Christopher Hill

In 16th-century England Protestant theology was overwhelmingly predestinarian. ‘Calvinist’ is the word normally used, but Dr Kendall, as we shall see, is unhappy about it. Bishops like Jewell, Grindal and Whitgift, Puritans like Cartwright and Perkins (though Dr Kendall would not call him a Puritan), later King James I, all agreed on the essentials of theology. This orthodoxy was challenged by Laudians in the 1630s, by sectaries in the Forties and Fifties. By the end of the century, Calvinism was no longer the intellectual force it had been. It was not stressed by the official Church of England, though the ‘Latitudinarians’ who came to dominate the Church had more in common with the earlier ‘Puritans’ than with Laudians. In the 18th century the ‘old dissent’, Presbyterians and Independents, was still mainly Calvinist, though Arminianism and Unitarianism were making inroads into their ranks. Calvinism survived among Particular Baptists and Muggletonians. It had ceased to be in the forefront of intellectual history. What had happened?

There are at least three possible portraits of Isaac Newton. Traditional internalist historians of science depict him as an aloof scholar, remote from the world, solving in his Cambridge ivory tower problems which derived logically from the state of contemporary mathematical knowledge. A second approach, which originated with the Soviet scientist Hessen, relates the problems which Newton studied, together with other scientists of his day, to the economic needs of rising capitalist society, or draws attention to the continued influence of his Puritan background on his mode of thought. This school finds it easier than the first to explain the later Newton, the dictatorial Master of the Mint and President of the Royal Society, and to take account of his continual obsession with alchemy, Biblical chronology and the end of the world – grave embarrassments for the purist ‘internalists’. The latter do not like to be reminded that Newton said he first turned to trigonometry and geometry in order to understand a book on astrology. A third approach is psychological, seeking the key to Newton’s achievement in his personality.

This is not quite another Montaillou. Professor Ginzburg’s book deals with an isolated heretical individual, not with a heretical community. But it shares some of the qualities of that marvellous book. It reveals an almost equally startling body of wholly unorthodox ideas existing within a nominally Roman Catholic society. The Middle Ages, it has been unkindly said, appear to be ‘the age of faith’ because nearly all the evidence which survives was written by monks and priests. We might extend this to the couple of centuries after the invention of printing: they appear to he centuries of faith because priests controlled the censorship. It is very difficult to find out what ordinary people thought. They may have accepted the orthodoxy of their betters, though there are many indications that this was not the case. But if they did hold unorthodox views there was no prospect of getting them printed, except when the orthodox refuted and denounced them. Only in the present generation have historians like Robert Mandrou and Peter Burke seriously attempted to ascertain what was going on beneath the surface. In Montaillou Le Roy Ladurie utilised one lucky cache of evidence. Professor Ginzburg has found another.

Rochester is one of the most exciting and paradoxical of English poets. Sexually ambivalent, a notorious member of the gang of young roués at the court of Charles II, he nevertheless managed to write a few poignant and haunting poems which suggest that his public notoriety concealed a sensibility reacting to the intellectual crisis of the later 17th century.

This is the first full-scale study of literacy in 16th and 17th-century England. Dr Cressy has long been known to scholars for his work on the subject: here he gives us his conclusions. For the whole of his period, he thinks, about two out of three adult males, and about 90 per cent of women, were illiterate. Proportions varied from region to region. In London by the end of the 17th century illiteracy may have been down to two-thirds or a quarter; for women about a half. There were fluctuations over time: a rapid growth in literacy immediately after the Henrician Reformation and again in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign; a recession from 1580 to 1610, and again in the Civil War decade, followed by a new advance in the 1650s, and a slowing down after 1660. The initial rapid rise may perhaps be attributed to a new emphasis on Bible-reading; the other fluctuations probably derive from economic factors – though the stagnation after 1660 must relate to the upper-class feeling that the revolutionary decades had shown that too much education was bad for the lower orders.