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196 Karl Gunther in a Rich and Important Study, Karl Gunther 196 book reviews Karl Gunther Reformation Unbound. Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2014, x + 284 pp. isbn 9781107074484. £65; us$99. In a rich and important study, Karl Gunther reassesses the character of the English church under the Tudors. Combing through both well-known and lesser-studied religious and polemical tracts, Gunther uncovers a “spectrum of voices” (p. 15) who called for radical change in the church. While radical ecclesiological visions have been typically ascribed to radical Puritans and separatists during Elizabeth’s reign, Gunther persuasively argues that these visions had existed in the minds of English reformers since Henry’s day. Gunther’s first and best chapter explores a wealth of radical ecclesiologi- cal expressions in the Henrician church, illuminating the extent of evangelical challenges to traditional institutions. Combing through the works of familiar figures such as William Tyndale, Robert Barnes, and François Lambert he tries to discover their opinions on a range of issues, including the eradication of bishops, the creation of new parishes, congregational discipline, and even the freedom for parishioners to form separatist congregations in case of theologi- cally or morally errant pastors. Perhaps even more important than their radical nature is the way these ecclesiological visions completely contradicted quasi- official publications of the 1530s and 1540s which claimed that the Bible had not set down rules of church governance and that therefore it was for the monarch to determine them. While chapter one antedates what scholars have considered for a long time to be later developments, chapter two ventures somewhere new. It investigates evangelical attitudes concerning peace and unity, widely recognized as vital to a healthy commonwealth, revealing that many radical evangelicals understood the Reformation to bring about ongoing battle between themselves, a godly minority, and the rest of the world. Far from establishing a national church or being aligned with the monarch, some evangelicals saw persecution as an inevitable consequence of faithful adherence to God’s truth, and Gunther shows that this conviction left no room for a unified national church, but instead rendered the king a partisan figure ruling divided subjects. Gunther also demonstrates that this ongoing battle between Christ’s followers and what they took to be Antichrist was not merely metaphorical, with evangelicals urging Henry viii to eradicate Christ’s enemies through violence. Chapter three treads on familiar ground, the topic of Marian anti-Nico- demism. Gunther argues that calls to reject dissimulation played a significant part in fueling the activism of more radical Protestants in the reigns of Henry © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/18712428-09601014 book reviews 197 and Mary. While that will not be news to scholars of the English Reformation, Gunther’s contention that the anti-Nicodemism ethos continued throughout the reign of Elizabeth will be. That a cohort of Elizabethan Protestants were anxious not to “deny Christ before men” (p. 100) even under a Protestant regime uncovers a relatively unexplored feature of Elizabethan Puritanism. Like anti-Nicodemism, Protestant ‘resistance theory’ developed in response to the hostile regime of Mary i. Also like anti-Nicodemism, it was supposed to have been spent as an ideological force by the time Mary’s sister Eliza- beth acceded to the throne in 1558. Gunther proves instead that this resistance theory was pivotal in shaping Elizabethan Protestants’ views on the task of reconstructing Protestantism in England. Through a close reading of James Pilkington’s 1560 commentary on the book of Haggai, Gunther demonstrates that God’s commandment to establish true religion even in the face of oppo- sition from rulers, had ongoing purchase for Puritans and separatists who did not believe reform happening fast enough. Chapter five again revisits an episode occurring under the reign of Mary which had later consequences under Elizabeth: the ‘Troubles at Frankfurt,’ a conflict among exiles concerning the use of the Book of Common Prayer. Long seen as part of an ongoing debate over adiaphora that extended from Edward’s reign through Elizabeth’s, Gunther makes the sharp observation that the debate among Frankfurt exiles did not, as other scholars have claimed, foreshadow the split between Elizabethan Puritans and conformists; rather, the arguments made by both sides would later be used by Puritans against the use of vestments. This underscores just how widespread opposition to ‘remnants of popery’ was in early Elizabethan English religious culture. Chapter six then revisits that vestments controversy of 1565–1566, paying special attention to the role that Catholic polemicists, usually sidelined in scholarly consideration of this debate, contributed to the public debates about vestments, adiaphora, and religious authority. Gunther trolls through works by Thomas Harding, Stanislaw Hosius, and others to reveal that these writers had a real impact on Puritan and conformist responses. The chapter also shows that the conformist case for wearing vestments was more robust than previously thought, and the overall result is a much fuller picture of this episode, including Archbishop Matthew Parker’s position. Chapter seven addresses the all-important claim to continuity that drove Puritan and conformist polemic in Elizabethan England. As radical Puritans became more vocal in their dissatisfaction with the slow pace of religious reform, their opponents charged them with abandoning the cause of earlier martyrs of the reformed English Church: Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, and John Bradford. Gunther surveys the responses of Puritans and separatists Church History and Religious Culture 96 (2016) 179–234.
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