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Reviews of Books and Films
Watkins is inclined to hear at least in serious music a
turn to neoclassicism, with its ear attuned as much to
past accomplishment as to future need. In this vein he
regards Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (1961) as a
composition that, while articulating modern anxiety
and aspiration, is nonetheless firmly fixed in tradition-emblematic of the effect of World War I on
twentieth-century music. Watkins thus tends to side
with those who see the war as affirmation and continuation, albeit pained, rather than as a disaster opening
the sluice gates to a century of catastrophe.
His material, one must insist, has everything to do
with his historiographical perspective. His book is
essentially about music in the victor states. It is divided
along national lines, with sections on Britain (three
chapters), France (six), Italy (one), Germany-Austria
(two), and the United States (six). There is nothing on
Russia, although the exile, Igor Stravinsky, does pop
up repeatedly like the irrepressible jack-in-the-box he
was. Germany and Austria get short shrift (thirty-two
pages out of 400), especially when one considers the
enormous German influence in the Western musical
tradition and the attempt, central to this study, of
Allied composers to define their art in distinctly nonand anti-German terms. (Not only are German issues
underrepresented, but the incidence of error in the
quotation of German texts is unacceptable in a book
brought out by a major university press, one that in
fact publishes a distinguished series on German history.)
That said, there is much to cherish here. Departing
from Claude Debussy's comment in 1913 that "the
century of aeroplanes has a right to a music of its
own," Watkins has a splendid section on the influence
of flight on music, concluding with a discussion of the
"Toccata" in Maurice Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin
where the mechanical sounds of war are unmistakable.
The treatment of Ravel's "Concerto for the Left
Hand," with its charged symbolism, written as it was
for the "enemy," Paul Wittgenstein, is excellent. Outstanding also are the chapters on the United States,
which include delicious accounts of, for example, the
goings-on at the Boston and Chicago symphonies,
where, as a flag-waving fervor gripped audiences and
administrators, the language of rehearsal remained
German.
Based on admirable research, full of new and intriguing material, this volume adds an important dimension to the debate on war and culture in the
modern age.
MODRIS EKSTEINS
University of Toronto,
Scarborough
PETER MARSHALL. Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation
England. New York: Oxford University Press. 2002.
Pp. xi, 344. $74.00.
In this important book, Peter Marshall takes us into
unexplored territory as he traces the often complex
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
series of shifts in beliefs and practices regarding the
dead in Reformation England. With the doctrine of
purgatory and its abrogation as the common thread, he
investigates "how religious and cultural ideas about
the dead interacted with political processes and ecclesiastical politics, with representations and reaffirmations of the social order, with notions of 'community'
and 'identity' " (p. 3). His central theme is "the role of
the Reformation in shaping attitudes towards the
dead, and the role that attitudes towards the dead
played in determining the shape and outcomes of the
Reformation" (p. 3).
The organization of this volume supports the author's aim and focus admirably. The first three chapters are devoted to the explanation and history of
beliefs concerning the dead in the three decades
preceding. Elizabeth's accession to the throne. After
examining beliefs and practices concerning the dead in
the late medieval church, Marshall turns to exploring
the nature and theological justifications of the Henrician evangelicals' refutations of the validity of the
doctrine of purgatory and the efficacy of intercessions
for the dead. He points out that, before the Reformation, the living and the dead were all members of one
community, but that community was being reshaped by
the end of 1546, effectively destroying "the web of
customary connections regulating relations between
the living and the dead" (p. 92). This was the situation
when Edward VI came to the throne and Protestantism was definitively introduced, resulting, Marshall
says, in the reconstruction of beliefs concerning the
dead. Marshall goes on to suggest that this process
"must rank as one of the most audacious attempts at
the restructuring of beliefs and values ever attempted
in England" (p. 107). Adding another layer of complexity, Marshall further asserts that, by 1560, "the
dead themselves had come to comprise two opposing
camps, papists and heretics" (p. 121), as the contest
over what constituted true religion spilled across the
boundary of death into the afterlife, weakening communal ties and beliefs in purgatory and intercessory
prayer even more than had earlier evangelical and
Protestant polemics.
Having established the theological and doctrinal
context, Marshall devotes the final four chapters of his
book to an exploration of factors that contributed
significantly to the development and manifestation of
Protestant beliefs and practices concerning the dead
during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles
I. In particular, he examines changes in authorized
burial rituals, the development of an imagined Protestant afterlife, the meaning of ghosts, and means of
commemorating and remembering the dead. Key to
the developments described in those chapters was a
recognition by the reformers of the powerful need
human beings had to remember the dead. As a result,
"the process of expunging Catholic associations from
the commemoration of the dead was slow, messy, and
never entirely successful" (p. 166). For instance, Marshall says, praying for the souls of the departed was
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Europe: Early Modern and Modern
forbidden, but even good Protestants could not resist
the strong urge to intercede with God on behalf of the
dead.
This carefully considered analysis of the abrogation
of purgatory and ways in which "the living and the
dead continued to coexist in post-Catholic society" (p.
265) does indeed help us to understand more clearly
the "complex and protracted process of cultural exchange, in which the teachings of the reformers were
adapted and internalized ... and in which the concerns
of the people helped to shape and direct the priorities
of reformers" (p. 311). Other recent scholars of the
English Reformation have noted the complexity of
responses to reforms and the wide range of Protestant
beliefs and practices in evidence across the length and
breadth of England. Extending his reach beyond scholarship on death, dying, and the dead, Marshall does, in
this sophisticated and nuanced analysis, shed substantial, welcome light on the entire creative process that
led to "that de facto religious pluralism which was
perhaps the most significant and enduring overall
result of the Reformation in England" (p. 315). In so
doing, he makes an important contribution to the
ongoing discourse concerning the nature of religion
during and after the English Reformation.
CAROLINE LITZENBERGER
Portland State University
ETHAN H. SHAGAN. Popular Politics and the English
Reformation. (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern
British History.) New York: Cambridge University
Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 341. Cloth $70.00, paper $25.00.
In recent years, the historiography of the English
Reformation has visibly retreated from the high water
mark of revisionist skepticism about its impact and
reach. Simultaneously the center of scholarly interest
has begun to shift chronologically backward from the
Elizabethan period to the heady decades straddling the
middle part of the century, during which Henry VIII
broke with Rome and Protestant policies evolved,
matured, and were imposed by royal decree and act of
Parliament. In both these respects, Ethan H. Shagan's
book represents a significant landmark. Concentrating
on the twenty years between 1534 and 1553, its central
thesis is that the English people were not passive or
hapless recipients of the religious changes brought in
by the Henrician and Edwardian regimes but rather
active participants in the making of them. "The Reformation was not done to people, it was done with
them," Shagan insists, in a dynamic process of engagement between governors and governed.
Turning away from the analysis of wills and churchwardens that has dominated research since the 1980s
and toward the records of court cases and local clashes
reported in the official state papers, Shagan explores
the "points of contact" between the Tudor state and its
subjects. A series of illuminating chapters captures the
color and texture of the fractious grass-roots disputes
that accompanied the theological, liturgical, and polit-
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249
ical upheavals of the era and casts fresh light on
well-known episodes such as the furor surrounding the
prophecies of Elizabeth Barton, the "holy maid of
Kent," the Pilgrimage of Grace, the dissolutions of the
monasteries and chantries, and the rebellions of 1549.
Shagan defines the "popular politics" of his title
inclusively but somewhat imprecisely as "the presence
of ordinary, non elite subjects as the audience for or
interlocutors of a political action" (p. 19). In practice,
however, much of his discussion is devoted to townsmen and gentry. The peasantry do not feature very
prominently.
Throughout the book, the focus of attention is not
the zealous minorities who enthusiastically embraced
and fervently rejected the Reformation but rather the
many individuals who neither wholly accepted nor
wholly opposed it. Taking his inspiration from studies
of the relationships between twentieth-century repressive regimes and the people over whom they ruled,
Shagan sees the concept of collaboration as the key to
resolving the puzzling riddle at the heart of historical
debate in this field: how did a state that lacked an
extensive bureaucracy, standing army, and police force
manage to achieve near compliance with its disruptive
and destructive ecclesiastical policies? He repeatedly
shows how people who had no prior ideological commitment to Protestantism were implicated by their own
vested political and economic interests in the implementation of the Reformation, how they "forged new
consciences to navigate the unprecedented circumstances in which they found themselves" (p. 309), how
they became, as it were, accomplices after the fact.
Spiritual transformations, he argues, "often followed
political positioning rather than preceding it" (p. 304).
This theme pervades all three parts of the book but is
nowhere so compellingly demonstrated as in chapter
five, which brilliantly dissects the process by which
local people cooperated in the ransacking and desacralizing of Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire, graphically describing "the uneasy alliance of evangelicals
and thieves" (p. 262) that carried out this extraordinary collective act of sacrilege.
In pressing his thesis that the English Reformation
was "a Reformation of strange bedfellows and nittygritty practicalities, negotiated and finessed rather
than won" (p. 303), Shagan seeks to effect a shift away
from "the meta narrative of conversion" (p. 7) that he
believes has seriously distorted our understanding of
this event. Here revisionists, no less than their predecessors, are the targets of his bold and, at times,
unnecessarily aggressive and polemical critique: he
holds both guilty of judging the success or failure of
the Reformation according to the exacting criteria
employed by contemporary Protestants themselves.
Instead, he offers us a Reformation that "entered
English culture through the backdoor, not dependent
upon spectacular epiphanies but rather exploiting the
mundane realities of political allegiance, financial investment and local conflict" (p. 306).
While this change of focus and perspective yields
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