We've been much reminded of Tudor England lately.The Sunday Telegraph recently reported the former prime minister's conversion to Roman Catholicism, alongside news that, as a result of domestic apathy and the influx of Eastern European and African migrants, Britain has once more, "after more than four centuries", become a Catholic country.
On the same day, the historian David Starkey was invited on to Clive Anderson's radio programme to discuss the monarchy.
As well as reminding listeners that the current Queen was poorly schooled, he declared that Henry VIII was "the original Eurosceptic" and that his host was, actually, rather like Erasmus.
James Simpson's unremittingly clever new book also suggests we re-examine the early 16th century in order to make sense of contemporary culture. His aim, however, is to disabuse us of the assumption that modern liberalism can lay claim to unproblematic origins in the Protestant Reformation.
The ideology which stresses the rights of the individual above those of the institution has frequently been traced back to Martin Luther and his English followers, such as William Tyndale.
They are often seen as releasing the Christian subject from the ritualistic authority of the Roman Church into the liberties accorded individual consciences formed through readings of printed vernacular scripture.
As Simpson points out, Luther's famous pronouncement that "I lift my voice on behalf of liberty and conscience… No law… may rightfully be imposed upon Christians without their consent, for we are free of all laws" has become indispensable to a Whig interpretation of history - where progress is won by Protestants and liberals defying the retrograde influences of Catholics and conservatives.
Simpson wants to dismantle this narrative in order to "provoke the liberal tradition to understand itself better and redraw its own genealogy".
The story he tells in its place is fascinating, but far from consoling. Instead of guaranteeing individual rights and freedoms, in his account the English Reformation actually fostered habits of thought much more conducive to liberalism's opposite: fundamentalism.
In a series of carefully contextualised analyses of 16th-century theology and polemic he demonstrates how the Protestant (or, Simpson's favoured designation, "evangelical") insistence upon "the literal inerrancy of Scripture", when combined with predestination theology (you're either elect or damned, sheep or goat, before you read a syllable) rendered the interpretation of Scripture a terrifying rather than liberating process.
Always uncertain whether God offers salvation, but absolutely certain that the Bible is the only place to discover that, evangelicals render Bible reading "a tightrope of terror across the abyss of damnation".
Where Roman Catholicism's emphasis on ceremonial observance, good works and unwritten verities permitted at least the appearance of some room for human agency in divine affairs, evangelical readers relied on the literal meanings of Biblical texts as points of illumination in the darkness.
In their slavish, if occasionally ingenious, adherence to the letter of the scriptures, such Bible readers seem less proto-liberals than proto-creationists.
Even if there are problems with transporting contemporary ideas of fundamentalism back to illiberal early modern English contexts (as Simpson notes, the term is a 20th-century American coinage), this book's ability to chart a clear course through unforgiving terrain is exemplary.
The confrontation between Tyndale and Sir Thomas More over the basic premises of vernacular Bible translation is rendered particularly vivid.
More is frequently caricatured, by those who don't see him as a saint, as some kind of snobbish protectionist insisting that the mysteries of the Latin Bible be reserved for an elite minority. The account of him on offer here, however, is much more nuanced: he's shown not to oppose vernacular Scripture per se, but simply Tyndale's version of it.
More was also capable of being exceptionally rude in Latin about his Protestant adversaries. In his 1523 attack on Luther, Responsio ad Lutherum, he affected to be "shamed of this necessity [of confronting him in print]" since "while I clean out the fellow's shit-filled mouth I see my own fingers covered with shit".
This isn't just a good insult; it also expresses an awareness of the way in which early modern religious controversy sullied its participants when their energies were supposed to be spent praising (rather than disputing) God and his motives.
In his determination to repudiate the research of a modern Tyndale specialist, David Daniell - errors of fact and interpretation are gleefully pounced on - Simpson sometimes permits us to catch a faint whiff of what it might be like to be embroiled in such a dirty fight.
His own fingers, though, remain impeccably clean.
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