Abstract
Invisible Worlds seeks to unearth and understand sixteenth- and seventeenth-century beliefs in what lay beyond the perceptible boundaries of existence: the afterlife, the supernatural, the celestial. In retrieving not just what early moderns believed, but when and how and why, Marshall burnishes his already unrivalled reputation as a subtle, sensitive and unusually sympathetic interpreter of the English Reformation.
In his elegant and intellectually powerful introduction to this volume of essays, Marshall argues that the Reformation was primarily experienced as a disruptive cultural event, one that ‘was more a matter of unsettling existing patterns of thought and belief than of rapidly implanting universally agreed replacement models’ (p. 7). This framework offers an exceedingly useful means of understanding the most recent turn in Reformation historiography, in which historians have begun to demonstrate how it was a two-way process, a negotiation between theological authorities and a newly anxious and questioning laity.
Invisible Worlds thus explores the imperceptible realms that were so relevant to the ontological uncertainties that proceeded out of Protestant theology. The book is split into two parts, the first of which deals with the afterlife – heaven, hell and the suddenly abolished purgatory – while the second pays respectful attention to the physical emanations of these realms in which early moderns fervently believed: angels, whose presence was regularly reported at deathbeds, and ghosts, whose wanderings testified to an existence beyond them; but also fairies and goblins – figures of the persistent folk belief that powered much of the lay response to the Reformation.
Marshall places himself in the shadow of Sir Keith Thomas, but emphasizes that ‘the divorce between “religion” and “magic” was a considerably slower and messier business’ (p. 12) than many have since assumed. In this volume’s final chapter, for example, Marshall shows how the case of Ann Jeffries, a woman purported in a pamphlet of 1696 to have been fed for six months solely by fairies, highlights the tension between official and popular attitudes towards the supernatural, and in particular the complex ways in which fairy belief became ensnared in anti-popery and fear of demonism.
It was not just the supernatural that proved so knotty. In his chapter on death and remembrance in the Reformation world, Marshall argues convincingly that the period’s ‘cultural responses to the dead … were complex and multilayered’ (p. 32); while in his chapter on hell he shows how Protestants were rather more reluctant than Catholics to ‘pronounce definitively’ (p. 41) on the literal nature of eternal punishment. While the abolition of purgatory was a hugely significant move, there was less clarity on its consequences, and on the mechanics of heavenly ascension most especially. As a result, ‘theological absolutes … were necessarily processed in intimate and pastoral contexts’ (p. 91).
Throughout, Marshall advocates respect for ‘the integrity, the autonomy, the strangeness’ (p. 2) of the past; Invisible Worlds exhibits this sort of nuance, attention to detail and empathetic imagination. Those who read this wise and supple book will emerge with a considerably more complete understanding of the nature of belief – both during the Reformation and more generally.