context,
reading books imported from the Continent and hearing preachers from outside their region. The mobility of many
evangelicals meant that the institution of the kingship was the common thread that united them, rather than loyalty to
localities. Thus the policies and practices of the government played a major role in the emerging evangelicals' selfunderstanding
and their perceptions of how their Christian faith could be lived out in changing circumstances.
Ryrie tells the story of how moderate reformers fared and had influence in a variety of settings. Chapter 1 explores the
national political situation and evangelical responses. The outbreaks of persecutions by the government against
evangelicals created an intensely ambiguous situation for those who sought to be obedient Christians and loyal subjects.
Chapter 2 faces the injunction of Romans 13:1: How does one fear God and honor the king? After 1540, evangelical
attitudes toward the king began to divide, given Henry's actions and assertions of royal prerogatives. Some dared to
attack the king directly while others--the majority of evangelicals--tempered their attitudes toward an obedience that
continued to exalt royalty authority. When Henry chose to enforce heresy laws and exerted further pressure on
evangelicals, most reformers were moved to pragmatic compromises rather than defiance or possible martyrdom. Four
of the most radical writers in this period--John Bale, George Joye, William Turner, and Henry Brinklow--"all practiced
one kind of dissimulation by writing under pseudonyms" (87).
The heart of Ryrie's book is the next five chapters where he deals with the "Faces of Reform" in a variety of contexts:
with exiles, in pulpit and print shop, universities, court, and the evangelical underground. English evangelical exiles,
between 1539 and 1547, chose exile as an alternative to recantation and death. Their number was small--nowhere near
the number of exiles under Mary Tudor. But Ryrie argues these exiles did not keep themselves informed of emerging
events in England and that even John Bale, the most prolific writer among them, was often ill-informed and
misinformed about English events. Given the slowness of the printing process, he and his fellow exiles were effectively
"shut out of the mainstream of religious life in England" (111), being relegated to a "sidelines" position.
Those who remained in England, as evangelical preachers and writers, more fully engaged the political establishment
by propounding their doctrinal content and political priorities. They drew on developing Lutheran theology--rather than
the more radical ideas of Swiss leaders. They spoke on issues of social morality and reform of the nation--and found
themselves in conflict with the prevailing powers.
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 16/28
Ryrie asserts that "the Reformation was perceived by those who made it and by those who were made by it, as an
intellectual event" (157). Thus the moderate reformers' emphasis on "Godliness and Good Learning" was centered in
university education. They hoped that dissolution of monasteries and their foundations would lead the Crown to
provide land and funding for education. When promises in this vein proved empty, "many reformers were openly
disillusioned" (163). Numerical declines occurred at Oxford and Cambridge with the latter having to sell books from its
library to remain solvent in the 1540s. But an evangelical minority emerged in both institutions, committed to the
defense of education and the promulgation of moderate doctrines even as this caused them to "doubt the value of their
alliance with the regime" (193).
Evangelicals also found their ways into the court and the upper echelons of Henry's government. Patronage begun
under Anne Boleyn continued while others obtained prominent positions by birth or connections, or their beliefs. But
"some reformers found themselves having to weigh their allegiance to the king against their understanding of the
Gospel" (222). Attractions of court life and influence led a number to retreat from earlier reformist leanings in order to
maintain positions of power.
Ryrie concludes by surveying a range of informal evangelical gatherings that functioned as "underground
congregations" during this period. While they displayed an array of doctrinal and political positions, he argues that they
tended toward more confrontational views, especially when laity was involved in leadership.
Ryrie's fine study clearly shows the delicate "balancing act" required of those who sought fidelity to the Christian
Gospel while also desiring to be loyal to their king, even when they perceived he was neglecting God's Word. As events
unfolded, moderate reformers opted toward a more aggressive stance as they became "no longer willing to tarry for the
magistrate indefinitely" (257). Ryrie's study helps us understand his final comment: "The fire of faith had done its
work" (257).
Donald K. McKim
Westminster John Knox Press
McKim, Donald K.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
McKim, Donald K. "The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation." Church History, vol.
74, no. 1, 2005, p. 166+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA130970844&it=r&asid=cfcfda82052c9cdbe1231b086a15fe77.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A130970844
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 17/28
The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the
Early English Reformation
Susan Wabuda
Renaissance Quarterly.
57.4 (Winter 2004): p1493.
COPYRIGHT 2004 The Renaissance Society of America
http://www.rsa.org/RQ.HTM
Full Text:
Alec Ryrie. The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation.
Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xx
+ 306 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. $65. ISBN: 0-521-82343-9.
Ever since the first edition of A. G. Dickens's The English Reformation appeared in 1964, succeeding generations of
historians have tested themselves against the template he established. When a memorial service was held for him in
2002 at King's College, London, Professor Patrick Collinson remarked that Dickens had "created out of almost nothing"
the concept of the English Reformation itself, a "great subject" whose influence has been so extensive that it amounts to
"a not so minor academic industry." In balancing the great themes of politics, religion, and society with regional trends,
and in promoting local archives as important sources for evidence concerning the spread of Protestantism, Dickens was
also "one of the inventors of the modern craft of microhistory."
Dickens's influence has been persuasive and often contested. Among those important books that reconsidered his
findings (and might be counted among Dickens's "revisionists") are Susan Brigden's comprehensive exploration of
religious conservatism and change in London and the Reformation (1989); Collinson's Birthpangs of Protestant
England (1988, dedicated to Dickens, "who both led and pointed the way"); Eamon Duffy's evocative Stripping of the
Altars (1992); and Christopher Haigh's English Reformations (1993), which divided events into three discontinuous
periods, characterized by political developments that had relatively little to do with evangelical persuasiveness.
Yet another generation of scholars has now entered the field that Dickens established. One of the boldest accounts
presented so far is The Gospel and Henry VIII by Alec Ryrie, who questions some of the fundamental assumptions
about the nature of the Reformation itself, along with recent historiographical trends. He suggests that the "golden age
of the local study in English Reformation history is passing" (7) and that it is time to press forward in light of the
achievements of some of the revisionists. He confronts the last phase of Henry's reign, from 1539 until his death in
January 1547, which, even in "a landscape as scarred by passage as the English Reformation," offers "its own distinct
set of historiographical tiger traps" (13). Haigh argued that Henry's Reformation was all but reversed between 1538 and
1546, under the terms of the Act of the Six Articles, which became law in 1539. But by examining how evangelical
reformers understood the Act, Ryrie demonstrates that it was hardly the "whip with six strings" of Protestant legend.
Rather than preparing the way for a widespread attack upon heresy, its chief purpose was to "proclaim the Henrician
orthodoxy of the moment," both domestically and internationally (38).
And it is in unpacking that orthodoxy and in exploring that moment that Ryrie's book makes some of its most
interesting contributions. In 1539 most leading reformers (including Archbishop Thomas Cranmer) still believed in
Christ's bodily Presence in the bread and wine of the sacrament of the altar. Ryrie draws useful distinctions between the
small number of Henrician exiles, like John Bale, skeptics of the king's policies, who "inclined" toward the views of
Huldrych Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger, what would later be known as "Reformed" Protestantism (97), and he sets
them against the thinking of the "conformist" evangelicals (120), whose views were ambiguous, and usefully so,
because they reflected the ambiguities of Henry's religious policies. Loyalty and obedience was their means for survival
and their hopes for ultimate ascendancy. Ryrie shows that Bale's uncompromising polemics had little immediate
influence at home. Negotiation, equivocation, recantation, and also a "creeping Nicodemism" (84) were all valuable
strategies for "lowering the ideological temperature" (89). Ryrie has illuminated a short-lived Anglo-Lutheran moment
that was quickly outmoded once Edward VI became king.
Margaret Clark paid tribute to Dickens in a recent issue of The Proceedings of the British Academy (vol. 120, 2003) by
recognizing that he was "an impossible act to follow" (99). While that may be so, it is the responsibility of each
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 18/28
generation to provide more revealing accounts of the course of the reforms in England, if revelations can be had. If
Ryrie's book is any indication, the efforts of the latest generation of Reformation scholars bode well.
SUSAN WABUDA
Fordham University
Wabuda, Susan
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Wabuda, Susan. "The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation." Renaissance Quarterly,
vol. 57, no. 4, 2004, p. 1493+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA127163264&it=r&asid=f946128c14f7e92952c14149eb26d19b.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A127163264
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 19/28
The Beginnings of English Protestantism
Janice Liedl
Canadian Journal of History.
39.3 (Dec. 2004): p575.
COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Toronto Press
http://www.usask.ca/history/cjh/
Full Text:
The Beginnings of English Protestantism, edited by Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie. Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2002. xi, 242 pp. $55.00 US (cloth), $19.99 US (paper).
This collection challenges the accepted truth developing in English Reformation historiography over the last thirty
years. Marshall and Ryrie's introduction praises the "revisionist troika" of Christopher Haigh, J. J. Scarisbrick, and
Eamon Duffy, whose studies have emphasized the vitality and depth of traditional religion in sixteenth-century
England, but wonders why these works rail to address how "the English Reformation eventually came to be, in
Diarmaid MacCulloch's phrase, a 'howling success'"(p. 3). The nine essays in this volume may not definitively answer
that question, but all are at pains to demonstrate the dynamic English evangelical communities that flourished under
Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I.
Readers will pick out several themes in the collection. First is the revisionist treatment of evangelical individuals and
groups. For example, Ethan H. Shagan overhauls the conventional treatment of one of the commonwealth men in
"Clement Armstrong and the Godly Commonwealth: Radical Religion in Early Tudor England." In Shagan's hands,
Armstrong transforms from an incidental member of the Reformation's radical fringe to an illustrative example of the
radicalism possible amongst indigenous English lay activists. Armstrong's unique formulations of royal authority
focused on the king's sacramental and spiritual leadership to maintain moral and economic order, enforced by
visitations and regular reporting to a royal religious administration. Similarly, John N. King gives a new spin to the
story of John Day, printer of Foxe's Actes and Monuments, by putting that later work in the broad context of Day's
early and voluminous Protestant publications. Andrew Pettegree's "Printing and the Reformation: The English
Exception" sketches out a comparative study of the printing industry, before and during the Reformation, that acts as a
broad companion piece to King's study. In "Dissenters from a Dissenting Church: The Challenge of the Freewillers
1550-1558," this Marian evangelical community emerges from obscurity in Thomas Freeman's capable hands. No
longer can historians dismiss this group as an insignificant fringe given the evidence of their congregational strength as
well as their rhetorical conflicts with such notable predestinarians as Bradford and Jewel.
A second theme is the study of religious culture across large and often conflicted social groups such as friars and
women. Complex treatments of the religious sensibilities of the age distinguish the contributions of Susan Wabuda,
Richard Rex, and Alec Ryrie. Wabuda's "Sanctified by the Believing Spouse: Women, Men and the Marital Yoke in the
Early Reformation" highlights the tensions created by the mixed messages of women's marital subordination juxtaposed
against their higher duty to God. Evangelical and traditional leaders both struggled with the disquieting prospect of
women contravening social norms by leaving a spouse who professed a different faith. Her essay promises to be widely
influential in gender, social, and religious histories of the period. "The Friars in the English Reformation" underlines
friars' conflicting contributions to, and resistance against, the Reformation. Richard Rex argues that "[t]he ultimate
triumph of the Reformation in England certainly had something to do with the early enthusiasm for Protestant doctrines
among the friars ..." (p. 59). Ryrie's essay, "Counting Sheep, Counting Shepherds: The Problem of Allegiance in the
English Reformation," takes a subtle and sophisticated approach to the confessional history of the early Tudor period.
His essay demonstrates how anachronistic it is to attempt to apply labels of "Catholic" and "Protestant" to the early
Tudor period of to seek quantification of the various camps. Ryrie compellingly argues that the appeal of evangelical
doctrine was importantly bolstered not only by official support under Henry VIII and Edward VI, but also by the
promise of liberty from the costly and sometimes painful demands of traditional piety.
Finally, Patrick Collinson's concluding essay, "Night Schools, Conventicles and Churches: Continuities and
Discontinuities in Early Protestant Ecclesiology," sums up both the historical context of these diverse and sometimes
oppositional forms of early Tudor evangelism and the historiographical context of the collection. Collinson's treatment
revolves, in great part, around the Lollards as a necessary component in the budding mythology of English
Protestantism. "If the Lollards had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent them. And they were, in a sense,
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 20/28
invented" (p. 225). Lollardy, Lutheranism, and, most importantly, a growing sense of the true Church all contributed to
the creation of what came to be called English Protestantism.
This collection appeals not only to the Tudor specialist, but also to readers of social and religious history. From the
introduction through to the final article, fresh treatments of familiar individuals and groups argue for the strength and
vitality of indigenous evangelism in early sixteenth-century Britain. Strong cases are also made for a link between early
Tudor England and the Continental Reformation, taking advantage of the rich development in historical literature and
materials for both areas. But the greatest recommendation for The Beginnings of English Protestantism is that it serves
as a vital counterpoint to the recent trends of revisionist history, illustrating the strength and depth of early English
evangelism alongside the celebrated continuance of traditional religion.
Janice Liedl
Laurentian University
Liedl, Janice
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Liedl, Janice. "The Beginnings of English Protestantism." Canadian Journal of History, vol. 39, no. 3, 2004, p. 575+.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA130282540&it=r&asid=46facf95547ba468b95d30449f647b52.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A130282540
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 21/28
The Beginnings of English Protestantism
Christopher Haigh
The English Historical Review.
119.481 (Apr. 2004): p508.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Oxford University Press
http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/
Full Text:
The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2002; pp.
242. 40 [pounds sterling]; pb. 14.95 [pounds sterling]).
Twenty years ago, it was complained that the Catholics had been left out of the English Reformation. The story then
was simply one of institutional reform and Protestant triumph: Reformation was construction. If Catholics appeared at
all, it was as losers, self-interested priests struggling to hold on to their privileges and superstitious old women
clutching their beads. And then there was 'revisionism', and recently the complaint has been that the Protestants are left
out. The revised story is of state enforcement and Catholic loss, people bewildered as their mental world was wrecked
around them: Reformation as destruction. If Protestants appear it is as cranks and misfits, or politiques and
expropriators dressed up as reformers. Another swing of the interpretational pendulum, perhaps, as historians play their
denominational games: Foxe to Sander, Froude to Gasquet, Dickens to Duffy. With a group of essays from leading
historians of early Protestantism--such as Patrick Collinson, Andrew Pettegree, Alec Ryrie, and Susan Wabuda--will we
be asked to go back to Dickens again? Thankfully, no. When Ryrie argues that there were more mid-Tudor Protestants
than I (for one) suggested, he insists 'This is not to try to re-introduce a "Whig-Protestant" interpretation of the English
Reformation by the back door' (p. 105). Good news. As has been said, we are all (well, in truth, almost all) postrevisionists
now. The editors begin by conceding that 'The heart of the revisionist case looks broadly convincing' (p. 3),
and set themselves the task of filling some emerging gaps. They suggest that interest in traditional religion and in the
long-term 'inculturation' of Protestant ideas has meant a neglect of the early reform movement. Just because early
Protestants were a small minority, we cannot ignore them. If this collection has 'an overall thesis, it is that, while
acknowledging the strength and vitality of traditional piety, we should also pay close attention to the highly complex
and multifaceted processes through which an English Protestant movement was formed and sustained, and a distinctive
Protestant identity created' (p. 12). Who could disagree? And who would dissent from Marshall and Ryrie's conclusion,
that Protestantism had only a Pyrrhic victory? 'It could not convert the nation; but it could, and did, permanently divide
it' (p. 13). This sounds familiar. There are nine essays in the set. Peter Marshall examines the meaning and the
experience of evangelical conversion in Henry VIII's reign: he suggests (as others have done) that it was often the most
fervent Catholics who made the leap, and that justification by faith was 'the catalytic agent' (p. 37) for converts.
Marshall also settles on 'evangelical' as the 'least worst label' for heterodoxy (p. 15), and is followed by some fellowcontributors.
In somewhat unusual company, Richard Rex looks at the role of the friars in the Reformation both as early
converts to Protestantism (no mealy-mouthed nonsense about evangelicals here), and as early activist opponents: the
Reformation did for the friars what it did for other groups--it divided them. Ethan Shagan tackles the odd career and
odder ideas of the eccentric London grocer Clement Armstrong--who made the mistake of dying in 1536, 'just as things
were really getting fascinating' (p. 60). Armstrong was a spiritualist and a sacramentary, who may have taken some
beliefs from the Lollards, but who combined theological radicalism with a 'hyper-royalist' (P. 74) conception of the
royal supremacy. In perhaps the defining essay of the volume, Alec Ryrie considers 'the problem of allegiance in the
English Reformation'--'the scale and speed' of conversion to evangelical (yes) ideas before 1553 (p. 84). Ryrie's essay is
a more sophisticated--a post-revisionist-version of A. G. Dickens's 1987 article on 'The early expansion of
Protestantism in England, 1520-1558'. Ryrie argues that counting heretics and tabulating wills do not help much, and
charts contemporary opinions on the trajectory of change. Although the evangelicals' numbers remained low, by the
1540s they thought the tide had turned their way. There was a small 'committed vanguard of reformers', but there were
also the 'pragmatic gospellers', the opportunists, those reconciled to the unavoidability of change, and the confused--
those whose compliance, complaisance and confusion gave determined evangelicals an influence well beyond their
numbers. Anyone disagree? Ryrie thinks that conservatives were right, and that it was the appeal of 'liberty' that helped
the reformers on--liberty from fasting, from confession, from purgatory, and from clerical celibacy. Susan Wabuda
adapts Joan Kelly's Renaissance question and asks whether women had a Reformation. They did--or a bit of
Reformation, anyway. The shift from Vives to Bullinger gave them the right to their own religion, the right to leave a
papist husband. Tom Freeman assesses the Freewillers again, and explains why they lost the mid-century argument.
Perhaps the predestinarians had the nastier theology, but they had the learning, the money and the martyrs--and
assurance was a useful doctrine for those facing persecution. Andrew Pettegree shows how an undeveloped English
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 22/28
book-trade was revolutionised under Edward VI by official sponsorship and the immigration of Dutch printers--and
then explains the imbalance of Protestant and Catholic printing under Mary by emigration. John King looks at the
printing career of John Day, who used the self-important slogan 'ARISE FOR IT IS DAY' on some of his title-pages.
Last, Patrick Collinson examines a discontinuity within the continuities of dissent. Lollards went to their parish church,
and were not even a sect, but dissenting Protestants became separatists with their own true Church. This nicely
encapsulates the theme of the book: there weren't many Protestants, but they thought they really mattered--so they did.
And who could now dissent from that?
Christ Church, Oxford
CHRISTOPHER HAIGH
Haigh, Christopher
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Haigh, Christopher. "The Beginnings of English Protestantism." The English Historical Review, vol. 119, no. 481,
2004, p. 508+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA116734588&it=r&asid=3e0c1030cbbeb32a0aa34ffe452ba67e.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A116734588
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 23/28
The Beginnings of English Protestantism
Baird Tipson
Albion.
35.4 (Winter 2004): p635.
COPYRIGHT 2004 North American Conference on British Studies
http://www.albion.appstate.edu/
Full Text:
Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie, eds. The Beginnings of English Protestantism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
2002. Pp. xi, 242. $20.00 paper. ISBN 0-521-00324-5.
The editors encouraged nine highly-respected historians to address a serious historiographical deficit: the now-reigning
revisionist narrative of the English Reformation has up to now paid little attention to the process, from the 1530s to
1558, by which English Protestantism actually won the loyalty of a significant minority of the English population.
Historians ought to be able to accept the strength and vitality of traditional piety, the editors believe, without reverting
entirely to interpretations of the Reformation as no more than an act of state. By shedding light on "the highly complex
and multifaceted processes through which an English Protestant movement was formed and sustained, and a distinctive
Protestant identity created" (pp. 12-13), these essays direct attention back to the theologians, preachers, and authors
who inspired the movement and constructed the identity.
In his essay on individual conversions to "evangelicalism" under Henry VIII ("Protestantism" being anachronistic at so
early a date), Peter Marshall takes issue with those who would "keep the theology and sociology of the topic apart, like
white and noncolourfast garments in the wash-cycles of meaningful historical explanation." Rather than reducing either
element to the other, he argues that the conversion experience of early English evangelicals "was a dye finely
compounded of social, cultural, and theological pigments," which contributed enormously to what became a distinctive
Protestant identity. Richard Rex's examination of the role of the friars finds them "more likely and more prompt than
others to take sides"; the many friars who were attracted to the reformers' ideas represent "a particular instance of the
general truth that support for the new religion came not from those most alienated from the old religion, but precisely
from those who had hitherto been most engaged in it" (p. 58). Their preaching and work in hearing confessions had
given the friars influence with both gentry and people, influence that allowed those friars who embraced the new
theology to gain a ready hearing.
Ethan Shagan directs attention to Clement Armstrong, who combined a thoroughgoing justification for royal supremacy
over the church with a spiritualism similar to that of Hans Hut and Caspar Schwenckfeld. At least one evangelical was
thus taking the royal supremacy case in a far more dangerous direction than Cromwell, Cranmer, or Henry ever
imagined; Armstrong represents "the sort of instinctive radical whom the magisterial reformers--both in England and on
the Continent--first embraced, then feared, and eventually sought to destroy" (p. 73). Alec Ryrie makes a case for the
importance of "the broader penumbra of sympathisers and opportunists" who became "an inseparable part" of the
reform movement (p. 105). The reformers' call to Christian liberty "had a dangerous, irresponsible, reckless appeal" and
gave them allies they may not have wanted, allies who sought to escape the "community, responsibility, virtue,
prudence and asceticism" offered by traditional religion. But these allies gave the message of the relatively small
number of committed reformers an importance, momentum, and dominance of the religious scene out of all proportion
to their numbers.
Susan Wabuda argues that the new doctrines did not call for, or result in, significantly different roles for married men
and women, but they did lead to "a greater emphasis on spiritual equality as it was lived through marriage, where the
wife's obedience was tempered by a quiet, new endorsement of male friendliness and fellowship" (p. 128). Thomas
Freeman shines light on the Freewillers and their prison controversies with the "predestinarians" John Bradford, John
Philpot, and John Careless. Not only did the predestinarians pioneer the practice of "practical divinity" so central to
later Puritans, they also created a hierarchy that succeeded in imposing unity and control over the secret, scattered
Protestant congregations of the Marian regime.
Andrew Pettegree focuses on how, where, and why Protestant texts were printed. During the last six years of Henry's
reign, printers in Antwerp produced a steady supply of finely-printed books to serve the needs of London's evangelical
community. Under Edward, the London printing industry exploded, more than doubling the number of editions
published annually. Protestant works--Bibles, catechisms, works of exegesis and polemic--dominated, and "this
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 24/28
Protestant publishing offensive was deliberately fostered by those at the very heart of the Edwardian regime" (p. 173).
John King argues that the output of the best known of these printers, John Day, represents a fine counter-example to the
revisionist emphasis (most notably in Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars [1992]) on the destructive force of early
English Protestantism. The Protestant printing press was distinctly creative, bringing into being a rich literature geared
to readers at all social levels.
Finally, Patrick Collinson, who has presided over early English Protestant historiography since the publication in 1967
of his magisterial. The English Puritan Movement, adds another item to his astonishing bibliography. His topic--
conventicles and how they became Protestant congregations--is one he has often explored before; here he suggests
among other things that most such gatherings found ways to exist within--rather than outside--the structures of the
established church.
This is a book for specialists. More general readers--who may already have read Duffy's Stripping, Christopher Haigh,
English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (1993), and J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation
and the English People (1984) and are searching for a comprehensive recent account of the years to 1558--can most
profitably be directed to Diarmaid MacCulloch's magisterial Thomas Cranmer: A Life (1996). But serious students of
the sixteenth century will deepen their understanding of the early English Reformation by careful study of one or more
of these essays.
BAIRD TIPSON
Wittenberg University
Tipson, Baird
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Tipson, Baird. "The Beginnings of English Protestantism." Albion, vol. 35, no. 4, 2004, p. 635+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA118172474&it=r&asid=6b57ad2e22d99d92b68cc6346d4945a9.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A118172474
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 25/28
Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie, eds. The
Beginnings of English Protestantism
Standford Lehmberg
Renaissance Quarterly.
56.3 (Autumn 2003): p874.
COPYRIGHT 2003 The Renaissance Society of America
http://www.rsa.org/RQ.HTM
Full Text:
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xii + 242 pp. + 6 b/w pls. index, illus. $55 (cl), $20
(pbk). ISBN: 0-521-80274-1 (cl), 0-521-00324-5 (pbk).
This volume is a contribution to the continuing debate over the character of the Reformation in England. As the editors
show in their preface, the traditional view expounded a generation ago by A. G. Dickens--that the medieval church was
corrupt and many people demanded change--is no longer accepted. More recent studies, especially those by J. J.
Scarisbrick and Eamon Duffy, have demonstrated that the medieval services and traditions of the church were still
widely appreciated and there was little popular desire to jettison them. One of the latest interpretations, that by
Christopher Haig (English Reformations, 1993), suggests that the Reformation was generally accepted only in the
middle years of Elizabeth's reign, after a new generation which had never known the pre-Reformation church had
grown up. The present writers attempt to clarify the situation in the early years of the Reformation, mainly during the
reign of Henry VIII. They show that it is much too simple to approach religious change as being either forced
politically ("from the top down") or demanded by a populist movement ("from the bottom up"). It was much more
complex than that: different leaders had different views and their interaction with each other, with the monarchy, and
with the people was varied and not easy to force into a simple narrative.
Although the essays presented here are on specific topics, all relate to the general theme of early Protestantism (though
several writers are hesitant to use that term, preferring reform or religious change instead). Six of the nine authors teach
at British universities, three at American institutions. At least two (Patrick Collinson and Andrew Pettegree) are widely
respected senior scholars, while others, like Alec Ryrie, Ethan Shagan, and Susan Wabuda are younger academics. Two
of most interesting contributions deal with the printers who made early Protestant writings available in England.
Pettegree discusses English printing generally, pointing out important differences between the smaller, newer English
presses and their larger, better established counterparts on the Continent. He also describes the technicalities of printing
and shows that publication of large folio volumes was much more complex and expensive than the printing of a larger
number of small tracts. John King follows this with a significant case study, the work of the notable London printer
John Day. The editors contribute separate but related chapters, Marshall discussing the experience of evangelical
conversion during the reign of Henry VIII and Ryrie tackling the problem of allegiance--which sheep followed which
shepherds. Richard Rex provides a fine account of the experiences of friars; strangely enough they have been studied
far less than monks and nuns, although a number of former friars, like John Scory, John Hilsey, Miles Coverdale, and
Robert Barnes, figure prominently in any narrative. The fascinating reformer Clement Armstrong is brought to life in an
account by Ethan Shagan. Already known as an associate of Thomas Cromwell, he turns out to be more radical and
perhaps less intellectual than we had thought. Thomas Freeman ventures into the reigns of Edward VI and Mary Tudor
to discuss the group of Freewillers, whose rejection of the doctrine of predestination made them dissenters even from
the dissenting church. Susan Wabuda discusses the impact of the Reformation on the institution of marriage, showing
that the dominance of husbands declined somewhat once marriage was no longer regarded as a sacrament. Finally,
Patrick Collinson adds another footnote to his continuing studies of Puritanism, examining the role of conventicles and
"night schools" (groups that met under cover of darkness to practice their radical religious beliefs) in early Protestant
ecclesiology.
Despite the significant contribution of these studies, it is too early to formulate any new interpretation of the early
English Reformation. In particular it seems necessary to examine the interaction between official policy and individual
belief more fully. But these writers demonstrate the quality of the work in progress and do much to illuminate what
have been some of the dark corners of the changing church.
STANFORD LEHMBERG
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 26/28
University of Minnesota, Emeritus
Lehmberg, Standford
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Lehmberg, Standford. "Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie, eds. The Beginnings of English Protestantism." Renaissance
Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 3, 2003, p. 874+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA110027471&it=r&asid=9ce99827eb199453d7972dce847d4ae5.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A110027471
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 27/28
The Beginnings of English Protestantism
Donald K. McKim
Church History.
72.3 (Sept. 2003): p656.
COPYRIGHT 2003 American Society of Church History
http://www.churchhistory.org/church-history-journal/
Full Text:
The Beginnings of English Protestantism. Edited by Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002. xii + 242 pp. $55.00 cloth; $20.00 paper.
Since the 1970's the traditional picture of the rise and progress of the English Reformation has been challenged.
Partisan portraits that stressed a progressivism of the reform religion have given way to a revisionism that emphasizes
more positively the vitality of the late medieval church. This change gives credence to J. J. Scarisbrick's 1984 comment
that "on the whole, English men and women did not want the Reformation and most of them were slow to accept it
when it came" (3).
Yet, say the editors of this collection of nine essays by British and American scholars, this revisionism "has brought its
own partisanship, and some aspects of its programme are as open to question as the 'Whig-Protestant' grand narrative it
aspires to replace" (3). This book helps redress some balances since "the theologians, preachers and authors who were
once given excessive importance as the central players in the Reformation drama have now been reduced to walk-on
parts. There is a danger that this neglect will leave us with an essentially one-dimensional conception of the early
Reformation as chiefly an 'act of state,' an unexpected calamity passively experienced by a reluctant but ultimately
obedient nation" (4).
The essays here focus on the England of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I to help interpret the meaning of
"protestant" in fluid and changing contexts that became increasingly complex and contingent on religion and society
interactions. The roots of religious reform were deep seated in the medieval past, the writers agree, and need to be seen
as well in a "Catholic" context "within which the early reformers were formed and from which they emerged" (9). Yet,
overall, the essays support the view that "while acknowledging the strength and vitality of traditional piety, we should
also pay close attention to the highly complex and multifaceted processes through which an English Protestant
movement was formed and sustained, and a distinctive Protestant identity created, in these crucial years" (13).
To present this view, the writers survey a variety of topics. Peter Marshall's study of evangelical conversion during the
reign of Henry VIII connects narratives of conversion in England with those from the European continent, especially
Luther, thus displaying conversion as, a European phenomenon. Richard Rex's "Friars in the English Reformation
shows English friars to be engaged in reformational issues--either for or against--and as a group that more promptly
than others took sides in the polarities the religious reform engendered. Early friar enthusiasm for Protestant doctrines
fostered the spread of the reform, especially since many friars had influence among gentry and common people.
The odd views of Clement Armstrong, an eccentric London grocer and occasional decorator for Henry VIII are
surveyed by Ethan H. Shagan. Armstrong mounted arguments for royal supremacy over the church and did so by
mixing, in varying measures, doses of themes from Continental Protestantism and Anabaptist thought. Armstrong's was
a "spiritual theology," and he developed his eclectic views in such a way as to remind us "the royal supremacy was a
deeply contested process, amenable to a wide array of interpretations" (82).
The interesting essay of Susan Wabuda, who clearly shows ways that English prescriptions about gender roles drew
from Continental sources, demonstrates further elements of dependence of the English Reformation on the Continent.
These reform sources opened potentials for more spiritual equality, friendliness, and fellowship in a marriage between
husband and wife. Traditionally, the prime role for the woman was obedience. The writings of Paul were used in the
sixteenth century "to validate an arrangement of power inside the marital union where the man was the ultimate
authority for his wife, but she acted as a sanctifier within their marriage" (115). Only obedience to the will of God could
take priority for the wife over obedience to her husband. Reform religion brought more emphasis on the kindness and
care of the husband (127). Both partners together sought to do the will of God. So while the social structure of marriage
still remained the same, "the standard of obedience inside the marital union went through its own alterations during the
English reform" (128).
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508095271304 28/28
A practical expression of the dependence of the English reform movement on the Continent is captured in Andrew
Pettegree's fine study of printing and the English Reformation. Pettegree shows how critically dependent early English
Protestants were on the expertise and assistance of French and Dutch printers who provided the English with their
printed books. This industrial dependence was key since "the printed book was one means by which the core messages
of the reformers were brought to the reading public; in this it functioned alongside the sermons preached by Luther and
his supporters and the wider amorphous categories of aural communication" (157).
Emerging English print culture was boosted by John Day, the "master printer of the English Reformation." John King's
essay on Day details his activities, including his use of the pseudonym Michael Wood during the dangerous years of
Mary's reign (198) until under Edward VI it was safe for him to use his own motto: "Arise for it is Day" (202). Day's
most significant contribution was publishing John Foxe's Actes and Monuments (1570). King indicates the printer's
great assistance to Foxe in putting the book together. This aid was so important that the book "would never have seen
the light of day without the publisher's active involvement in every phase of book construction" (208).
Other essays by Alec Ryrie on the problem of Allegiance, Thomas Freeman on the Freewillers (1550-58), and Patrick
Collinson on early Protestant ecclesiology round out this volume. The book shows how early Protestant reform was a
"many-headed monster" as it sought an emerging identity. This leads to the wise caution that "subsequent confessional
clarity should not be allowed to obscure the kaleidoscopic diversity of the early years of the Reformation, or the messy
complexity of the processes by which those possibilities were resolved into the Protestantism which we know" (8).
Donald K. McKim Westminster John Knox Press
McKim, Donald K.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
McKim, Donald K. "The Beginnings of English Protestantism." Church History, vol. 72, no. 3, 2003, p. 656+. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA108694285&it=r&asid=7c19411f60e809a89bd4f61ec623fa0f.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A108694285
Book Review: ‘Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World’
Presbyterian News Service March 31, 2017
Volume traces history and character of Reformation-inspired Christians
by Gregg Brekke | Presbyterian News Service
LOUISVILLE – On the eve of the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Reformation-launching writings and disputations, scholar and author Alec Ryrie has released a book he hopes will explain the origins and impact of the Protestant movement. Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World (Viking, April 2017) provides a comprehensive overview of major, and many minor, events throughout the history of Protestantism, and how it shaped and impacted the modern era.
Ryrie, a professor of Christian history at Durham University in England, set out to do in 500 pages what few have been able to accomplish in much longer or multiple volumes. Divided into three sections—the Reformation Age, the Modern Age and the Global Age—Ryrie’s survey sees Protestantism “snowballing” from its scholarly beginnings to the current context of explosive growth in the global South.
Starting with rumblings within medieval Catholicism and attempts at internal reform of the Church, marching through the groundbreaking split from the Church by Luther and the theological groundwork of John Calvin—who codified “Reformed” thought—and ending with the modern context, he leads readers not only through the historical and political landmarks that defined the Reformation, but also into the mindset of Protestantism itself.
The “point of no return” for Protestantism, when it went from being an attempt by Luther to reform the wrongs he was confronting in the Catholic Church, happened at the Leipzig Disputation in June 1519.
“Luther has by then already developed his doctrine of justification by faith alone,” Ryrie said via a Skype interview. “That alone is something Catholicism could have, and now has, embraced in large part. The dispute over how faith and hope and love relate to one another could also have been resolved.”
“The key thing that happens at Leipzig is that Luther is pressed to submit his authority to those of the general councils, in particular the case of Jan Hus, who was condemned to burn at the stake in 1415,” he said. “Luther recognizes he has to either double down or back down. And backing down was not the man’s style. His insistence that power of the Church in any form, not just the pope, cannot bind his conscience. As he would later put it, that he is captive to the Word of God and he doesn’t recognize any authority, including anybody else’s right to interpret scripture. … It’s a recipe for chaos.”
The Protestant faith, Ryrie argues, is built on three tenets that infuse and inspire all Protestant thought. They are free inquiry, democracy and apoliticism. Of these, he says apoliticism is the most unique point. “Protestants might have sometimes confronted or overthrown their rulers, but their most constant political demand is simply to be left alone.”
The other two tenets, free inquiry and democracy, would flow into the burgeoning Enlightenment movement and lead to great social and political change throughout Europe and the New World, even as Protestants attempted to build their “kingdom of heaven” rather than being subject to and self-interested in constructing earthly kingdoms.
And it is this passion for access to and knowledge of God that fuels one of Protestantism’s other well-known features: division. Whereas the Catholic Church exerted control over its reformist tendencies, in the form of lay and monastic movements, Protestantism had no such superstructure within which further reforms could coexist.
“There is a tension in Protestantism, and maybe in Christianity, between inspiration and institution,” he said. “When you have a particular movement of the Spirit or a period of renewal and rediscovery, then the first generation is swept up by it. But unless it’s going to just flare up and disappear you need to create structures and institutions—churches. And as soon as you do that, it fossilizes and you lose some of the life, until that becomes the new establishment, which the new round of renewal will inevitably rebel against.”
Digging into the ramifications of free inquiry, personal inspiration and institutional freedom, Ryrie spends a great deal of time looking at the issue of slavery in the book. He asks how people of seemingly good intent could end up on opposite sides of questions regarding the enslavement of other humans.
“Slavery had always been accepted, often regretted, but it was there and the biblical case for it was very strong,” he said. “But then you have this moment in the 19th century, and the real work is done by American radicals, who reach the point of saying this isn’t a tolerable evil and we should try to regulate or abolish it. It’s inherently evil—it is a sin and always has been a sin; we just never saw it before. We spent 18 centuries being wrong.”
Once that is said, and a biblical interpretation of human dignity replaces the literal acceptance of slavery, Ryrie posits that many ethical disputes—including modern discussion of human sexuality—take place with this understanding as the great example of how accepted thought may be counter to biblical intent. “Nobody says now that slavery could have actually been OK,” he said.
While a widespread understanding of the birth of Protestantism and its expansion in theological and social contexts throughout the modern era is at the heart of Ryrie’s work, the book’s final section on the Global Age of Protestant expansion is most compelling, and likely forward-looking.
In this section Ryrie examines mission efforts in Korea, China, Africa and Latin America, focusing on how in each of these cases Protestant Christians have come to claim societal power, most often once the traces of colonial Christianity left and indigenous church leadership emerged.
Ryrie also looks at the influence of Pentecostalism, noting it is the fastest-growing form of Christianity worldwide and a subgenre of Protestantism that has found its way into almost every Christian expression. He predicts it may continue to grow and be the dominant expression of Christianity worldwide.
“You’re bringing spiritual life in to the private sphere, and this has been what’s helped to drive the Pentecostal explosion,” he said. “It also keeps Christianity, or these forms of Protestantism, out of the public eye. So you can have these huge religious movements as you do in Latin America and China especially, which are largely invisible.
“There may come a point at which that’s just not possible anymore, because of the sheer numbers.”
—–
Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World was released April 4, 2017, for worldwide distribution.