Ian Green. Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xxiv + 691 pp. $165.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-820860-0.
Reviewed by Sears McGee (Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara)
Published on H-Albion (August, 2004)
Folios, Thirty-twomos and Everything in Between
This massive survey is the second volume in a trilogy, each of which examines a different body of sources in an industrious effort to answer a deceptively simple question. Ian Green's concern is with "how Protestantism was disseminated from 1530 to 1730" (p. x). In The Christian's ABC (1996), he tackled catechisms, and in Religious Instruction in Early Modern England (forthcoming) he will turn to sermons as delivered and to visual aids and music. In the work under review here, the subject is printed books on religious subjects, and the method is encyclopedic. Drawing upon the insights of bibliographers and historians of the book, Green considers not only authors but printers, publishers, booksellers, and especially readers. Throughout, he pays attention to features of books that reveal the kinds of readers (clergy, gentry, and the "middling sort of people") who were being targeted. The most important of these features was obviously cost, and a lengthy book in folio on good paper would have been too expensive for most readers, whereas a short book in a small format such as octavo or duodecimo would be widely accessible. A publication in a black-letter typeface, after roman type came into use in the 1580s, was aimed "at those with limited reading skills." Many of the "penny godlies" printed after the middle of the seventeenth century were still in black letter, indicating that "a lively market still existed among those who preferred such type" (p. 40).
In chapters 2 and 3, the meticulousness and thoroughness of Green's research is on full display. Chapter 2, on bibles in English, presents tables arranged by decade that list the number of translations and editions of complete bibles and New Testaments in English, their formats (folio, quarto, octavo, etc.) and typefaces. The many barriers to achieving an accurate estimate of the availability of copies, such as the vexing question of the size of print runs, are carefully assessed. Appendix 2 treats the complex questions involved in counting editions, such as different definitions of what constitutes a new edition and the problems caused by "pirate copies being imported from Holland from the 1640s to the 1680s" (p. 675). Green also discusses many other features of the bibles, such as the use of maps and other visual aids, marginal notes, and prefaces, before turning to library lists and wills to describe patterns of ownership in different sectors of society. Chapter 3 explores printed aids to study the bible (such as commentaries, annotations, concordances, lexicons, and abridgements). Green argues that such study aids, although numerous in the century after 1530, were not seen as absolutely essential because it was widely assumed that scriptural truths "were evident to all" and that readers could be trusted to accept the "wisdom of the church" concerning "obscure or difficult passages" (p. 102). By the middle decades of the seventeenth century, however, "both conformists and the more conservative nonconformists seem to have become much more strongly convinced of the need" to stress the use of commentaries, paraphrases, and other helps. Moreover, during these years there was a distinct shift away from works aimed at scholarly clerics and intellectuals toward fare that would assist less well-educated readers. Green concludes this chapter by disputing Christopher Hill's contention that the mid-century's "multiple and mutually contradictory interpretations" of biblical passages "discredited and marginalized" the importance of the scriptures in England. On the contrary, the growing variety and numbers of bibles and aids to bible study that streamed from the presses meant that "many more people had some awareness of what was in the scripture in the later Stuart period than in the late Tudor." Green also finds evidence for a theme that runs throughout his book, which is that in the study aids as in other genres considered in subsequent chapters, printed material "produced in the second century after the Reformation tended to devote less space to doctrinal disputes and prophetic readings than those in the preceding century, and to give correspondingly more space to scriptural teachings on Christian morality, without necessarily descending into moralism" (pp. 164-165).
Green's principal methodological innovation is his decision to concentrate on his "sample" of printed works that sold best and steadily in early modern England, and, after considering efforts by other scholars to come up with such a sample, he explains his reasons for choosing to examine all those works that had five or more editions in a thirty-year period. This method yields a total of 727 titles, 338 of which were first published by 1640 and 389 that appeared between 1641 and 1700. These are listed in alphabetical order in Appendix 1 in a tabular form that occupies eighty-one pages and gives, besides authors and titles, dates of first and last editions and estimates of the number of other editions published between 1536 and 1729. Another column identifies each entry according to type (treatise, sermon, bible study aid, discourse, dialogue, prayers, meditations, catechism, allegory, ballad, verse, etc.) and provides a brief statement about its contents. Scholars will find this huge table of best-sellers and steady sellers enormously useful. They will also find much of interest in Green's analysis of the works in chapters 4-7, in which he groups them into broad categories according to their themes (i.e., "prayer, meditation, and preparing for communion;" "the inner life of faith, godly living and godly dying;" "entertaining edification"). Ballads and chapbooks are analyzed in chapter 8, where Green offers a different take than Tessa Watt, Peter Lake, and others about how "Protestant" they were theologically. The relative lack of providentialist works in the sample also lead him to express doubt about Alex Walsham's claim that providentialism helped to create "a collective Protestant consciousness" in this period (p. 436).[1] In chapter 9, Green discusses the amazing persistence of the popularity of the metrical psalms by Sternhold and Hopkins.
One of Green's large themes is that historians of early modern English religion have laid far too much emphasis on theological controversies and not nearly enough on the broad consensus that extended across most aspects of the Christian life despite minor theological differences. On things like the vital importance of prayer and of preparation for communion, on the way to pursue "godly living" and "godly dying," on the necessity of repentance, and on many others, agreement reigned and differences between conformists and others were slight. The best-sellers in the sample tended to be "in that consensual middle ground that some historians have identified in the early Stuart period, or were open-ended in their appeal" (p. 369). Green is quick to deny that he is claiming that "works which sold less than five editions in a generation were without influence," and he mentions Foxe's Acts and Monuments and Thomas Beard's Theatre of God's Judgments as examples of important books that did not sell well enough to get into his sample (p. 174). Nevertheless, having gone to the trouble to construct his sample, Green understandably wants to give the conclusions from his reading of the works considerable weight. In his final chapter, he states that the broad religious divisions revealed by his analysis do not follow the "high Calvinist" versus "conformist" (or "Anglican" versus "puritan") pattern about which so much has been written by modern scholars. He finds instead that there were "three versions of Protestantism." The first, orthodox Protestantism in doctrinal and moral terms, he associates mainly with the clergy (and "some among the educated laity"). The second, coming also from the educated elite but mainly from the laity, tended towards "moralism, rationalism, and anticlericalism" (pp. 556-557). The third came from publishers of cheap print who in the seventeenth-century produced material "of dubious orthodoxy" that combined "leftovers from medieval exempla and an instinctive popular semi-Pelagianism" with "pope-bashing and empty praise for the Bible" (pp. 556, 565).
Green is no doubt correct to hold that there was much common ground among Calvinist and anti-Calvinist clergymen, but he may be downplaying theological controversies more zealously than the evidence warrants. He recognizes the possibility that there might be a problem when he writes, with respect to controversial sermons, that they were quite popular "at least in terms of the number of titles published" (p. 206). If similar anti-Arminian sermons and tracts (such as the cloud of witnesses opposing Montagu's New Gagg for an Old Goose and his Appello Caesarem) were published and purchased in large numbers, this would undermine the idea that the fact that none of them made the "best-seller" status means that there was not much interest in theological debate. One senses that for Green, "orthodox" Protestant views were at one end of a seesaw and a combination of lay moralism and popular semi-Pelagianism were at the other. Thus, when the quantity of the latter in his sample goes up, the quantity of the former must go down. But the seesaw may be the wrong image, and "orthodoxy" could be conveyed subtly in many genres. Sensitivity to and interest in soteriological debates might have existed alongside areas of consensus. The writings of thoroughgoing Calvinists such as John Preston, Richard Sibbes, William Gurnall, William Whately, and Henry Scudder sold quite well. Their Calvinist soteriology underpinned their work but in an implicit rather than explicit way. Their predestinarianism did not have to be "in your face" to be understood by their readers, and this may well have remained the case later in the seventeenth century among nonconformists like Thomas Brooks and sectarians like John Bunyan. Green's desire to put authors in the "consensual middle ground" sometimes leads him to place there men who would have strongly demurred at being thus categorized. For example, Edward Leigh, whose Critica Sacra (a lexicon of Hebrew and Greek words) had three more editions after the first of 1639, is characterized by Green as "a layman of independent means." That he was, but he was also a protege of the vigorous Puritan preacher William Whately, a Presbyterian member of the Long Parliament, an officer in the Parliamentary army, and the author of numerous books in which Roman Catholics and Arminians were dealt heavy blows.[2] Another layman, Francis Rous, appears in Green's account as the author of a translation of the Psalms, and he is correctly identified as "an active member of the Long Parliament and Westminster Assembly" (p. 542). A little later, however, Rous is grouped with Francis Bacon, John Selden, Viscount Falkland and other laymen who saw "themselves as good Protestants" while "unconsciously promoting the survival of older ideas on merit" (p. 564). Thus Green appears to subsume Rous into his second "version" of Protestantism. Yet Rous was so uncompromising in his predestinarianism that on the floor of the House of Commons on January 27, 1629, he famously said that the growth of Arminianism in England was an "Errour, that maketh the grace of God, looke after the will of men: that maketh the sheepe to keepe the shepheard, and make a mortall seed an immortall God. I desire, that we may looke into the belly, and bowels of this Trojan Horse, to see if there be no man in it, ready to open the gate of Romish tyranny, and Spanish Monarchy."[3] Rous and his step-brother, John Pym, were among the earliest members of Parliament to raise the hue and cry against Montague, Laud, and other anti-Calvinist clergy. Neither Rous nor Pym had any use for "older ideas on merit" where human salvation was concerned. These are, to be sure, minor flaws in Green's long and impressive march through best-sellers and steady sellers in early modern England, but they support the case for reserving judgment about some of his conclusions.
Notes
[1]. Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), reviewed on H-Albion, <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=7209964552178>.
[2.] For example, Leigh's Treatise of Religion and Learning (London, 1656), p. 24: "The enemies of Christian Religion are twofold, Open or Close: Those openly oppose the Doctrine of Christ, and persecute his Church, viz. the Heathens, Mohometans and Jews; these treacherously and under the name of Christ, as Hereticks, but especially Arminians, Pelagians, and Papists."
[3]. Rous, A Religious and Worthy Speech (London, 1641), sig A2v. Green here calls him "Sir Francis Rous," but he was never knighted (although he did end up in Cromwell's "other house" late in the Interregnum). This reference on page 564 is not noted in Green's index. The index is frequently incomplete, failing to note all of the places where a particular individual or topic appears in the book and sometimes failing to include people or topics that are mentioned. For example, the index entry on "semi-Pelagianism" notes four pages but omits mentions on pp. 196, 310, 443 and 450. The text itself has very few typographical errors.
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Citation:
Sears McGee. Review of Green, Ian, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
August, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9697
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