Renaissance Forum: Volume 2, Number 2, Autumn 1997: J. A. Sharpe

David Cressy. 1997. Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. xvi + 641 pp. ISBN 0-19-820168-0. Ł25.00.

David Cressy will be familiar to most readers of Renaissance Forum as one of the leading current exponents of early modern English social history, author of a number of works addressing topics as diverse as literacy and the development of a Protestant ritual calendar. His latest book is, at least in terms of its size, his most ambitious work to date, a massive and well-documented overview of the experience of, and attitudes towards, various aspects of the life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England. The reader is led through the logical sequence of these aspects: birth, taking in such matters as what Cressy describes as 'childbed mysteries', the management of childbirth, childbed attendants, and the interaction of the mother and the newborn child; baptism, again seen from a variety of angles; churching, a subject which has long demanded a good, general discussion; courtship; marriage; and death. Each of these stages in the rites of passage is discussed at length, and the reader is left fully aware both of our capacity to reconstruct these events, and of the complexities which remain in interpreting them.
This is a very rich book, based on a wide range of sources. Inevitably, a number of familiar names appear among the authors of the diaries and autobiographies which Cressy draws upon: Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, of course, along with Henry Newcome, Ralph Josselin, Oliver Heywood, and Jane Sharp . But some less well-known diarists appear, as do numerous quotations from what is still an underworked source, the church court records of the period. As Cressy acknowledges, he has been fortunate in being awarded grants and other forms of support on both sides of the Atlantic, and one of the profitable uses he has made of the opportunities thus provided has been to work through the ecclesiastical court archives of a number of counties, notably Durham, Essex, Leicestershire, Oxfordshire and Yorkshire, along with London. The combination of autobiographical sources, diaries, some literary sources such as plays and ballads, and manuscript court records with a wide range of contemporary printed materials (notably conduct books and religious works) is a totally appropriate one for a work of this type, and Cressy is able to draw on a formidable range of sources to great effect. The way in which this material is deployed in a fashion which manages to convey the complexities of the subjects in hand while both keeping the thread of arguments and maintaining the reader's interest is clearly one of the great achievements of this book.
This is, then, a large, well-documented, well written, and humane book which deals with its subject matter -- which has formed the basis for some extremely bad history -- in a sane and balanced fashion. Even so, the present reviewer felt that there were some problems with the work, and it is to these, regretfully, that we must now turn.
The first is constituted by what might be described as the down side of the documentary richness. Cressy dedicates the book to Keith Thomas, and in many respects follows the methodology which Thomas and, before him, Christopher Hill, has employed: the historian reads a lot of sources, and then builds general arguments by quoting from a wide range of them. On one level this approach is, of course, inevitable, and it is one which the present reviewer, like most historians writing about social history topics from this period, has followed. There are, however, two problems with this approach. The first is a lack of context. Anybody who has worked seriously on church court records, for example, will come away wondering what the local or personal circumstances were behind the disputes which surfaced in the records, or the words that were reported there. Once in a while, as some of Cressy's better documented cases make clear, we are able to gain insight into some of these contexts, and these often provoke a necessary nervousness about citing church court records at their face value. Moreover, this loss of context can be accentuated by what might be termed chronological or geographical slippage: an argument about, say, attitudes to courtship might be supported by a quotation from a husbandman's daughter drawn from Elizabethan church court records from County Durham juxtaposed with a quotation from a well-heeled Londoner's diary dating from the reign of William III. One is sometimes left at something of a loss about what exactly to make of this.
This type of problem is inevitable, given that Cressy is setting out to write a wide ranging and broadly based general study rather than a monograph based on the experience of one or two counties. What is rather less inevitable, however, is the lack of any sustained discussion of what the author means by 'ritual'. The term is used in the book's subtitle, and it occurs frequently in the text, but there is little by way of any deep explanation of what the author means by it, and 'ritual' (as both noun and adjective) is used as if its meaning is self-evident and unproblematic. There are points at which something like a discussion of this issue does get off the ground (for example, and very appositely, in the discussion of churching), while the importance and effects of ritual are cogently restated in the conclusions: but a clear, and developed statement of what the author means by ritual would have been welcome. Throughout, Cressy seems to be boxed in by a quadrilateral bounded by 'traditional', Catholic, mainstream Protestant and advanced Protestant perspectives on the various stages of the life-cycle he discusses. Perhaps this is inevitable, but again, a willingness to sit back and clarify this framework for interpreting both the rituals attending the various phenomena he discusses might have been useful.
A third problem lies in the problem of change in attitudes to these various stages of the life-cycle over the period in question. Obviously, and as Cressy is fully aware, this issue can be traced in the interplay of the four perspectives mentioned above, and one would expect (and whatever the qualifications, broadly speaking one finds) a slow drift away from popular and Catholic practices, a marginalising of radical Protestant ones, and a growing, albeit incomplete, acceptance of the practices laid down by the Church of England (although, as Cressy makes clear, even some of these were uncertain and contested). A main theme of the book is, as Cressy tells us, how local disputes about the life cycle reflected early modern England's problems with absorbing Protestantism. What is less obvious is how far decisive changes, a move towards 'modernity' in family relations and attitudes to childbirth, churching, courtship, marriage, death and the rest set in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of the sources which Cressy cites from this later stage seem to suggest that the old quadrilateral of religious and cultural influences formerly at play were being replaced by, or were at least having to interact with, the attitudes and values of 'polite' or 'genteel' society. It has been claimed that the rise of such values (we welcome again an old friend, the 'civilising process') prompted decisive changes from the late Stuart period onwards, and it is a pity that Cressy does not confront this problem directly and give us his opinions on it: the short allusion he makes to such matters in the introduction to the book could have been extended.
Despite these reservations, this remains an important and valuable work which deserves to be widely read as a reminder of the sheer diversity of practices and beliefs in early modern England, and the trove of documentary treasures which still await the assiduous historian.

J. A. SHARPE
UNIVERSITY OF YORK