A familiar image of the English Reformation is one of destruction, of Henry VIII dissolving nine hundred monasteries, scattering their rich manuscript collections to the four winds, and transforming the English landscape into a graveyard of Catholic belief and practice.
In her new book Reading Practice, Melissa Reynolds presents us with a different sixteenth-century world, one in which medieval manuscripts, far from lost or obsolete, were part of the fabric of everyday life. From the fifteenth century, the literate gentry and middling classes had started to build collections of devotional texts and works of natural history, helping them to navigate the vicissitudes of the divinely ordered world. These manuscripts had long lives; they were family books, passed down through generations, evolving in the hands of new owners, who over time annotated, amended, augmented and censored the texts they inherited, reflecting the new ages in which they lived. While monastery walls decayed with disuse, folios of religious and medicinal works were kept alive by new generations of Protestants.
In his 2006 Marking the Hours, Eamon Duffy followed English Protestants as they scrawled across their fifteenth-century Catholic Books of Hours. Ignoring the myriad decrees enjoining them to destroy their old prayer books or urging them to buy the 1545 official Protestant royal primer, many otherwise devout reformists preferred instead to include Catholic books in their new religious practices. There was no one way in which they did so. Over the course of the 1530s and 40s, one reformist reader, possibly the London clergyman John Brygandyne, amended his fifteenth-century Hours by deleting certain popish prayers. At the same time, he added traditional Catholic prayers to a guardian angel; he also drew illuminated initials to imitate the decoration of his original Hours. In a more conventional case of censorship, another owner deleted prayers to the Virgin and sacrament from a fifteenth-century Marian primer. But even this begs the question of why he or she still used it. Perhaps, as Duffy considers, Catholic manuscripts helped people adjust to change through a comforting consistency of habit.
The same goes for books of natural history, Reynolds shows, which had as much to do with religion as prayer books; people’s relationships to their bodies and the divinely ordered natural world were fundamentally intertwined with religious belief. And again, Protestants preferred to amend or update their fifteenth-century manuscripts, rather than discard them or seek the same knowledge in printed books. After all, Protestants still believed in prognostications, in reading the heavens for godly signs, building upon the rich fifteenth-century culture of almanacs.
But Reynold’s work shows us that the arc of continuity is only one part of the story. The medieval past was also mined for raw materials out of which to concoct a new Protestant future and worldview, not all of it savoury.
Collecting manuscripts of natural history was part of a project of English Protestant national identity formation. Men like Timothy Bright, an aspiring, Cambridge-educated physician, and author of several medical works, wrote a treatise in 1580 which extolled “the sufficiencie of English medicines.” He used old English manuscripts of natural history to present a case against foreign medicines by showcasing that English plants and remedies had been revealed to the English people for centuries by a God who favored them, and their health, on account of their piety. Bright collected medieval knowledge to rewrite English national and natural history as a narrative of the teleological march to Protestant truth.
And there was a dark side to the Protestant fascination with its medieval past, Reynolds tells us. When sixteenth-century readers went looking for the secrets of nature that their ancestors had known, they discovered a world of charms and amulets, material that had provided much of the contents of medieval lay prayer and practice. Many of these charms and remedies related to female physiological matters like childbirth and menstruation and contained recipes for abortifacients. In the fifteenth century this knowledge had circulated freely, but in the active and persecutory hands of sixteenth-century readers, they became newly associated with popery and shrouded in a language of discovery that accompanied all pursuits of manuscripts in an age of print. Readers imagined having stumbled upon a forbidden “secret” female knowledge, and saw a world that needed to be reformed, not only through the censoring of charms on a page but through the vigilant expunging of its practitioners off the page, leading to the first the woman hanged for witchcraft in England in 1566 who was accused of having killed her unborn child with “a certain herb”.

In the sixteenth century, the Catholic past was less a discarded relic than a living, evolving, presence in Protestant homes, where in the hands of readers, it provided material for new imaginative visions of the natural and supernatural world.
Nikianna Dinenis is a PhD student at Princeton University, where she works on women’s reading practices in Reformation Germany.