Reformation Reputations: The Power of the Individual in English Reformation History ed. by David J. Crankshaw and George W. C. Gross (review)

Reviewed by: Reformation Reputations: The Power of the Individual in English Reformation History ed. by David J. Crankshaw and George W. C. Gross Alexandra Walsham Reformation Reputations: The Power of the Individual in English Reformation History. Edited by David J. Crankshaw and George W. C. Gross. (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 2021. Pp. xxvii, 474. 149. 99. ISBN 978-3-030-55433-0. ) Recent trends in English Reformation history have arguably eclipsed the powerful part played by prominent personalities in the making of religious change. Inspired by the quincentenary of Luther's protest against the papacy in 1517, Reformation Reputations reasserts the value of a biographical perspective on these developments. Predicated on the observation that reputation lies "in the eye of the beholder" (3), its aim is to illuminate the agency and afterlives of figures who enjoyed celebrity and notoriety in their own time and in the centuries since. The editors' lengthy, slightly meandering, but helpful introduction situates the collection in the "longer durée of the history of fame" (3) and celebrity. It charts the contribution of humanism and reform to the erosion of inherited heroes and heroines, traces the development of life-writing and the commemorative post-mortem media of epitaphs and monuments, and briefly considers memorialization in television and film. The editors distinguish their endeavor from the current surge of work on early modern memory, but their reluctance to engage with the insights emerging from this burgeoning body of historiography feels like a missed opportunity. Steering around the heavily studied Tudor monarchs, the nine excellent essays that follow focus on a relatively familiar cast of characters, but with a few surprises. They investigate individuals from both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide, from archbishops, missionaries, and martyrs, to a professional author and three End Page 417 episcopal wives. They probe how reputations were constructed, perpetuated, and manipulated: by the modes of self-fashioning deployed by the protagonists themselves, by the polemical strategies of their enemies, by the encomiastic accounts of their friends and admirers, and by subsequent generations of scholars consciously and unconsciously molding them in accordance with their own ecclesiastical, political, and cultural priorities. David Crankshaw discusses how and why Matthew Parker has been selectively remembered less for his ecclesiastical activities as Elizabeth I's first archbishop than as an antiquary and collector of books; Felicity Heal deftly assesses John Whitgift's shifting reputation from scourge of the puritans to architect and gatekeeper of the Anglican via media. By contrast, Ashley Null's essay is only indirectly concerned with Thomas Cranmer's post-Reformation afterlife, offering a revisionist evaluation of the medieval and patristic roots of Cranmer's theology of salvation and the Eucharist that challenges existing interpretations. Susan Wabuda tackles Anne Askew, the evangelical icon whose courageous death at the stake was immortalized by John Bale and John Foxe, arguing that she herself was "the premier shaper of her ultimate reputation" (257). Rachel Basch's essay rescues the wives of three noted reformers from obscurity, underlining the "act of rebellion" (227) entailed in entering into clerical marriage in the early Reformation. Peter Lake and Michael Questier provide an illuminating reconstruction of the intra-Catholic controversies of which the much cited "autobiography" of the Jesuit John Gerard was a product, while Victor Houliston examines Robert Persons's dual status as Counter Reformation hero and traitorous villain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries together with his recent historiographical rehabilitation. Bill Sheils examines the politics of the canonization of Thomas More and John Fisher in 1935, particularly the transmutation of the former into "a man for all seasons" and a defender of freedom of conscience. Elizabeth Evenden-Kenyon takes up the "Janus-faced" (373) figure of Anthony Munday, the writer turned government informer whose confessional affiliation has consistently been disputed, concluding that Munday's equivocations were deliberately designed to efface his own identity. In different ways, all the essays in this valuable volume bear out the editors' observation that "there was no such thing, in the sixteenth century, as disinterested biography" (45). They highlight the agency that their subjects exercised in crafting their own reputations in the present and for the future. They underline how far the sources upon. . .