Rescuing the bishops

Blair Worden

• The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559-1625 by Patrick Collinson
  Oxford, 297 pp, £17.50, January 1983, ISBN 0 19 822685 3
• Reactions to the English Civil War 1642-1649 edited by John Morrill
  Macmillan, 257 pp, £14.00, November 1982, ISBN 0 333 27565 9
• The World of the Muggletonians by Christopher Hill, Barry Reay and William Lamont
  Temple Smith, 195 pp, £12.50, February 1983, ISBN 0 85117 226 1
• The Life of John Milton by A.N. Wilson
  Oxford, 278 pp, £9.95, January 1983, ISBN 0 19 211776 9
• Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Vol. 8: 1666-1682 edited by Maurice Kelley
  Yale, 625 pp, £55.00, January 1983, ISBN 0 300 02561 0
• The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Works of Andrew Marvell by Warren Chernaik
  Cambridge, 249 pp, £19.50, February 1983, ISBN 0 521 24773 X

The publication of Patrick Collinson’s The Religion of Protestants is a stirring event in the rediscovery of Early Modern England. Unmistakably the work of a historian who has reflected on his subject for the better part of a working lifetime, the book consists of six wide-ranging essays which were originally delivered as the Ford Lectures when Professor Collinson visited Oxford in 1979, and which have now been revised, expanded and tightened – although the speculative tone of the lecture-hall has been appropriately retained. Many other scholars have recently explored the development of the Church of England over the two long reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and one of Collinson’s achievements, executed with singular modesty and generosity, has been to draw their conclusions together and to set them in perspective. But the findings which count for most are the author’s own. To the non-specialist reader, two warnings should be offered. The opening chapter, about Church and State, may seem the hardest: begin with Chapter Two. Secondly, do not expect tidy answers. Collinson’s thesis, although lucidly and vigorously presented, is honourably complex and tentative. This is the modern manner, history with its head down: patient, unpretentious, suspicious of the swift and brash generalisations that stole the headlines a decade and more ago.