This latest edition of the Bulletin is a welcome addition to the growing corpus on the reception of Reformation thought. The theme of this collection of seventeen articles and two afterwords, together with a brief introduction, is the cultural history of the reinvention of the Reformation in the nineteenth century. The articles are categorised into three areas: invocation, reinvention and negotiation, and cover a wide range of literary, musical, economic, sociological and theological themes, to name but a few. Though such a range of subjects may beg the question of consistency and continuity, the articles are of a high standard, and their broad focus adds to the attraction of this volume. Richard Rex, in his introductory essay ‘The morning star or the sunset of the Reformation?’, sets the tone for the volume in that the perception of the Reformation in nineteenth-century England was under threat from the Enlightenment, Irish immigration and Catholic emancipation, as well as forces of reaction, and the increasing influence of the science of history. These forces could no longer be ignored insofar as they influenced the the Reformation legacy in Britain and Ireland. Eamon Duffy writes in his afterword that ‘the writers of the Reformation in Nineteenth Century Britain were seldom if ever disinterested’, and it is this lively engagement with the subject that shines through the vast majority of these essays. Of particular note in this volume are essays by John Wolffe, Andrew Atherstone and Vivienne Westbrook. Wolffe's essay on ‘The commemoration of the Reformation and mid nineteenth-century Evangelical identity’ examines the polemical usage of anniversaries by Evangelicals, such as the tercentenary in 1835 of Coverdale's English Bible, and the establishment of the Parker Society in 1840, which, Wolffe argues, demonstrate a desire to re-invent the Reformation in their own image on the part of Evangelicals. Atherstone's article on ‘Memorializing William Tyndale’ is a further example of how the legacy of Reformation grandees was downplayed or brazenly altered to suit contemporary polemical aims. Westbrook's piece on ‘The Victorian Reformation Bible: acts and monuments’ examines issues surrounding the increasing popularity of paratexts and annotated versions, highlighting a need to reclaim the King James Bible, the ‘jewel in the crown’, through Reformation heritage, quoting Larsen's belief that the Bible was the ‘common cultural currency of the Victorians’. Also of note is Peter Nockles's ‘The Reformation revised’, which reminds us that nineteenth-century reception of the Reformation was far from binary, and provides much-needed documentation of attempts to transcend traditional Catholic/Protestant categorisations. It is with Jeremy Morris, in his afterword, that the importance of the issues examined in this volume can be summed up: ‘even the most apparently scrupulous historians bind the pre-occupations of the present into their study of the past’. With the forthcoming five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation in 2017, this is a timely publication, which should serve as a salutary reminder of the dangers of interpreting history too much from the contexts within which we ourselves write – if indeed that can ever be avoided.
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