Alec Ryrie - Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford University Press), 2013

498pp., £45, hard, ISBN 978-0-19-956572-6

In 1500, Britain was a Catholic country like the rest of Christian Europe.  By 1600, it had been a variegated Protestant country, on and off, for over half a century.  A political imposition from the centre, the Reformation also reflected the growth of humanistic and religious ideas from below.  Yet little has been written, until now, about what being Protestant actually meant.  Alec Ryrie provides the first comprehensive and elegantly written account of what it actually meant to live a Protestant life in England and Scotland between c. 1530-1640, drawing on a rich mixture of contemporary devotional works, sermons, diaries, biographies, and autobiographies to uncover the lived experience of early modern Protestantism.

Beginning from the intense and multifaceted emotions of Protestantism, Ryrie explores practices of prayer, of family and public worship and of reading and writing through people's lives from childhood through conversion and vocation to the deathbed. He examines what Protestant piety drew from its Catholic predecessors and from contemporaries and situates that piety in material realities such as posture, food and tears. He concludes that being Protestant in the British Reformations was the meeting of intensity (a religion which sought authentic feeling above all, and which dreaded hypocrisy and hard-heartedness) with dynamism (a progressive religion, relentlessly pursuing sanctification and dreading idleness). That combination, for good or ill, gave the Protestant experience its particular quality of restless, creative zeal. The Protestant devotional experience also shows us that this was a broad-based religion: for all the differences across time, between two countries, between men and women, and between puritans and conformists, this was recognisably a unified culture, in which common experiences and practices cut across supposed divides. Alec Ryrie shows us Protestantism, not as the preachers on all sides imagined it, but as it was really lived.  The book takes us beyond the notion of the Reformation as rhetoric to an understanding of it as not merely a lived experience but as a life in which religious faith played the seminal role in determining people's actions and decisions.  It is a major study of the Reformation as perceived and lived by those who played little real role in its introduction but who were fundamental to why it succeeded.