https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2867-5363
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Alessandro Arienzo, Polly Ha, Jonathan D. Moore, and Edda Frankot, eds. Reformed Government: Puritanism, Historical Contingency, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Late Elizabethan England., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1344–1345, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae328
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This volume is a valuable critical edition of an anonymous manuscript entitled Reformed Government preserved in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. The text can be dated to approximately 1590–1594, and to date, there is no evidence of who its author was; indeed, contrary to earlier assessments, it cannot be attributed to Thomas Cartwright or Walter Traves although it is part of a collection of texts amassed by the latter that came to him through the Archbishop Ussher’s library. This book constitutes not only an important critical edition of a text of historical, political, and religious significance but also, thanks to the editors’ extensive introduction, is an important tool for analyzing and understanding the political and religious rifts that marked the 1590s and the final years of the Elizabethan era.
Reformed Government provides an enhanced understanding of a pivotal moment in the history of Puritan radicalism and the consolidation of the Anglican theoretical horizon, placing the religious conflicts that marked the entire succeeding century in a broader historical context while clarifying some theoretical assumptions. In her introduction, Polly Ha places Reformed Government within the framework of religious conflicts in the Elizabethan age, interpreting it as an important moment in the conflict between Anglicans and Reformed Christians, particularly Presbyterians. The conflict, however, precisely in Reformed Government, appears ecclesiastical and more broadly political and social. Indeed, the last decade of Elizabeth I’s reign coincided not only with a hardening and authoritarian closure of English monarchical political culture but also with some of the most economically and socially difficult years for Tudor England. A shift in Elizabethan government, then, was marked by a shift from moderate religious policies accompanying the construction of a balanced monarchical political culture toward the pursuit of a more rigid Anglicanism accompanying an authoritarian assertion of imperial power.
