‘History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.’ Benjamin Guyer's first book is a stimulating attempt to put Herbert Butterfield's wise maxim (quoted pp. 10, 183) into practice. Inspired by Quentin Skinner's linguistic approach to the history of ideas, it is a study of ‘the semantics of Reformation’ between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It charts the process by which ‘the English Reformation’ emerged as ‘an inescapably Anglican historiographical category’ (p. 183) and as ‘one of the most persuasive and skilfully crafted of all early modern religious polemics’ (p. 11). Forged in the 1640s, this apologetic narrative steadily settled into a rhetorical habit and eventually became an ‘historical certainty’.
Guyer develops this provocative argument over five chapters, which examine three discourses of reformation: reformation by church council, reformation by revolt and reformation as a past historical event. Chapter i revolves around the excellent point that reformatio was a distinctive part of the lexicon of the church councils of Constance, Basel, Lateran V and Trent. Recognising this apocalyptically-inflected objective to reform the institution ‘in head and members’ is vital if we are to recover the meaning of ‘reformation’ in this period. Chapters ii and iii then consider the rhetorics of ‘reformation’ between 1553 and 1625, showing how the term became closely linked with violent resistance and revolt in the context of the tumultuous religious revolution in Scotland, which John Knox celebrated in his famous history of the event. Deployed in tandem with the adjective ‘pretended’ by Richard Bancroft and John Cosin to castigate Presybterianism in the 1590s, it accordingly became part of a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ (p. 82). Although Richard Hooker can be found speaking retrospectively of the ‘moderate’ kind of Reformation that had occurred in England, a coherent positive paradigm of ‘reformation’ did not crystallise until the mid-seventeenth century. This critical shift is examined in chapter iv, which is perhaps the most persuasive part of the book. Here Guyer shows how apologists for the Church of England developed the phrase and concept of ‘the’ or ‘our English Reformation’ to defend their ecclesiastical vision of orderly monarchical reformation against a rival Presbyterian version of reformation which, against the backdrop of the civil wars, was once again synonymous with rebellion and bloodshed. Finally, chapter v traces how the notion of the English Reformation as ‘a diachronically discreet [sic] event’ (p. 124) evolved after the Restoration, culminating in Gilbert Burnet's celebrated history published in three volumes in 1679–1715. Increasingly, Henry's reign was excised from standard accounts, which focused on the transformations wrought under Edward vi and cemented by Elizabeth i. What began as a piece of apologetic, Guyer suggests, became accepted as an ‘accurate historical depiction’ of past events (p. 152).
This is an ambitious book in several respects. It is admirably broad in chronological scope; it brings the stories of England and Scotland into fruitful dialogue; and it is methodologically self-conscious and reflexive. It asks important questions about the roots of historiographical paradigms that have enduring influence, but are too often taken for granted. Guyer is right to divert our gaze towards the historically contingent and political processes by which these came into being and to highlight the lasting imprint they have left on modern scholarship. However, not all the elements of the story Guyer tells are convincing. He may be a little too keen to join the dots between conciliar reformation, reformation as revolt and reformation as historiography and to develop a narrative that mirrors the curve in the n-gram he reproduces on p. 7. Some readers may also worry that in his eagerness to dismantle misleading ‘Luthercentric’ narratives of the European Reformation he overstates the extent to which Luther was ‘a figure of minor consequence’ in early modern England. Others will resist his use of the label ‘Anglicanism’ to describe the apologetic paradigm that is at the centre of his analysis as an unhelpful anachronism. His willingness to adopt this contested term sits in ironic tension with his insistence that historians should ask themselves ‘whether scholarship is well served by maintaining a synthetic historical description … whose value derives from the normative commitments of a faith community (Anglican Christianity)’ (p. 8). In this regard, Guyer does not heed his own contention that it is preferable to use ‘organic’ or ‘synchronous descriptors’ which were current at the time. Is it really necessary to abandon ‘value-laden’ concepts whose meaning has changed in subsequent centuries or, with due caveats, can they remain heuristically useful? Should we exclude particular narratives such as those derived from John Foxe's Actes and monuments on the grounds that incorporating them ‘wholly concedes historical understanding to the confessional projects of various sixteenth-century protagonists’ (p. 184)? Can we ever escape the long shadow that ‘pietist mythologies’ (p. 194) cast? Here, Guyer seems to tie himself slightly in knots. Sometimes his radical nominalism feels constraining. There is a risk inherent in this approach: the risk of overlooking the reality of the immense ruptures through which English men, women and children lived in the mid-sixteenth century. They knew something had happened that fundamentally changed their world. It would be a mistake to assume that the English Reformation did not exist until it was named. This is not ‘confirmation bias’ (p. 72); it simply reflects the dictum that the past cannot be disentangled from the present. As Guyer himself observes, we are ‘embedded inquirers, studying a past “always already” framed and re-framed by the interpretative work of earlier generations’ (p. 183).
The comments and queries above are a measure of how much Benjamin Guyer's book succeeds in making its readers think. While some of its features and underlying assumptions may be disputed, this is a thought-provoking first book which will reignite conversations about the relationship between language and history.
