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WALES AND THE REFORMATION. By Glanmor Williams. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1997. Pp. xii, 440. £ 25.00. Sir Glanmor Williams hastens to tell us that he had been working on this book since 1950. Since that time what began as the introductory chapter has been published as the classic The Welsh Church from Conquest to Reformation (1962; 2nd edn 1976); the author's general interpretation of events has been conveyed in the wide-ranging Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation: Wales, c. 1415-1642 (1987; repr. as Renewal and Reformation, 1993); and there have been a vast number of articles, many subsequently collected, some digging deep into the particular, others searching the horizon. No serious student of Welsh history can be unfamiliar with this ceuvre. Those historians who have allowed themselves to be deterred from pursuing the big picture can only salute the perseverance, pursued in the interstices of teaching, administration, public service and preaching, which has produced this book, the culmination of a lifetime's work, while suspecting that the author has by no means decided to lay down his pen. Given Glanmor Williams's generosity in making his work in progress available, the book's findings will not surprise. His interpretations have developed. But the freshness which was so striking a feature of Conquest to Reformation is hardly to be expected. That was a remarkable pioneering venture in its attempt to understand the meaning of late-medieval religion from the viewpoint of the parishioner, especially in its use of iconographical evidence, and, most strikingly, vernacular poetry, clearly influenced by post-war French historiography, and, behind that, Febvre and Huizinga-influences which had hardly begun to touch historians of English religion at that time. That approach has since become commonplace; indeed, in some of its manifestations has been carried too far in the neglect of consideration of spiritual values in favour of cosy folk- religion. A touch of asperity creeps into the brief recapitulation of popular religion in the first chapter of Wales and the Reformation. The theme of the new book is how 'reformation', which was clearly, according to Christopher Haigh's useful schema, 'from above', was to be transformed and win hearts and minds, and not merely grudging acquiescence. The argument in fact, though not so phrased, fits another Haigh insight, of 'reformations' rather than reformation. The Henrician and Edwardian period is seen, for Wales, as unequivocally one of imposition by act of state. Other than in ports with substantial numbers of English-speakers, there were none of those factors-Lollardy, openness to humanist ideas or German theology or the message of the scriptures- which can serve to qualify the statist interpretation in the English context.