What is Reformation? Frederick Smith here aims to recover the reforming activities of those who left England in the mid-sixteenth century to avoid the renovations to ecclesiastical structures that Henry VIII and Edward VI were undertaking and to participate in the less immediately and dangerously political worlds of religious reform on the continent. Were they exiles or refugees? Some certainly, though they wouldn't have used the term and may not have agreed with the concept. Yet they were out of sorts with the types of reform that the Tudor monarchs were pushing, and in some cases this brought existential threats. In the course of their transnational movements through Italy, the Netherlands, France, and elsewhere, they could find more congenial models for their own evolving views about spirituality and ecclesiology, working in to the many spiritual currents still washing over the continent in the decades before Trent concluded. For some this encouraged a degree of openness to the varieties of spiritual experience possible within what was still, to some extent, a Church Universal. The travels of others led them in the direction of more prescription and discipline as they sought to Make Rome Great Again, a movement in which they were far from alone.
Smith here works with the roughly 200 individuals, largely male, who formed this early wave of migrants, and he seeks to make their transnational movements the focus of the study. Whatever their reasons for leaving England – and some were far from staunch Catholics when they did – he sees their mobility as the defining feature of the Catholicisms that they came to form. The plural is the point. Roughly half were laity and among the remainder about two-thirds were regular and one-third secular clergy. They had no single origin or destination. Most were people who had something to lose – their family, education, and status made them potential targets. This also meant that most had the financial means to travel, the advanced education to make something out of that mobility, and the social networks to ease the way. A third went to the Low Countries, a slightly smaller proportion no further than Scotland, and a little over a fifth to Italy. Only 5 percent went to France, and even fewer to Spain or Ireland. They traveled to and through places with rich spiritual traditions reaching back to the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries that fed strong reform movements oblivious to the predilections of English monarchs.
Smith divides his study into four roughly chronological stages: Departure (mainly under Henry VIII and Edward VI), Translation, Repatriation (under Mary I), and Elizabethan legacies. Of these, the second is perhaps the most engaging, as it is here that he shows these catholics becoming Catholics by means of engagement with those other believers they were encountering on the continent. Terming this “Translation” may seem to invoke John Bossy's Christianity Translated, that disciplined and disciplining Christianity which reformers of all stripes seemed to find most compelling, regardless of their stands on Transubstantiation or the Priesthood of All Believers. Yet Smith means something more moderate, open, and potentially irenic. These mobile English Christians were translating across borders and languages and between past and present, and the experience was taking them beyond the insular English faith they'd been raised in. Smith's discussion of their translations across Time, Space, and Confessions is the most fruitful and accomplished part of the book. He makes the compelling case that it was their transnational movements around Europe, engaging with other traditions, that allowed them to shape the deeper and broader Catholicism that would then take root in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Smith's framing of the analysis is clear and accomplished. He joins a more general movement of the past decade or two that uses the refugee and exile experience as a window into the Reformation. Some historians have emphasized how forced mobility generated intolerance among some refugees, who then imposed orthodoxy when, as in England and the Netherlands, they returned from exile to take up high church positions in their former homelands. Others have countered with examples of exiled or refugee Christians who became more open and tolerant in practice, if not always in their theology and ecclesiology. The truth lies in the middle of course, and no single characterization can express the wide range of experiences among those forced to be mobile. Smith emphasizes the distinction and decisively places himself among those who prefer to speak of a moderating mobility, yet then is frequently forced to acknowledge that there were in fact many mobile reformers who fell into the latter and stiffer camp. Some of this may be gendered. It's indeed the case that males were the ones heading for the continent, but some female reformers still in England gained transnational contacts and achieved a mobility of mind through pen and print, and their impact in shaping later English Catholicism was perhaps even greater. Beyond this, after noting how much the mobile English reformers learned from their engagement with continental counterparts who were drawing on long-standing local traditions to revivify spiritual practices, Smith emphasizes that this shows the continuing value of the term “Counter Reformation.” It seems the opposite of what the book demonstrates so well, and it narrows the field unnecessarily. The Catholic Reform tradition predated the varieties of Protestantism by many decades if not a century, and many of the Catholic reformers that English refugees encountered were far more concerned with intensifying the faith of their own coreligionists than with countering heretics over the confessional border. Reverting to a binary term beloved by nineteenth-century church historians who focused on confessional and political conflict seems out of step with how we frame Reform and Reformation now, and indeed with how Smith himself frames this discussion of Transnational Catholicism. What is Reformation? Smith's book explores the fluid, dynamic, multi-faceted, and reciprocal nature of religious reform with a breadth that moves well beyond the parochial limits of that older terminology, which is perhaps better consigned to the antiquarians’ shelf.
