In Faith and Fraternity London Livery Companies and the Reformation, 1510–1603, Laura Branch takes a challenging plunge against the deep currents of two long-standing scholarly perspectives: one that connects English merchants with early Protestant sympathies, and the other that connects mercantile institutions with secular tendencies. Branch is prompted by the belief that too much has been made of the evangelical stance of English merchants and that too much has also been made of the secularization of civic culture during the Reformation era. Three key questions articulate these concerns to form the heart of the book. Were merchants and mercantile communities really more inclined to Protestantism? Is the Reformation best understood as a process of secularization? How did merchant communities manage to address religious change?
To investigate these questions, Branch selects the London liveries and their members as appropriate barometers of religious affinity. Distressed that, as she sees it, studies of the religious views of merchants and merchant institutions have too often been based on the study of single companies, Branch selects not one but two, the Drapers and the Grocers, as test cases. She used the relatively full and frequently combed archival records of both companies to draw a data base of 977 members of one or the other company, and she additionally employed the evidence of wills and other sources to ascertain the individual religious persuasions of their members.
The thrust of Branch's investigation is to show that, while liveries, and therefore merchants in general, may have opted steadily for Protestantism, their support for evangelical extremes was modest, and their institutions cannot be said to have undergone the degree of secularization that she sees many scholars (prominently including—full disclosure!—this reviewer) as having proposed. She notes repeatedly that the liveries strove throughout these times for the virtues of brotherly love, peace, harmony, and similarly compassionate ideals. These she sees as inherently Christian values, and therefore as religious rather than secular in nature.
Branch subsequently examines merchants as the governing element in London's hospitals and parishes, their attitudes towards money and trade, and their religious identities and social networks. Overall, she charts their religious affinities, and the effect of those affinities upon the various aspects of their lives and ambient London society. Taken together, she demonstrates how people did not always act on the basis of their religious persuasions as one might assume, and that both religious conservatives and Protestants within the merchant community were inspired by common values.
Branch must be credited with an admirably close explication of the working of the institutions she describes and the rich biographical details of the merchants she discusses. Yet there remain several problems with her overall perspective. First (as it has unfortunately become appropriate to note), the “Christian values” that she emphasizes throughout are not, as she repeatedly implies, exclusively Christian, but rather remain common to all the Abrahamic religions. To label them repeatedly as specifically Christian in this day and age smacks (perhaps unintentionally but nevertheless unhelpfully) of partisan political perspectives that are out of place in such a study. Second, her fervent disagreement with others is not always backed by a refutation of their evidence. Third, she fails to see that those “Christian” values had, by the sixteenth century, been so thoroughly integrated into the normative behavioral expectations of civic society in general as to have become virtually secular as well. Few if any of those with whom she takes issue have sought explicitly to deny their religious foundations. Sometimes she reaches quite far in the effort to establish the continuity of what she sees as Christian traditions. She accepts, for example, that “new rituals were being forged” but continues by adding that “even if they appeared entirely secular in nature they often reflected the liturgical calendar or were funded by bequests from their deceased brethren” (68). But the perpetuation of a “liturgical” calendar is a dull blade upon which to skewer the notion of secularization, and even atheists can make bequests.
Finally, Branch has a consistent tendency to cherry-pick examples of actions and attitudes that support her thesis, sometimes exaggerating them in the process, while ignoring those that don't. This suggests a highly polemical reading of secondary sources: one that is somewhat less than open-minded and lacking in subtlety and thoroughness. Very few if any of those with whom she takes issue, for example, have argued for the “simple removal of religion from corporate life” (10) of which she accuses them. Most (including this reviewer) have agreed with her in recognizing degrees of adaptability and change in the transformation of older celebratory forms to new ends. Such transformation and adaptation has been a major theme in English Reformation and cultural studies for some time. Finally, for a work that is so highly polemical and historiographic, the publishers have done her no favor by omitting from the index all the names of those scholars with whom the text takes specific issue.
In sum, a more dispassionate reading of Branch's secondary sources would turn up much more common ground than she allows, as well as a good deal that has long been accepted in modern scholarship. Save for the distinct and persistent implication that “Christian” ideals are somehow wholly distinct from what were considered secular and civic virtues, it is neither particularly controversial nor novel to conclude, for example, that “the livery companies were fundamentally secular organizations that were governed in line with civic concerns, but that drew upon shared Christian ideals. … The rhetoric and binding power of Christian principles remained of significance in governing the companies” (42–43).
Along with its rich discussions of individuals and institutions, the greater value of Branch's study may well lie in the ways it motivates one to clarify concepts, “Christian” and “secularization” especially, and perhaps to make finer distinctions in their use.
