Saints on Sundays, Devils All the Week After

Patrick Collinson

  • The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England by Peter Lake and Michael Questier
    Yale, 731 pp, £30.00, February 2002, ISBN 0 300 08884 1

What was it that Samuel Johnson said about Laurence Sterne’s unusual novel? ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’ I wonder whether the Doctor would have said the same had he lived long enough to reach the end of The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, whose odd title is only explained on page 584, when we come across a quote from The Alchemist. Some of the chapter subtitles are no less zany: ‘Sex, Lies and Cheap Print’, ‘What Was So Funny about Peace, Love and Understanding?’; some just pretentious: ‘Compliment as Meta-Critique’. Is this the way the history and culture of lost worlds will be recovered in the future? Conventional lines of demarcation between respectable academic disciplines breached, twisting dust-devils of ideas, a kind of historical News of the World? (All human life is here.)

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[*] ‘The Sherman’s Tree and the Preacher: The Strange Death of Merry England in Shrewsbury and Beyond’ from The Reformation in English Terms 1500-1640, edited by Patrick Collinson and John Craig (1998).