Rosamund Oates. Moderate Radical

Moderate Radical: Tobie Matthew and the English Reformation is an impressive and important monograph, Rosamund Oates’s first. The “moderate radical” of the title, Tobie Matthew, was successively dean of Christ Church Oxford and Durham, and subsequently bishop of Durham and archbishop of York. Moderate Radical is somewhat less and substantially more than simply biography: rather, it is a shrewd and perceptive account of the English Reformation, from the 1560s to the 1620s, through the lens of Matthew’s preaching, appointments, networks, and rising and falling political and ecclesiastical fortunes. What makes Matthew such a valuable focus for such a study is the unique survival of a number of important sources, principally his preaching diary, his sermon notebook, and his extensive personal library of around three thousand heavily annotated texts, which survives largely intact in the archives of York Minster, where they were donated by Matthew’s widow, Frances, shortly after his death in 1628. Oates’s study therefore neglects some elements of traditional biographical fare, such as Matthew’s childhood and adolescence in the West Country following his birth in the mid-1540s, but it provides fascinating insights into Matthew’s book purchasing and ownership, his reading and working practices, his preaching, and the intellectual universe out of which his conforming Puritanism matured.

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