The Christian's ABC. Catechisms and Catechizing in England, c. 1530-1740. By Ian Green (Oxford: Clarendon P., 1996; pp. xiv + 767. 70 £).

Ian Green's The Christian's ABC is a work of extraordinary, even intimidating scholarship and careful exposition, the first part of a three-volume project on the ways in which religious ideas were transmitted in early modern England. It is based on a survey of the almost 680 different question and answer forms intended for religious instruction published in English between 1530 and 1740, and on a more detailed analysis of a representative sample of fifty-nine. Part One -- `The Message' -- explores the varieties of catechetical forms in circulation and the methods of catechizing in church, home and educational institutions. Catechisms varied from the most basic `milk for babes', sometimes with one word answers, through more extended forms used as preparation for confirmation or the sacrament of the Lord's supper, to advanced methods used at universities to develop skills in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Reprints and new versions of catechisms were produced throughout these centuries and circulated in vast quantities. There were perhaps as many copies of catechisms as there were people in England before 1640, amongst them three-quarters of a million of the 1549 Prayer Book Catechism (besides those in the book itself). Completely new forms were most numerous before the 1620s, during the interregnum, and at the very end of the seventeenth century; repeat editions dominated production in the 1620s and 1630s. Many of these were by Calvinist authors, a phenomenon that Green takes to indicate that Laudian `censorship' was mild or inoffensive. Although Green's overall stress is on the broadly common ground and shared religious ideas in catechisms, there was more variety after the Restoration, as the fragmentation of English Protestantism would lead us to expect. Almost 100 different expositions of the Prayer Book Catechism competed with versions of the Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Assembly (which had only a third as many expositions and copies), while there were specialized catechisms also for Quakers and Baptists. Green has identified forty-eight English Catholic catechisms for this period, but his analysis focuses almost entirely on English Protestantism, and there is no Catholic catechism in his sample of fifty-nine.

Sources for Green's discussion of how catechizing was done are inevitably biased towards the eighteenth century when episcopal surveys supplement the earlier impressionistic, largely biographical material, but he provides a characteristically balanced and convincing treatment. There was no simple linear process of improvement or decline: it was always a struggle to catechize as fully as the zealous would wish; weekly catechizing remained an aspiration as much as a regular practice especially in the winter; servants and other older groups were always the most resistant, especially to public catechizing. Overall, Green judges that catechizing had `moderate success' to 1640, and he believes that `cautious optimism' is justified on the inculcation of religious ideas over the period as a whole, despite the confusions and divisions of the interregnum. This, the most stimulating section of the work, will be of broad significance for historians of childhood, of education and of popular culture as well as for those interested in religion specifically. Catechizing was a part of growing up, and it was an important means through which literacy was achieved; hence nonconformists in the latter part of his period often published reading primers with their catechisms to compete with the very popular, The ABC with the Catechisme, used to teach the alphabet along with the short version of the 1549 `official' Prayer book catechism. Catechizing was an oral educational technique based on a written, and often on a printed text. We thus learn much from Green on the interactions of reading and rote learning, print and orality.

Part Two -- `The Message' -- offers an informative but rather repetitive discussion of how his sample group of fifty-nine catechisms treated the central issues of Protestant Christianity: the creed, predestination, the commandments and the sacraments. Green is least convincing (to this committed reviewer) when he seeks to use the content of catechisms to address controversial historiographical issues about the extent and nature of religious divisions in England before the Civil War. As Green shows, most authors were deliberately noncontroversial in their catechisms; authors polemically decisive in other genres such as Beza, Calvin or Thomas Cartwright, `appear to have taken a self-denying ordinance to avoid contentious issues, or to avoid using polemical techniques' when writing catechisms. Catechisms thus by their nature support Green's stress on the issues that united English Protestants rather than on conflict and division, and on continuity rather than dramatic change. The Staffordshire Puritan John Ball produced a `studiedly neutral and practical' catechism, very widely circulated in seventeenth-century England, yet he was a notorious ceremonial non-conformist, described by the Independent John Goodwin in 1646, as `a great Doctor (while he lived) of the Presbyterian school'. Clearly historians need to explore the implications for our understanding of the early Stuart Church of catechetical authors' evasiveness on the central issues of predestination, the numbers of the elect, or the nature of assurance. However, the evidence of catechisms by an author like Ball cannot be taken in isolation from other aspects of his career or influence. It is by no means clear that the content of catechisms can be used to make many generalizations about the overall influence of, for example, predestinarian ideas in the early Stuart Church.

The Appendix contains `a list of all the works written or published in England between c. 1530 and 1740 which might have been or might be called catechisms', with information on editions, content and surviving copies. Specialists may be able to add to his list: he has not, for example, included what the Cheshire minister Adam Martindale, called `that little Axiomaticall Catechism called An Antidote against the Poyson of the Times,' developed in 1653-4 through discussion with his most godly parishioners. But it is very difficult to think of `omissions, and the Appendix is an immensely useful basis for future research on the many issues raised but not exhausted by Green's most impressive work.