Norman L. Jones. The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation.

Sacks, David Harris

New York and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. xvi + 254 pp. + 7 b/w pls. index, illus. map. bibl. $64.95 (cl), $29.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-631-21042-3 (cl), 0-631-21043-1 (pbk).

For most English men and women, the advent of the Reformation was something akin to a force of nature. It reconfigured the political and institutional landscape, roiled the intellectual and cultural atmosphere, and altered the social ecology, leaving the vast majority of individuals and families to come to terms as best they could with confessional conflict and religious change as they happened.

Norman Jones has set out to study the English Reformation primarily from the perspective of those ordinary subjects and churchgoers affected by it. The subtitle of his imaginatively conceived and engaging new book gives a good sense of its approach. It not about religious developments and movements themselves, but about the "adaptations," mainly "cultural," generated by the Reformation process as it unfolded. Jones accepts--or does not take it as his task to engage with--the claim that in the early sixteenth-century English society "was contentedly, habitually Catholic," as Eamon Duffy and others have argued, but he also recognizes, along with Patrick Collinson, that "a Protestant culture" was "in operation in the Elizabethan age." The main question Jones asks, therefore, is "how a nation of habitual Catholics turned into Protestants" (2). His answer focuses critically on the experiences of the different generations as events reshaped church and state during the sixteenth century.

The new religious environment, Jones argues, introduced the "possibility of choice" into lives of the post-Reformation English, and "the awareness of alternatives ... meant nothing was static anymore" (5). Although English religious culture was not notably static in the Middle Ages, despite arguments to the contrary, it is true that the choices open to those reared in Elizabeth I's reign were dramatically different from those available to men and women who had already reached adulthood before Henry VIII's break from Rome or who directly experienced the confessional and institutional turmoil of the middle decades of the sixteenth century.

Although attention is paid to topics in social history, especially to the ways in which religious change affected families and communities, the principal focus here is on the individual conscience. Much of the discussion traces the religious experiences and trajectories of belief of particular persons. This approach necessarily centers on the life experiences of members of England's elite, since it is only among the upper echelons of English society- figures of the rank of Thomas More and John Donne or of Sir William Wentworth and Henry Hastings, third Earl of Huntington--that sufficient evidence survives on which to base detailed narratives. The same can be said about the university colleges, the Inns of Court, and other established communities that Jones closely and effectively examines. They are peopled by the well-to-do and the educated. Whether similar struggles with religious choice existed among villagers or urban artisans is not considered here.

Jones argues that in providing religious choices, and thereby dividing the world into divergent viewpoints and opposing confessional camps, the Reformation also created dilemmas for the peaceable conduct of everyday life, particularly among the propertied and the privileged. If communities and corporate bodies were to continue to function, and if families were to maintain their collective interests and their properties, it became necessary to recognize not only that "people had conflicting religious values," but that "those values had to be appreciated and avoided" (3). The effect was to encourage "pragmatic conformity that convinced the ego and kept the purse full" (34). In consequence, the test of one's convictions in this-worldly as well as other-worldly matters shifted inwards and conscience rather than the law and confessional or communal pressure from kinfolk and neighbors gained preeminence in directing everyday behavior and political commitment.

Earlier in his career, Jones successfully maintained that the problem of usury was resolved in the early modern era by allowing intentions to be the test of what constituted illegitimate interest charges, and letting the judge of intentions be the individual conscience. Here Jones shows that similar arguments removed many important ethical as well as religious issues into the inner realm of conscience where only God could know one's true thoughts and motives. By the end of the sixteenth century, Jones concludes, "a post-Reformation culture was emerging" whose "core was the individual conscience, the place where God's plan for the individual could be read. In a separate cell was political loyalty, a thing that could be practiced by people with conflicting consciences ... Enclosing them all was the hazy film of duty and obedience ..." In this mix, Jones urges, lay an unresolved problem. If there was a conflict, the demands of conscience necessarily "trumped" obedience to this-worldly magistracy and "for every order by a magistrate there was a possible objection in conscience." The Elizabethan Settlement succeeded in finessing the dilemma by permitting "varying local standards of conformity," but "[w]hen a more centralized monarchy" under the early Smarts "tried to impose genuine uniformity on the nation, consciences rose up and smote it" (201-02).

Jones' concluding remarks capture the profound significance for later English and British history of the Protestant culture that was born under the flexible religious policies that prevailed in Elizabeth I's long reign. In its focus on conscience this culture contained within itself both the source of future conflict and a model for its resolution. It would be most welcome now to extend these deep and important insights about the culture of England's elite into the lives of the lower and middling sort.

DAVID HARRIS SACKS

Reed College