Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation.(Book Review)

Publication: CLIO

Publication Date: 22-MAR-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne

By Richard McCoy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. xix + 218 pages.

In Alterations of State, Richard McCoy links the political and social anxieties that accompanied royal succession in early modern England to the uncertainty caused by the religious upheaval during the Reformation. Using the immediate public reaction to the sudden death of Diana, Princess of Wales, as an example that indicates just how compelling royal absence remains in our own culture, McCoy traces this fascination to a "vague but persistent desire for real presence" (xv) that has its origins in the early modern period. McCoy focuses on literary, religious, and political works of John Skelton, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell. According to the author, the divergent group of writers warrants a comparative study because they are especially "astute in their representation of the paradoxes and contradictions of early modern sacred kingship" (xix).

One of the strengths of McCoy's book is its cogent distillation of the complex historical debate over the contested meaning of the Eucharist during the Reformation. The ambivalent reaction of both the Catholic and Protestant faiths to the notion of real presence in church ritual meant that instead of an eradication of presence, the period of the Reformation witnessed a "migration" (3) of the sacred from theological institutions to other locations. According to McCoy, with the cultural desire to "locate the sacred somewhere" (22), the English political and social imagination magnified the potency of the idea of royal supremacy. Simultaneously, however, continued Protestant attacks on papist "fantasies" (22) of real presence and continual succession crises laid the seeds for the regicide of 1649.

McCoy makes clear that resistance to sacralization had been a divisive force in Christianity long before early modern reformers such as Thomas Becon, Ulrich Zwingli, and Thomas Cranmer presented unprecedented challenges to the Catholic practice of sacralizing physical objects in church...

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