John Guy. Ed. 1997. The Tudor Monarchy. London: Arnold. xi + 391 pp. ISBN 0-340-65219-5. £14.99.
Peter Marshall. Ed. 1997. The Impact of the English Reformation 1500-1640. London: Arnold. xi + 344 pp. £14.99.

  1. England has had a reformation since the sixteenth century, even in that distinctively English field of political history. Now it finally has a Renaissance. Or rather, it has become part of the Renaissance. This is both gain and loss, gain through having England join Europe, loss because European historians have of late nearly ceased to speak of the Renaissance, dropping a diffusionist model in favour of a more complicated one of multiple origins. That being so, to continue to speak of the Renaissance and its impact on England is to treat 'Renaissance' as an extrinsic category beyond historical process. This would in large measure waste both the comparative power of 'Renaissance' and, worse, of beginning to think of history in terms of process, rather than predominantly of periods, as something made by people rather than a set of abstractions. The job for the future will be to treat both 'Renaissance' and England in terms of process. At the moment, it is time to take the first step and to set the problem of Renaissance and Reformation (or better renaissance and reformation) in England.

  2. This bit of punditry is inspired by these two readers, part of a new series for A-level and undergraduate students intended to familarise them with the state of historiographical debates. Both go beyond that limited aim and lay out an agenda for the future, above all by clearing away the dross of the past. This is, of course, a common rhetorical turn, and English historiography has often been characterised by less than charitable discussions. But it is a little difficult to see how that attitude serves students, who more often than not come to their studies with near contempt for the past, and who deserve to be introduced to history not as a matter of scoring points but as a cooperative enterprise which has been in being for a very long time. No one would dispute that some history is better than others, but it is all history, all done to more or less the same standards. Although these volumes allow a little more than used to be the case that students of literature or the arts might have something useful to say to historians, the rule of thumb of the best literary critics that interpretative tradition can be learned from seems foreign to many of these essays and their editors. Pedagogical questions might also be raised about the selection of articles, both in terms of breadth and of the importance of some of the pieces, especially marked in the case of those by authors who have produced more telling books on the same subject.

  3. Agenda-making claims and the often vituperative criticism of older historians, especially Sir Geoffrey Elton, serve one useful purpose: they highlight the degree to which history is a branch of rhetoric, its object in part persuasion. Recognition of this point is especially urgent in the field of Tudor studies. The problem is simple and obvious. In order to produce new results, one must ask new questions. The difficulty is that the rage for novelty has led to the asking of many questions which can never be answered. That being the case, the other foundation even of rhetorical history, its allegiance to truth-telling, comes under strain, and pushes the discipline in the direction of rhetoric in the pejorative sense (read: hot air). Instead of coming ever closer to the allegedly Rankean standard of 'as it really was' (what he really meant was 'as it essentially was'), we wind up ever more deeply mired in gamespersonship. However unintentionally, we model our careers, not our values.

  4. This is poignantly brought home by one of the dominant themes of both volumes, the degree to which sixteenth-century England was a rhetorical culture, grounded in the civic virtues of classical humanism. It was, in Patrick Collinson's now familiar phrase, a monarchical republic, where some lucky men, at least, might aspire to make themselves citizens through the exercise of their duties. Major consequences followed, above all the corollary that citizens might be obligated to restrain an erring monarch when he or she tried harder than usual to make sure that subjects stayed in their place. Every sixth-former used to know that there were only one or two occasions on which subjects did that violently, which must mean that the rest of the time options for the mediation of conflict existed. Indeed they did, as the 'New Political History' (Guy's coinage) has helped to discover. Now, instead of resistance to monarchical pretension, whether in the old 'Whig' form of the 'seizing of the initiative' or the newer one of 'resistance theory', we have processes of accommodation through which the crown negotiated with its subjects and servants and they with theirs. King-in-parliament seems to have been replaced by king-in-political-nation.

  5. This is a development well brought out in both volumes as some rather nebulous ideas of process replace older reifications, like constitution. Even more important, several of the essays, especially both of Collinson's, take a dialectial approach. It seems we have stood Marx (the vulgar one) on his head and got back to Hegel. As a consequence, we have contingency and movement instead of crystalline objects, and – most important on the score of method – the search for the conventions, including linguistic, which informed political practice. This is exactly the right way to go, even if except for David Harris Sack's excellent piece, one might be pardoned for thinking that not much progress had been made on that score. We also find the realm of the political very broadly stretched, although not to the point quite where the personal is political. Of course, David Starkey's path-breaking work on the Privy Chamber is here, along with his most important essay, 'Representation through Intimacy'. We even find historians talking of tending to emotional needs. What we do not find in either volume is much about women, other than Elizabeth, an oversight which might be described as shocking. Part of the reason, no doubt, is a pretty narrow perspective on what counts as important scholarship, since much of the work on women of relevance to these volumes has been done by North Americans. Guy is much better here than is Marshall, for whom 'Americani non sunt legendi' still seems to be an article of faith.

  6. Although also relying on process but oddly enough not much on language, Marshall's volume most distinctively suggests the utility of a longer than usual period, stretching the English reformation down to the Civil War, anyway, and mirabile dictu, including its various 'Catholic' phases (one marvels at a solitary reference to David Loades). Both are nothing new in historiography of the continental reformation, which Marshall also salutarily suggests might be more regularly consulted in order to throw light across the channel, as do some of the essays in Guy's volume, especially his own new one on 'Tudor monarchy and its critiques'. Before this can prove a helpful move, we need to do more than observe that periodization is an inherently difficult problem, as do several essayists, especially Christopher Haigh. Talk of processes sets up a tension with the act of drawing lines around periods, and much more thought needs to be given to the implications. We may continue piously to sneer at Foucault, but he put that caveat exceptionally well.

  7. The scale of future research to which many of these essays point, by design in Marshall's view, rather more accidentally in Guy's, is increasingly local and increasingly sharply focused. The now strongly-running move in the opposite direction to expand the focus from England to Britain is largely missed in both volumes, except for Steven Ellis's piece on the borders (Guy). Perhaps because it concerns power rather than saving souls, Guy's collection does not explicitly open the question lurking behind the turn to the local of why what happened to most people matters to historians. In other words, it shows less of the impact of social history than does Marshall's, where the axiom that what happened to ordinary people is vitally important is accepted without argument. Collinson once again causes trouble for even The New Political History by his stubbornly subversive emphasis on the elites of some very small places, if not exactly on ordinary people. A problem lurks here. As the Tudor mental universe becomes increasingly important, it will become increasingly difficult to get at the presuppositions of the vast majority of Tudor-age humans, like those who never saw the monarch or his or her 'propaganda' as Sydney Anglo forcefully reminds us in the first essay in Guy's volume. Watt's piece above all ought to demonstrate that the evidence may very well not be there. This ought not necessarily be a disheartening conclusion, but it does mean once again that historians will have to think very hard about the epistemological principles underpinning their practice. If the issue is not faced squarely, the plague of perhapses which has descended on Tudor history approximately since the loss of Elton's corrosive scepticism will only become worse.

  8. Most historians, given the discipline's ancient insistence on telling the truth, or some of it, anyway, still adhere to the correspondence theory of truth. If Tudor history is to become more interested in questions of culture, as both volumes suggest to almost the degree they carefully avoid using the word, then we will have to get used to truth as a construction in the mind of the historian as much as a thing left lying around an archive, waiting to be re-presented. The honors here once more go to Professor Collinson, whose 'From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia' puts the problem of representation squarely at the heart of the English reformation. Margaret Aston's pathbreaking work on images points in ever more interesting ways in the same direction. Both leads demand substantial awareness of the subjectivity inherent in the reconstructing and writing of history at the same time as they unavoidably stress the historian-observer's participation in the past.

  9. Although Quentin Skinner's name is given something like the credit it deserves in fostering this development, one of his inspirations, R. G. Collingwood's Idea of History, might well be put in place of the manuals of the past generation, too many of which undermined historians' practice through their unreconstructed emphasis on the factuality of the past. Turning back to Collingwood and his notion of rethinking the past may have one elitist consequence, it is true. In order to rethink an idea, it must have been thought in the first place, in a form suitable for reanimation. This suggested move may lead once again to the giants who have never exactly been neglected, but who have been worse served in the last little while than the pygmies. And without prejudging the issue of which he was, how can neither of these volumes have nothing to say about Richard Hooker in the wake of the near completion of the Folger Library edition of his works, including a massive volume of commentary?

  10. Let me close with what may at first appear to be a nihilist question. Are the stresses and strains of the problems and the evidence to which these essays give witness a sign of the cracking of a paradigm? Is Tudor history about to fall apart? It is old news that this is happening in purely demographic terms in North America where Tudor history is a distinctly threatened species. More serious than crude loss of numbers (and no doubt contributing to that problem) is the attitude to our sub-discipline here. About the best we can hope for is a judgment like that betrayed by a leading intellectual historian who once put it to me, quite innocently of any patronizing I am sure, that 'Tudor history is a legitimate but not very interesting field'. The first nail secures the coffin lid much the more tightly, alas just in inverse proportion as broader and (to us, anyway) more interesting topics come under study. It will remain hard to improve the status of Tudor history among historians in other fields – and consequently the demand for it – as long as we struggle with the epistemological and methodological crisis testified to by these volumes in which 'themes' can be termed as 'part of a new methodology'. Tudor history has never been a cutting-edge field in terms of method or philosophy of history, and its central methodological advance of the last generation, the necessity of working from original documents, can be almost as dangerous as making it up in the way that generations' predecessors naturally must have done, working without benefit of those ipsissima verba. On one level this article of faith reflects the truism that any argument is only as good as the evidence supporting it. On another it overlooks the crucial point that any evidence is only as good as the argument which makes sense of it. Only part of the truth is in the archives.
Thomas F. Mayer
Augustana College
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