Mark Stoyle. A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549 New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. Pp. 384. $60.00 (cloth).

Historians, despite our best efforts, often fall victim to teleology.Knowing the outcome of an event leads to the temptation to see not just the roots of its success or its failure long before any of the participants would, but also a kind of conclusive inevitability.It is a rare book that can take a familiar incident and make it seem both urgent and uncertain in outcome.Mark Stoyle's intricately researched A Murderous Midsummer accomplishes this to brilliant effect.Here, the event is the Western Uprising of 1549, otherwise known as the Prayer Book Rebellion or, to its contemporaries, the "commocion time" of the restless summer when it seemed as if all of southern England was on the verge of mutiny.Though historians have often studied these events, A Murderous Midsummer manages to hold the reader in suspense, moving with astonishing detail through the week-by-week, even day-by-day, story of this rebellion.While explained clearly enough for the nonspecialist reader, its conclusions make important interventions in our understanding of the mid-Tudor polity.Throughout the book, the overwhelming impression is just how close English history came to taking a very different tack.A Murderous Midsummer begins with an overview of the South West, and the context provided sets up the events to come in an evocative, pacey fashion.The book really hits its stride, however, in part two, which in four chapters takes us through the events of June, July, and August 1549, when thousands of rebels (a contentious term, Stoyle argues) began to move against the centralizing, reformist policies of Edward VI's government, as led by the duke of Somerset.Stoyle argues that the resistance in the West was based on twinned anger at English cultural imperialism and evangelical Protestant reformation.He claims this uprising was thus unlike the uprisings in the East, most notably Kett's Rebellion, insofar as it was not "primarily a social conflict" (294).The interconnection of these disruptions waits until Part III, where Stoyle moves to the gruesome fates of the failed rebellions' leaders.Here, Kett and the Western captains find themselves put on trial at the same time in a deliberate attempt by the earl of Warwick's faction to solidify power: as he puts it, "to further the ruling junta's political ends" (276).The unfolding of the Western Uprising, Stoyle argues, must been seen on its own terms.Stoyle justifies this claim with a painstaking level of research and a bone-deep familiarity with both scene and players.In A Murderous Midsummer we see the unspooling of a rebellion in real time, with moments of contingency; of personality (cautious Lord John Russell, the fiery Carews, and-perhaps this reader's favorite-fearless Frances Duffield, who slaps the mayor of Exeter across the face when hearing of her father's imprisonment); of panic.