Protestant Bodies: Gesture in the English Reformation , by Arnold Hunt

Arnold Hunt describes the Jacobean court as ‘a world preoccupied with the movement of bodies through space, a world where small details of gesture, posture and position carried great symbolic significance’ (p. 224). As Protestant Bodies reveals, these words hold true for the rest of early modern society. Hunt’s monograph is an invaluable contribution towards developing a more detailed scholarly understanding of gesture in post-Reformation England. This book is not, and does not claim to be, a comprehensive dictionary of gesture, but instead offers six detailed and incisive examinations of ‘types’ of gesture experienced and performed in both ecclesiastical and non-ecclesiastical spaces. These chapters are linked by wider themes of dissimulation, conformity and ‘embodied’ cultural performance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Debates about gesture and behaviour in and around church spaces were never far from the centre of religious and political controversy in Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline England. The work of Margaret Aston, Peter Milward, Kenneth Fincham, Nicholas Tyacke, Peter Lake and Anthony Milton has highlighted how such debates formed a serious and lively aspect of the Tudor and Stuart Church. Rather than the theological debates provoked by gesture, Hunt focuses on gestures themselves. Drawing from an extensive range of legal records, controversial literature, civility manuals, epistolary evidence and contemporary accounts, Hunt highlights how gesture cannot be understood as a monolithic action within or outside ecclesiastical environments, but instead developed a protean meaning influenced by historic, cultural, local and political events and contexts. Gesture did not simply ‘decline’ by the eighteenth century, Hunt argues, but took on new meanings suitable to a post-Reformation society. Gestures performed by Protestant clergy and laity were difficult to enforce and monitor, and contemporary interpretations of their respective ‘indifference’ or ‘power’ had significant consequences for how congregational behaviour and belief could be controlled, and nonconformist wings of the established Church could be comprehended.