The James Ford Lectures in British History, which are offered over six weeks every year at the University of Oxford, are among the most prestigious history lectures that the academic world offers. As the website for the university's Faculty of History observes, “The Lectures invariably result in important books, many of them classic and pioneering works of British history.” Indeed, many studies of lasting value have rolled from Oxford's presses since the late 1890s, when the lecture series began, including G. R. Elton's Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (1972); Patrick Collinson's The Religion of Protestants (1982); and more recently, Steven Gunn's The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII (2018).
Converting spoken lectures into print has always offered challenges. Patrick Collinson once asked me if I could discern from reading the dense, heavily footnoted text of Policy and Police how Geoffrey Elton might have originally arranged his Ford Lectures when he delivered them. I could not. In contrast, Collinson's own Religion of Protestants was a comparatively straight-forward version of his lectures, each refashioned into its own footnoted chapter, rather close to the way that he probably delivered them.
Alexandra Walsham is a Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, and her Generations has managed both approaches. Her book represents a “revised and expanded version” (1) of her Ford Lectures, with six lengthy chapters that take up large themes: “Youth and Age”; “Kith and Kin”; “Blood and Trees”; “Generations and Seed”; “History and Time”; and “Memory and Archive.”
Even in the context of the Ford Lectures, the history of the Reformation in England has been a well-trodden field, and her starting point has been taken not from Collinson (with whom we both studied), but from an important monograph by Norman Jones (who was trained by Elton). Jones's The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (2002) explored shifts in generational experience and political perceptions during the sixteenth century. Parliament made King Henry VIII the Supreme Head of a national Church from 1534, and Jones considered the effect that the Reformation had on three generations, to the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, when England could be perceived to have become a Protestant nation.
Walsham's Generations is over five hundred pages in length, and although it is difficult to capture its essence in a brief review, she has taken a broad and ambitious perspective that considers not only the Protestant experience, but rather the spectrum of the “Reformations” in England and New England, into the seventeenth century, that includes Catholic survival, the emergence of the Quakers, and various millenarian groups, like the Fifth Monarchists. She provides a bountiful selection of illustrations. Many of them are fresh to the field, like illuminated genealogical tables, or family portraits, or the Tree of Jesse iconography that once was featured in many parish churches. Her deep footnotes, full of references to a wide array of secondary sources, are comprehensive without being exhaustive. Generations will be invaluable to graduate students just starting out.
Among the topics that Walsham addresses are nuanced interlocking accounts in chapters 4 and 6 concerning how Protestant families commemorated departed loved ones after the English Church discarded the tenet of Purgatory, and once religious houses and chantries were closed. Although prayers for the dead were no longer considered to have any role in their salvation, the memory of those who had died continued to be marked in family stories, in printed sermons, by funerary monuments, or in handwritten books of advice to descendants. Similarly, she discusses how parents went to great efforts to cope with the doctrine of predestination by encouraging goodness in their children. Salvation could be located for the godly “in the lines of descent that connected the generations,” and that could be compiled in a pedigree (287).
Walsham notes that our own interpretations of Reformation history “are products of the very processes we seek to study” (516). This point is taken up with greater clarity by Harriet Lyon (whose doctoral thesis Walsham supervised), in her recent book Memory and the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Early Modern England (2022). Walsham's sources on lineage and life cycle, as they related to religion, have encouraged her to focus on families. Although she has chosen to embrace the ambiguities in the word “generation” as including reproduction in many forms, Generations is largely an exercise in social history. Politics are not her focus. Other forms of institutional or professional reproduction for bodies that (like families) were essential for the well-being of society, including the English Church or Parliament, have not been taken up in her book. More might have been made of an apostolic succession, not just in the families of the elect, but in clerical careers, as every priest, especially in the Roman tradition, follows in the example established by Melchizedek (Genesis 14:18; Psalm 109/110). Vocation can be understood as a type of generation too. To misappropriate a title from one of Collinson's most famous essays, the process of generation was not necessarily “Sexual in the Ordinary Sense.”
Generations closes with the observation that the historiography of the Reformation in England “over the last half-century has entailed a series of generational turns.” Now, “the revisionism of younger scholars has supplanted [the] interpretations of their elders.” The study of history too “is a form of genealogy” (516).
To quote one of Collinson's favorite sayings, “We stand on the shoulders of giants.”
