The diametrically opposed outcomes of the Reformation in England and France have led historians to presume that there were significant differences in their religious situations before the Reformation that help account for that ultimate divergence. This chapter argues that any such presumption is wide of the mark. Not only were the supposed ‘preconditions’ for the success of the Reformation in England (such as Renaissance humanism, anticlericalism and church-state tension) more evident in France, but the early diffusion of Reformation teachings was swifter and more widespread there as well. Although in the second quarter of the sixteenth century the Reformation received increasing royal support in England but not in France, that early progress was insecure and was briefly reversed. Decisive divergence between the two realms in this regard began only around 1560, and in each of them the outcome might still have been different under other circumstances. The ultimate outcomes reflected the interplay of political contingency with pre-existing differences not in religious experience but in political structures and political culture, which put the English monarchy in a position to impose its will upon the English nation, but left the French monarchy less able not only to impose change but also to suppress it.

The Introduction explains the book’s intention to look at the religious history of the mid-seventeenth century in the context of the history of the Church of England and its earlier Reformations. Given that recent historians have emphasized that there was no single clear Church of England orthodoxy in the pre-war period, and have mostly ceased to use the term ‘Anglican’ altogether to describe pre-war conformists, it does not seem to make sense to describe the religious upheavals of these years as the destruction of a coherent established church. The book will instead propose that these events should be studied as an extended argument over the identity of the Church of England, and how it should be reformed, that involved a wide range of religious opinions. The use of the term ‘second Reformation’ to describe this phenomenon, and the rationale behind including the Laudian movement of the 1630s as part of this process, are explained. A final ‘Note on Terminology’ explains the meaning and rationale of several new terms introduced in the book to describe some of the phenomena discussed therein, and explains the rejection of the terms ‘Anglicanism’ and ‘Restoration settlement’ as anachronistic and/or misleading.

Richard Hooker wrote in 1594 that public worship was performed ‘not only with words, but also with certain sensible actions, the memory whereof is far more easy and durable than the memory of speech can be’. This chapter explores some of the ‘sensible actions’ which the post-Reformation Church of England inherited from the liturgy and worship of the medieval church, such as kneeling at communion, the sign of the cross in baptism and bowing at the name of Jesus. The significance of these gestures was widely acknowledged by Protestant reformers, who feared that they allowed elements of Catholic doctrine and worship to retain a foothold in popular memory. Some reformers argued that they should be abolished altogether, while others sought to harness their mnemonic power by giving them new meanings. The chapter argues that by looking at how the reformed Church remade its bodily regime, we can gain crucial insights into how it remembered and renegotiated its past.

James Logan (1674–1751) led many lives. The son of a schoolmaster, he arrived in Pennsylvania in 1699 as William Penn’s secretary. The fur trade made him rich. His political career included stints as mayor of Philadelphia, chief justice, and acting governor of Pennsylvania. Above all, he pursued books and learning, systematically building a collection of almost 4,000 books in fields from classical scholarship to Newtonian physics. His profuse and vivid annotations traced his progress in fields as diverse as Arabic philology and botany, recorded striking incidents in his life as collector and scholar, memorialized his creation of bibliophilic and scholarly networks, and provided the foundation for the learned essays that he published in both American and European periodicals – all characteristic ways of using books in the world of contemporary European scholarship. Drawing on the evidence of Logan’s books, papers, and his writings, and comparing Logan’s practices to those of the Mathers, the Winthrops, Francis Daniel Pastorius and other contemporaries, this essay offers a case study in the migration of Protestant late humanism to the English colonies in North America.

This essay is based on a singular archive of “relations” made by lay people when they were made candidates for church membership in New World Cambridge, Massachusetts ca. 1638–1648. In these narratives, women and men recall the social experience of being among the “godly” in England, reflect on the decision to emigrate, and above all, map the ups and downs of their spiritual histories. These “relations” are paired with sermons preached by Thomas Shepard, the town minister, who addressed the same topics both in sermons and in a journal. Bringing these two sources together makes it possible to explore various dimensions of lay experience and pastoral perspective: continuities between old and New England, disruptions and self-critiques arising out of the transition to Massachusetts, echoes of the “Antinomian” controversy and its objections to some aspects of the practical divinity. Overall, this essay will attempt to redefine “Reformation” as a challenging mixture of the local and the general, and of adaptation and continuity.

The best-known case of early American religious migrants is that of Plymouth Plantation. Valorized in US national mythology for enduring hardship to practise freedom of religion, the story of Plymouth is a famous example of the supposed commitment to religious liberty. For the many Christian commentators who have dug deeper than the first Thanksgiving, Plymouth connects the story of the Reformation in England to the founding of the United States, telling the tale of a separatist rebellion against the Church of England that led to exile, suffering, and a Christian founding. A close consideration of Plymouth Plantation’s early history reveals that Plymouth, far from being a unique case of pious commitment struggling with and triumphing over American challenges, experienced all the difficulties involved in exporting the Reformation. Plymouth church confronted all the same challenges of staffing, membership, and religious practice of any migrant church. At the same time, their storied commitment to separatism proved weaker and less permanent than their modern champions like to assert. This case study allows for a reconsideration of the process of exporting Reformation even as it upends one of the most central myths of the American founding.

The relationship between scholastic biblical commentary and translation recovered in the foregoing chapters posed problems for reformist Tudor writers, who sought precedents for their vernacular biblicism in Middle English writings. This Epilogue focuses on the work of John Bale, describing the tensions in Bale’s commitment to cataloguing the literature of medieval England, including the commentaries studied here, and his desire to identify medieval English translators as early coreligionists. Although Bale is able to find a place for commentary (even some medieval scholastic commentary) in reformist biblical reading, his approach to vernacular exegesis and translation leads him to obscure the place of medieval biblical translation in the larger project of scholastic exegesis. The resulting distinction between the work of commentary and translation has had a long scholarly afterlife, one which this study seeks to set right.