Meta-Meta-Meta History: Current Views of Victorian Views of English History

History Today features this review of a book looking at how the Victorians looked at English history; thus it's a meta-meta-meta history. Our view of how the Victorians interpreted English history:

Victorians saw themselves as moral and progressive. They frequently referred to the brutal history that had preceded them. The more benighted the past, the better they seemed. Thus, as Andrew Sanders explains, a great deal of British history before the 18th century was popularly characterised as being ‘little more than a series of judicial executions and violent or untimely deaths. The sad stories of the death of kings were retold with relish and the sword, the axe, the assassin’s dagger and the poisoned cup became a stock in trade of history painting’.

The beautifully titled painting Queen Elizabeth Discovers She is No Longer Young by Augustus Egg is typical of the way Elizabeth, with her capricious ways and refusal to do the womanly thing, to marry and procreate, was contrasted with the Victorians’ own dear queen. The 1848 picture shows a haggard, hook-nosed Elizabeth grumpily averting her eyes from a looking-glass in front of a group of fawning courtiers.

In contrast Queen Victoria holds Prince Arthur in her plump arms to receive a jewelled box from the elderly hero, the Duke of Wellington, while that symbol of magnificence, the Crystal Palace, glimmers in the distance in Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s painting The First of May 1851.

Sanders, a Dickens expert and emeritus professor of English at Durham, builds on the work of Roy Strong’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? The Victorian Painter and British History (1978). Sanders’ contribution is to explore the literary nature of Victorian history to reveal how painters were indebted to written record. Literary figures, moreover, not only wrote that record, they became part of it. In the 1840s Thomas Carlyle had identified the literary man as a new breed of hero. Henry Wallis’ 1856 painting of the teenaged suicide Thomas Chatterton was a new kind of history painting. Saunders suggests the image represented to the Victorians both the 18th-century’s neglect of the man of letters and, correspondingly, their own enlightened approach, as they were prepared to commemorate him.

Jad Adams does not mention in his review how Sanders recounts the Victorian view of the English Reformation, but according to the publisher, Yale University Press, Sanders focuses on Pugin and Cobbett:

In this richly textured and wide-ranging survey of Victorian attitudes to the past, Andrew Sanders builds on Roy Strong’s groundbreaking book And when did you last see your father?: The Victorian Painter and British History (1978). Sanders explores the essentially literary nature of Victorian history writing, and he reveals the degree to which painters were indebted to written records both fictional and factual. Starting with a stimulating comparison of Queens Elizabeth I and Victoria, In the Olden Time examines works by poets and painters, essayists and dramatists, architects and musicians, including Jane Austen, John Donne, William Shakespeare, and John Soane. Together with a study of religious history as seen through the eyes of architect and critic Augustus Pugin and journalist William Cobbett, this book offers an original view of Victorian responses to British history, presenting a fresh investigation of unexpected Victorian attitudes and the establishment of particular 20th-century prejudices and bias.

I would think that James Anthony Froude would be represented as the mainstream of Victorian attitudes to the English Reformation in historical prose, but Sanders' emphasis on historical views of the past seen through the arts and literature looks as fascinating as an examination of Victorian historiography would be--perhaps even more so. The whole genre of historical painting appears to be a great subject for exploration. Think of the effect of Delarouche's painting of Lady Jane Grey on the scaffold and how it influenced the common views of her as an innocent victim and object of pity.

Alec Ryrie on Current English Reformation Studies

Alec Ryrie writes in History Today about the current state of English Reformation Studies:

A generation ago, to study the English Reformation was to participate in a cheerful form of trench warfare. Long-held Whiggish positions were being spectacularly bombarded by Christopher Haigh’s wonderful rhetoric and systematically undermined by Eamon Duffy’s devastating arguments; but they weren’t abandoned without a fight. The whole subject was being reduced to whether there was one English Reformation or several, when it (or they) started and finished and whether anyone actually wanted it. If, indeed, it happened at all.

So, for those of us who grew up in the midst of this battle, it is a little disconcerting to realise that peace has broken out. We are becoming used to a new historical landscape, in which (whisper it) we pretty much agree on the broad outline of events. . . .

He previews some new and upcoming releases, and one of them that looks most interesting is from Cambridge University Press: The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Sense of the Past in Early Modern England by Andy Wood. According to Cambridge University Press:

Did ordinary people in early modern England have any coherent sense of the past? Andy Wood's pioneering new book charts how popular memory generated a kind of usable past that legitimated claims to rights, space and resources. He explores the genesis of customary law in the medieval period; the politics of popular memory; local identities and traditions; gender and custom; literacy, orality and memory; landscape, space and memory; and the legacy of this cultural world for later generations. Drawing from a wealth of sources ranging from legal proceedings and parochial writings to proverbs and estate papers , he shows how custom formed a body of ideas built up generation after generation from localized patterns of cooperation and conflict. This is a unique account of the intimate connection between landscape, place and identity and of how the poorer and middling sort felt about the world around them.

Ryrie mentions that Wood will pay "proper attention to the earth-shaking importance of the Dissolution of the Monasteries" and then continues/concludes:

All this touchy-feely stuff has left some holes, though. The most glaring is Henry VIII’s reign. It is a vital part of the story and little work is being done on it now. Peter Marshall, Ethan Shagan and I have written on the period, but then moved elsewhere. There are some works in the pipeline. Aude de Mézerac-Zanetti is preparing a groundbreaking book on the way Henry VIII used liturgy as propaganda. Diarmaid MacCulloch is writing a long-needed biography of Thomas Cromwell, made newly sexy by Hilary Mantel. . . .

The other gap is international. We now all recognise that the English Reformation was part of the European Reformation and some terrific research – Rory McEntegart’s England and the League of Schmalkalden (Royal Historical Society, 2002), David Gehring’s forthcoming Anglo-German Relations and the Protestant Cause (Pickering and Chatto, 2013) and Collinson and Polly Ha’s edited collection The Reception of Continental Reformation in Britain (OUP, 2010) – has set it in that context. But most historians of England still don’t ‘do’ foreign languages, much less foreign archives. So we need more – but don’t hold your breath.

One thing is now clear. Whether long or short, singular or plural, domestic or international, the Reformation does now seem inescapably religious. All of these scholars take religious belief seriously (not, of course, uncritically). Best of all, they don’t read their scholarship off from their own religious views. Lake’s atheism, Marshall’s Catholicism or my own Protestantism are not instantly obvious from what we write. Just possibly we will stop fighting over the English Reformation for long enough to be able to understand it.

So Thomas Cromwell is "newly sexy"?

I Confess

That I am a Catholic (and I hope there's enough evidence to find me guilty of the same!) writing, blogging, and talking about the English Reformation and its effects on Catholics in England in its long aftermath. Since I'm writing popular history, speaking often to Catholic audiences through Catholic media, and I think I've been upfront about it, it might not be that much of an issue. But in the exalted halls of academia, the religious background and practice of some historians of the English Reformation has become an issue--because they are Catholic (or to English academia, ROMAN Catholic--RC).

Peter Marshall, whose article on "(Re)defining the English Reformation" I linked yesterday, discussed that issue, referring to some confusion and even supposition that anyone who writes at all sympathetically about Catholics before and after the English Reformation, just must be a Catholic (and its effects on the acceptance of the revisionist view of that event):

There is, I think, little doubt about where much of this apparent nervousness in the academy has come from. The extraordinary success and influence of Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars in the field of English Reformation studies has from the outset been coupled with widespread awareness of, and comment on, the circumstance that its author is a deeply committed Roman Catholic layman. This coupled with the fact that a significant historiographical precursor to Duffy, Scarisbrick’s The Reformation and the English People, was also authored by a politically prominent British Catholic, has encouraged some critics to identify a confessionally grounded school of historical interpretation at work: Catholic revisionism. This is a phenomenon perhaps more substantial in the eye of some beholders than in reality, for it would appear that not all Catholic revisionists are actually Roman Catholics. The fact that Christopher Haigh, a self-styled Anglican agnostic, is regularly accused of belonging to this tendency has for some time been a source of wry amusement to himself and to others. More incongruously still, a new biography of Luther identifies the late Richard Marius, along with Haigh, as another of the Catholic apologists of whom readers ought to be wary. Marius was in fact a religious skeptic and a sometime Southern Baptist.

(Derek Wilson was the author who made that error. I cite A.G. Dickens' frustration with Christopher Haigh in Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation--if Haigh wasn't a Catholic, Dickens wondered, how could he write such things!)

Marshall goes on to note how Eamon Duffy has responded to these issues, which was included in Duffy's recent Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition:

Duffy himself has now explicitly addressed the issue in print, and it is fair to say that he has not entirely sought to douse the fire that some clearly suspect to be smoldering beneath the smoke of so-called Catholic revisionism. He freely acknowledges that there is a “notable Catholic presence” in Reformation-related studies, naming John Bossy, Peter Burke, and Bob Scribner in this connection, as well as, in the younger generation, myself and Richard Rex. In part, Duffy adduces a sociodemographic explanation for this phenomenon: the greater numbers of Catholics entering higher education in Britain in the years after the 1944 Education Act. But he also detects a kind of elective affinity between Catholic academics, practicing or lapsed, and the study of late medieval and early modern religion, a greater openness on the part of those formed in the Catholic tradition to the internal logic and symbolic coherence of a generally alien cultural world. Insofar as Catholic revisionism exists at all, suggests Duffy, it may simply represent “the absence of a Protestant historiographical agenda at least as much as the presence of a Catholic one.” Not unreasonably, Duffy points to the fact that critics have seldom or never commented on the Protestant faith, or the Protestant cultural background, of very significant numbers of historians of the English Reformation over many decades.

Then Marshall goes on to show that not only Catholic historians have noted the issue of confessional influences on historians; Anglicans and Puritans wondered about it too:

Yet this too has started to change, and sensitivity to the issue of confessional perspective in English Reformation studies is no longer simply a game of “spot the Catholic.” In a recent historiographical essay, the young (and Anglican) historian Alec Ryrie is quite prepared to name and shame, or at least to name, right across the ecclesiastical spectrum. So he writes about the “Protestant historian” Patrick Collinson and draws attention to a “confessionally colored” Anglican view of Reformation developments, exemplified by the writings of an Oxford-based scholar who is also a priest of the Church of England, Judith Maltby. The idea that an identifiably “Anglican agenda” can be detected in much recent Reformation scholarship has been taken further by a leading historian of Puritanism, Peter Lake, who warns that “many modern historians of the period retain a stake—rarely owned or explicated—in the very disputes they are seeking to explain.”In a succession of books and articles, Lake, sometimes writing in collaboration with Michael Questier, has accused an entire cohort of leading Reformation historians—Maltby, Alexandra Walsham, Norman Jones, Ian Green, Christopher Marsh—of manufacturing an overly consensual Anglican religious culture for the immediate post-Reformation period, and of doing so largely by choosing to take at something close to face value highly polemical constructions of both Puritanism and Laudianism, positions from which the majority of the people can be presented as sensibly dissenting.

Marshall's article bears much close reading: he also addresses the (more common than I had realized) view of the Long English Reformation (via Nicholas Tyacke), the Second Reformation (via Patrick Collinson), the contentious issue of Lollardy and its influence (Duffy and Rex vs. McCulloch), and the whole field of Mary I's reign and how it should be judged and evaluated--he packs a great deal into 22 pages.

Of the Making of Books about the English Reformation

There seems to be no end: here is another new title about the English Reformation in the 16th century, by Derek Wilson: The English Reformation: Religion, Politics and Fear: How England was Transformed by the Tudors, from Running Press. It's part of their BHO series--A "Brief History Of". It's 288 pages and seems to have a different view of the Reformation:

Religion, politics and fear: how England was transformed by the Tudors. The English Reformation was a unique turning point in English history. Derek Wilson retells the story of how the Tudor monarchs transformed English religion and why it still matters today. Recent scholarly research has undermined the traditional view of the Reformation as an event that occurred solely amongst the elite. Wilson now shows that, although the transformation was political and had a huge impact on English identity, on England's relationships with its European neighbours and on the foundations of its empire, it was essentially a revolution from the ground up. By 1600, in just eighty years, England had become a radically different nation in which family, work and politics, as well as religion, were dramatically altered.

Looks like Wilson is going back to A.G. Dickens and G.R. Elton's views. I'll be on the look-out for reviews of this BHO. In the meantime, here is a BE (brief essay) on the state of the history of the history of the English Reformation or English Reformations, by Peter Marshall, author of Religious Identities in Henry VIII's England, Reformation England 1480-1642, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, and The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction (only 168 pages!).

It's interesting to note that Peter Milward, SJ (the historian who has written a couple of the better books on Shakespeare and Catholicism) had a book published with the same illustration on the cover: The English Reformation: From Tragic Reality to Dramatic Representation which was published by Family Publications, based near Oxford, which sadly went out of business a couple of years ago.