Being Protestant in Reformation Britain

by Alec Ryrie

The Reformation was about ideas and power, but it was also about real human lives. Alec Ryrie provides the first comprehensive account of what it actually meant to live a Protestant life in England and Scotland between 1530 and 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 surprisingly urgent, multifaceted emotions of Protestantism, Ryrie explores practices of prayer, of family and public worship, and of reading and writing, tracking them through the life course from childhood through conversion and vocation to the deathbed. He examines what Protestant piety drew from its Catholic predecessors and contemporaries, and grounds that piety in material realities such as posture, food, and tears.

This perspective shows us what it meant to be Protestant in the British Reformations: a 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.

Genres: History, Religion, Nonfiction

516 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Alec Ryrie is a prize-winning historian of the Reformation and Protestantism. He is the author of Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt and Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World. Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University and Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, London.

Reviews

[Chad D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exactly what it says on the tin. A hearteningly exhaustive account of the emotional lives and lived existence of Early Modern Protestants. Stuffed with exemplary quotations from the insightful to the highly amusing. Ryrie's own framing is very helpful--strong, easy transitions; commentary studded with insight; a lot of dry humour.

So it's practically everything it needs to be.

Yet have I an emotional reservation of my own that has to do with tone. I've noticed before that Ryrie (whom I admire very much as a writer) gently skewers some of his subjects' excesses, contradictions, and follies. It is gentle, but it is a skewering. Hard to resist. Especially because many of our contemporary religious culture's follies find root or early growth in this period. But if the point of the book is to understand the emotional life of early Protestants, this critique works against that point, produces emotional distance. We are still viewing their inside from the outside. And as a historian he struggles to account for their religious emotions, often giving several explanatory possibilities, from the material or political or social to the religious. The possibility that they would call a probability or even a certainty, that they really were in touch with the Divine, he can't really invite us into. He can suggest it, and he does, gesturing toward behaviours that seem difficult to reduce to material causes. But those gestures remain essentially apophatic or agnostic. That may be the limit of what the history of emotions can do. But I wish sympathy or charity could go a little farther.

I've learned a tremendous amount from this book, which gets timelier by the year. This book is a magisterial description of the emotional life of early Protestants. Even though at its end I am not quite sure what to feel, myself, about their feelings.

[Suzanne McDonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a superb book! A treasure trove of information, and wonderfully engagingly written! Ryrie distills a vast amount of primary source material to give us an anatomy of a 16th C - 1640s English / Scottish Protestant soul and to get us to the heart of devotional practices - private, household, and public, and from daily schedules to physical postures - and to describe what all of this meant for a life well-lived. Along the way, it is also massively, if indirectly, illuminating for studies in the literature, theology, and history of the period. This is incredibly well informed, highly judicious in its assessments, sympathetic and sensitive (although not uncritically so) - and full of dry wit! An absolute gem!

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

If one is interested in how people in history experienced religion, one could hardly do better than turn to this book by Ryrie. His remarkable command of a wide spectrum of primary literature lets him put the English Protestant religious experience into a number of useful analytic categories while still letting it seem to speak for itself. His argument that both Puritans and non-Anglo-Catholic English Church loyalists shared a common religious experience and vocabulary offers a useful move away from old divisions. His opening chapters on the affective life of English Protestants are superb. They grip the reader in powerful prose while overturning a number of assumptions. The chapter on life cycle near the end integrates much of the earlier book in a useful fashion.