Society and Culture in Early Modern England by David CressyReview by: Gary JenkinsThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 475-476Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20477371 .

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Book Reviews 475

leadership. Mendelson argues that Elizabeth succeeded by staying true to the recognized female virtues of chastity, obedience, piety, and silence. In each of these categories, the queen took advantage of certain exceptions and portrayed herself as a woman whose circumstances had made her reliant on her courage and resourcefulness. Carole Levin and Jo Eldridge Carney convey the dichotomous roles of capable ruler and young princess from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries and show a disturbing continuity between past and present perceptions of female agency. The editors find that modern views of Elizabeth perpetuate myths about the capabilities of young women and have not yet merged the private, personal life of the princess with the public, politically successful life of the queen.

The essays in this collection demonstrate that early modern English queenship cannot be completely understood through the lens of political, religious, or diplomatic sources.The authors add cultural and literary sources to traditional historical source material, but they do not contextualize Elizabeth into a fictive queen brimming with female agency. Instead, they constitute a complex and astute monarch who won the loyalty of her subjects by successfully identifying herself with her country.

Society and Culture in Early Modern England. David Cressy. Variorum Collected Studies. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. 344 pp. $105.95. ISBN 0-86078-91 1-X.

REVIEWED BY: Gary Jenkins, Eastern University

David Cressy's first seven essays deal with the social and educational parameters of early modern England.The first essay treats the difficulty historians have encountered in indexing Tudor and Stuart social stratification, a difficulty shared by the subjects of their studies, who struggled to classify themselves in a world in which social status did not always equal financial status, a new emerging norm of description.The next two essays, written sixteen years apart, comprehend the question of levels and extent of literacy. Using signatures as a measure, Cressy attempts to discern not only who could read at any given time, but what discernible difference this ability made for economic advancement. Cressy's fourth piece surveys how the printed word, and most importantly the Bible, assumed a place in the Protestant nation once obtained by relics, a status which Cressy identifies as totemic. Used not only for the swearing of oaths and the warding off of ill, in New England a Bible was once used as a stan dard to lead a mob to battle. In essays 5 and 7, Cressy treats the expanding educational world of Elizabethan andJacobean schools, pedagogy's putative ends, and the fortunes of the teach ing vocation. For many the proliferation of schools was seen as a way to correct manners, though some saw in schools the danger of educating boys beyond their station (the admin istrators of Canterbury's grammar school so argued against the reforming ideas of Cranmer). Yet such a state depended on the ability of those who taught, many of whom could have used a great deal more education themselves, their remuneration often reflecting the level of their competence. Consequently, while the number of grammar schools increased, this did not bring with it a necessary broadening of educational opportunity.The better schools still catered to the elite of the society, whose schools usually afforded them the better teachers. Sandwiched between the essays on educational opportunities and the prospects for teaching is a recounting of Francis Bacon's attempts in 1612 to circumvent, to the benefit of himself and the crown, the provisions of Thomas Sutton's will, the bulk of whose munificence pro vided the founding of a classical grammar school at Charterhouse. Given his own curricular bent, Bacon saw this as a waste of money. Thus, Cressy does not see Bacon's actions as base,

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476 Sixteenth Century journal XXXVI/2 (2005)

but motivated by his own standing at court as well as by his conservative notion, shared with

the Canterbury admi-inistrators, that too many grammar schools threatened the social order.

Playing the iconoclast in essay 1 1, Cressy takes on an aspect of Renaissance literary

criticism that sees Elizabethan and Jacobean England as undulating in its gender identity, a

reality testified to by the prorminence in the literary sources given to invectives against cross

dressing. For Cressy these instances are little more than Puritan commonplaces as part of

their diatribes against the stage. He builds his argument around a court case against one

Thomas Salmon who donned female garb to gain access to a birthing chamber to take part

in some postpartum gaiety. Salmon's offense, however, was hardly seen as the wearing of

women's clothes as much as it was the breach of a peculiarly femi'nine space. Cressy then

interrogates whether male characters depicted on stage in women's clothes were caught in

gender confusion, but finds that far from inhibiting masculine tendencies, the female clothes

actually enhanced their male personas. Again the iconoclast in essay 12, on the churching of

women, a rite often depicted as a patriarchal attempt at the ritual derogation of women,

Cressy maintains that the rite embraced female celebration, thanksgiving for deliverance

from childbirth, the end of the "green month," and was defined not by male parameters, but

by ferminine festivities. Essays 10 and 13 both touch on the extent and limits of kinship,

Cressy asserting, contrary to much received opinion, that kinship in Tudor and Stuart

England was important, citing the logic contained in several letters that touch on the issue

(10). In essay 13, he considers the lessons to be gathered from funerary preferences and wills.

Kinship is only a part of this essay's concern, but it nonetheless gives further light on essay

10, published originally three years previous to this one. In essays 9 and 15 Cressy takes up

the topic of the social changes arising from changes brought to the church calendar by the

Reformation. In essay 9 he notes how couples in New England, dominated by the Puritan

revision of the church calendar, were no longer barred from marrying in periods of penance

(Lent and Advent). Though altered by the Reformation, the retention of Lent and Advent as

penitential seasons, at least initially, still brought with it a prohibition on wedding ceremonies. In essay 14 Cressy's emphasis is less on the implications of the church calendar

for society, than on the appropriation of new holidays, fraught with political significance, for

ecclesio-political ends, most notably the anniversaries of the Gunpowder Plot and Elizabeth's

ascension, 5 and 17 November respectively. Whereas John Cosin sought to reinvigorate the

calendar with saints' days, Puritans sought rhetorical gain against the perceived Romanism

of the Laudians by valorizing the November observances. In essay 15 Cressy compares the

political crises of 1584 and 1696, both animated by England's fear for its monarchs' lives. In

the first instance Cressy divines the actions of the Privy Council, led by Walsingham and

Burghley, to unify the nation in an association around fealty and revenge. In the second he

sees the Whigs using the former instance as a means to unite the nation, but at the expense

of their political adversaries.

Collected now in one volume, Cressy's disparate articles, given the breadth of their

subject matter, should appeal to students of almost any aspect ofTudor and Stuart England.

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