Generations: Age, Ancestry, and Memory in the English Reformations

The Protestant Reformation produced Western Christianity's greatest ideological rift in the 1,200 years between the Arian controversy and the French Revolution, leaving a permanent mark on Western Christendom and its cultural offshoots that even Arianism had failed to imprint. What survives today of European religion and its flourishing outgrowths worldwide is sharply divided between Catholic and Protestant. In the sixteenth century, England was a marginal player in this story, a second-rank power on the European scene and in more than one sense insular, but over a century and a half it emerged as one of the most successful Reformations, its Protestantism so vital and creative that a single state church failed to contain it. As this outcome became clear in the 1690s, a wider significance was emerging for the Atlantic archipelago: the regime in Westminster that had once governed only part of those islands not only brought political union to England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, but emerged as a seaborne world power that briefly extended farther than any previous global empire.As a result, the story of the English Reformation has much more than local significance. Walsham, with her usual originality and ability to pick out the important patterns from a vast array of evidence, makes here a major intervention into the historiography. Her subject is multifaceted and difficult to summarize better than in the subtitle of her book. What began as a revolution (though, in England, a revolution largely directed by the monarchy) settled down into a slowly unfolding process. The Church of England, with aspirations to monopolize English religion, found itself in the center of a religious spectrum, flanked by oppositional communities established on principle: on the one side obstinately surviving Roman Catholic communities, and on the other “Dissent”—multiple Protestantisms seeking purity of Reformation in a variety of contradictory forms. That pluriformity was bequeathed to the thirteen English colonies in North America, and beyond them into the British world empire, which only disintegrated in the twentieth century, shaping the contours of many new societies across the seas.Walsham's intricate construction of themes around this narrative highlights the way in which all the different players on the religious scene, from Catholic recusants right through to Quakers, dipped into the rhetorical dressing-up box, often grabbing for the same garment, to provide identities for themselves amid changing realities. Everyone wished to lay the best claim to what everyone assumed to be norms: the centrality of the family, the role of the patriarch, the dutifulness of children. Was Protestantism/Catholicism a religion of youthful enthusiasm or wise age? If one followed the stern doctrine of double predestination—to salvation or damnation (following the Catholic Augustine of Hippo or the Protestant John Calvin)—what did that say about beloved children in a devout family? Might they be predestined to salvation by heredity, just as they inherited their father's land? It was a real headache in those North American colonies founded on strict Protestant principles, where later generations seemed distressingly less inclined to sign up to the pioneering theological package that had brought the original settlers to those transatlantic shores.And then there were the problems posed by a Protestant insurgency that became the establishment. Did one celebrate, minimize, or even conceal discontinuities and ruptures?—a particular problem for the Church of England, some of whose members came to feel embarrassed by much that the Reformation achieved, especially its destructive aspects, and sought to present their church as a better representative of Catholicism than the pope's version. Yet Roman Catholics, now cast as rebels against godly society, might find themselves drawing on tropes of resistance that had first sustained Protestant heretics, when they sought to withstand the persecution unleashed on them by Elizabeth I and her successors.Early modern English society became ever more obsessed with genealogy and pedigrees, which for Protestants meant some hard thinking to do about the salvation of unavoidably Catholic pre-Reformation ancestors but also brought worries about present-day relatives who held different religious convictions. Destruction of Catholic buildings and objects such as medieval tombs eventually produced antiquarian nostalgia and regret even among some Puritans who were supposed to hate what those signified. Walsham walks us decorously through this clamor of rival clichés and human confusion seeking to present itself as coherence. She never raises her voice, leaving Reformation noise to babble out from her quotations and judiciously chosen illustrations. Amid the portraits, contemplate the aged faces of Mary Honywood, who at her death, aged 93, looked out on 367 living descendants, or her contemporary “Old Parr,” who claimed to be 152 when he died in 1635. They had seen it all tumble past their eyes, but now Walsham can sort it all out for them.