How the English Reformation was Named: The Politics of History, c.1400–1700, by Benjamin M. Guyer

Benjamin Guyer is asking a simple question: ‘How did the English Reformation get its name?’ (p. 1). Arguing that ‘Reformation’ as a concept was a product of European conciliar discourse that devolved into local identities, he propounds the case that the ‘English Reformation’ did not exist until the late seventeenth century. It is a ‘synthetic descriptor’, emerging in the Restoration as a counter-narrative to the apocalypticism of the Scottish Reformation. As such, the concept is stained by an Anglican historiographical tradition that obfuscates what really happened.

Guyer looks at descriptions of England’s religious changes, as distinct from those in Scotland and all the confessional identities on the Continent. An exercise in the history of ideas, the book is not concerned with historical detail. It is tracing the invention of a particular understanding of religious change in Tudor dominions. This can be frustrating, since many of the usual markers of English religious identity, such as Jewel’s Apology for the Church of England, are seldom mentioned. Guyer is not interested in what Jewel thought these markers were doing, but in what later apologists imposed on Jewel. (The very thin index compounds this confusion. Many people, including Jewel, are in the text but not in the index.)

He makes his case in three parts. First, he asserts the importance of Conciliarism in defining what ‘reformation’ meant. The ‘conciliar imaginaries’ denoted ideas of reform from the Council of Constance to the Council of Trent. These imaginaries were determining the ‘body of Christ’ (the Church community), but they failed to reform the Magisterium (the idea of ecclesiological authority). In England, conciliar language was used by Henry VIII, but the ecumenism of the councils was alien to the royal supremacy, explaining why Henry and Edward VI failed ‘to articulate a comprehensive vision for domestic ecclesial reformation’ (p. 29). Concentrating on doctrinal statements and liturgies, Guyer does not address how Tudor reformers articulated what a reformation of the people might look like, on either side of the papal divide.

Guyer asserts that ‘the Elizabethan regime failed to develop its own discourse of reformation’ (p. 48). Always on the defensive, it was fending off Knox’s idea of reformation by arms and the resistance theory of the ‘Marian exiles’. Set against these was the historiography of Catholic resistance, as embodied in the works of Edward Rishton and Nicholas Sanders, who spent their ammunition on the schismatic royal supremacy, backed by Tridentine conciliar doctrine.

Their Elizabethan Protestant opponents had no shared historical narrative and did not associate their ‘schism’ with reformation. Instead, they were interested in the meaning of the word ‘catholic’ as it applied to them. They were restoring, not reforming, and they did not call what they were doing a ‘Reformation’. Thus, ‘reformation’, he says, came to be associated with the Council of Trent, while the providentially restored Church of Queen Elizabeth debated church governance.

The arrival of James VI/I in England introduced a new twist in the historical understanding of English religious change. As James and then Charles I sought to unite their kingdoms religiously, their scholars fought over whether the Church of England was a Reformed Church like that of Scotland. This argument was well-rooted in Elizabethan debates, but the Articles of Perth provoked deep soul searching about where adiaphora lay. Could, for instance, ‘sacrilegious’ and idolatrous kneeling be a part of a truly reformed religion?

These disputes, visible in the histories of John Hayward, Francis Godwin and William Camden, says Guyer, flowered during the Civil Wars and Interregnum. The historians of that time, such as Thomas Fuller, created a religious history that celebrated Edwardian reforms—the ‘English Reformation’—and associated the Scots and Puritans with the enemies of that Reformation. Pro-Anglican historians, like George Carleton and Peter Heylyn, could talk of the ‘first Reformation’ in England, associating it with Edward VI and Elizabeth, when the English church was realigned with the primitive True Church. The Elizabethan Settlement permanently fixed it in place, and the Caroline ecclesiologists upheld it.

The Restoration provoked a new English church history. Now, Anglican historians began asserting that the English church was made of ‘reformed Catholics, true Protestants’. Historians including Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Gilbert Burnet sought to prove that the English church was the purified Catholic Church. This required that Henry VIII be recognised as a Protestant hero, something not common before.

Guyer shows that the word ‘reformation’ changed meaning from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and that the ‘English Reformation’ is a late seventeenth-century invention. He proposes that this ‘pietist mythology’ be uprooted and replaced with ‘studies of how the vocabulary of reformation was used and disseminated’ (p. 184). This would end an old misconception, ‘for what is any academic history but well-sourced mythology’? (p. 187). He does not address how this Anglican mythology relates to the historical practices of different eras. The enthusiasm for publishing historical documents that began in the 1550s had become an industry by the 1650s, and Burnet was writing ‘well-sourced’ history, even if his questions and conclusions were shaped by the politics of his time. It is a shame Guyer did not include John Strype, a younger contemporary of Burnet, whose The Annals of the Reformation … of Religion (1725) included fat appendices documenting the political history of the English Reformation. Without him, Guyer’s book does not reach the point when the ‘English Reformation’ gelled.

As a history of the idea of ‘The Reformation’ in England, Guyer’s arguments are interesting, but not nuanced. His decision to avoid political events (except on a very broad scale) means he is cherry-picking texts, using a few printed authors to follow a concept. He does not show how church historians were prompted by political questions into doing document-based research on the history of the church, responding to the alternative mythologies (and documents) of Catholics and Puritans. Nor is there recognition of how this ‘pietist mythology’ has been rigorously shaken by modern scholarship.