Cathedrals under Siege. Cathedrals in English Society, 1600-1700.

By Stanford E. Lehmberg. Pp. xxx + 270 incl. frontispiece, 75 ills and 25 tables. Exeter: University of Exeter Press/Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. 40 [pounds sterling]. 0 85989 467 3

This handsome volume complements Lehmberg's study of cathedrals in the Tudor age (1988), although it comes from different publishers and in a different format. Like its predecessor, it has chapters of chronological narrative followed by thematic studies: a prosopographical examination of cathedral clergy and a roundup of their literary achievement, discussion of cathedral finance and music and an attempt to put cathedrals into the context of the Church and society which they (somewhat uneasily) served. The main title is apt: as Lehmberg observes, cathedrals faced danger even greater in the seventeenth than in the sixteenth century. Having mysteriously survived earlier Protestant …