Book review: Reformation: The Dangerous Birth of the Modern World

Published on Saturday 8 August 2009 16:44

REFORMATION: THE DANGEROUS BIRTH OF THE MODERN WORLD Harry Reid Saint Andrew Press, £24.99 Review: Michael Fry

THERE is scope for a popular, multinational study of the Reformation in all its complexity and human drama. The subtitle of this book promises as much, and its blurb goes so far as to recall a time when "Europe went through one of the most remarkable and turbulent periods in its history". The reader is all agog. Then follow 48 pages of over-elaborate, if not deflating, preliminaries before the story opens "on a battlefield in the English Midlands" with the troopers of King Henry VII about to chop up King Richard III.

The approach remains oblique throughout. If I had won a commission for a book on the Reformation I would have started among the sturdy peasants and gritty miners of late medieval Bohemia. The kingdom was divided racially and linguistically between Germans hating the Italians who dominated their Catholic religion, and Czechs hating the Germans who dominated their feudal economy. Into that cockpit of spitting resentments strode Jan Hus, prophet and bearer of revolutionary ideas for church and state. He liberated his nation, not in the event for good, but he made reform live for ordinary men and women, especially after he was martyred.

From Hus's University of Prague, the same revolutionary ideas were carried by a group of disgruntled professors, who stomped off to found the University of Leipzig in nearby Saxony, another land of sturdy peasants and gritty miners. From among them a man called Martin Luther was born in 1483. He would transmit the ideas to the world.

I set out my scheme in a little detail because it seems to me to capture the concept of a dangerous and a modern Reformation in the way Reid's does not. To him the Reformation is in essence the English Reformation, which takes up nearly half his narrative chapters, with the Scottish Reformation second, but the rest of the field nowhere.

Yet by the standard of Bohemia or Saxony, let alone Switzerland or Holland, the English Reformation was hardly a Reformation at all. In theology it added up to nothing: other nations have theology, the English have hot water bottles, a Hungarian academic once remarked to me.

Oddly for a writer who is a professed Scottish Nationalist, Reid espouses the same anglocentrism as Simon Schama or David Starkey. No doubt this goes back to his time in the school of modern history at Oxford, fondly recalled as the ultimate source of the present study, where in his final exams he had to do two papers in what was labelled English history.

But when Reid comes home to Scotland this approach leads him astray. To him the Scottish Reformation is at bottom an extension of the English Reformation in its final form, that is to say, as promoted and protected by Queen Elizabeth I. She also promoted and protected the Dutch Reformation but I do not think anyone would think it, on that account, an extension of the English Reformation.

The same with the Scottish Reformation: to the extent it resembled any foreign Reformation, it most resembled the French Reformation that never happened, the Reformation that might have been inspired from John Calvin's Geneva.

Calvin was another liberator, on the same scale as Hus and Luther, but in a different way. They vindicated the honest faith of simple folk. Calvin liberated the mind in his pellucid prose. His was a God who revealed himself not in the bowels or in the heart but in the brain. And that was the same God as the Scots worshipped through the intellect, the one they meant when they commended to the uncomprehending English, later in the Solemn League and Covenant, "the example of the best reformed kirks".

I do not think historians from any other nation than England would regard the English Reformation as central in the way Reid does. It might have been an interesting case of Reformation from the top down rather than from the bottom up, but in every respect it was deviant – not to say inconsequential – with its constant twisting and turning at the whim of monarchs. If it is to be used as guide to the sundering of the Christian West in the 16th century, then the resulting study will (as this one does) lack focus and discipline. And it will miss what was never obvious in England, where in the end everything always carries on as before: that life, of mind or spirit, would never be the same again.

Harry Reid is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, 16 August, 2.30pm, with Edwin Moore and Roderick Graham