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Rebecca Lemon. Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England. Haney Foundation Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 280. $65.00 (cloth).

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attention in recent years among early modern historians. This works well in tandemwith Law’s focus on adaption and negotiation. Communities, she writes, are both real and imagined and they experience… Click to show full abstract

attention in recent years among early modern historians. This works well in tandemwith Law’s focus on adaption and negotiation. Communities, she writes, are both real and imagined and they experience forces that shape them from both within and without. Cambridge, then, was simultaneously one community (as the university) and a gathering of multiple communities (the colleges). And even then, communities could expand beyond geography and involve imagined religious identities like “the Godly” or Catholics. She highlights, too, how the university, with a revolving door of students and fellows, was always in flux, how it was youthful and all male, and how its culture encouraged not only argumentation but argumentativeness. Further, Law tells us how the boundaries of these communities were porous, both among the colleges and between the university and the drivers of national concern. People both within the university and without would implore the chancellor, a nonresidential political figure at court, to intervene when things were not to their liking. Likewise, outside authorities might initiate visitations, as in 1559. The results of such interventions were never straightforward. The communities that welcomed the appointment of Martin Bucer in Edwardian Cambridge likewise exhumed his corpse and burned it during the reign of Mary. Andrew Perne of Peterhouse, who famously preached at the burning, was later a faithful conformist in the reign of Elizabeth, although he was often suspected of crypto-Catholicism by colleagues. Law shows us a Cambridge in which many also simply “lived through” religious change, arguing that the loudest voices ought not to monopolize our attention. Likewise, we should not be surprised that certain colleges, even at Cambridge, had links to Catholic seminary priests or that many within the university through the reign of Elizabeth found ways to live out a quiet non-conformity. While there were clear signs of Puritanism such as the mass refusal of the fellows of St. John’s to wear the surplice and Walter Mildmay’s foundation of Emmanuel with Laurence Chadderton as the first master, Cambridge also witnessed the attack on Calvinism in the famous sermon of William Barrett in 1595. Law argues that Barret’s sermon was not an aberration but rather underlines that religious conservatism, even Catholicism, within Cambridge has been underestimated. Law’s work is a welcome entry in the historiography of the English reformation, a solid addition to studies of the way communities engaged religious change in the sixteenth century, and it certainly expands the history of Cambridge more broadly.

Keywords: rebecca lemon; law; foundation; cambridge; university; early modern

Journal Title: Journal of British Studies
Year Published: 2019

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