THE HISTORIAN

studying people's religious beliefs. He posits that not everyone had a religious con-
version in the sixteenth century that would make them convinced Protestants. Rather,
he suggests, it would be better to analyze the ways in which people were changed by
the new forms of religious worship that were imposed from above. What were the
politics of reform and reformation? How did the politics change the religious beliefs
and practices of the majority of the English? How did the people, either elite or
common, negotiate religious change and use it for their own purposes? All of his ques-
tions are interesting. At the beginning and end of each section of his book, if not at
the beginning and end of each chapter, he informs the reader of why the revisionists
(i.e., Scarisbrick, Haigh, and Duffy) have it wrong. This reviewer found the format
annoying and at times wondered if the author was simply setting up straw men to
demolish. Perhaps he would have served himself better to show that the revisionists
did not look at the entire picture, rather than repeat how wrong they were.
Ethan H. Shagan is the first author recently to emphasize that the Reformation was
framed by Cromwell, Henry VIII, and Edward VI's councils in terms not of heresy and
true belief, although preachers may have used that language, but in terms of political
obedience. How did the English, a people schooled in obedience, react to this change?
The author believes that any conservative reaction and opposition to the imposition
of the royal supremacy or reform was doomed because the Catholics were divided
among themselves-e.g., only a small group of people objected to the royal supremacy,
and the Pilgrimage of Grace did not have unified goals. He then examines how the
people took part in, and profited from, the dissolution of the monasteries and chantries
and what the latter did to their belief in purgatory and intercessory prayer.
The author does occasionally say things that led this reviewer to wonder if he
understands some of the religious material. In commenting on a parish protest over
the changes of 1536, he relates the story of a young man who stuck a piece of pudding
in a priest's mouth, "rendering him ritually unclean and preventing him from per-
forming his duties" (58). The issue is not whether the priest was ritually impure or
not-the
6
nly instance of ritual impurity from medieval religion that comes to mind
is childbirth, and even that is open to discussion-but breaking a fast imposed by
both tradition and canon law. Receiving communion after breaking the fast was a
mortal sin. In analyzing the differences between Catholic and Protestant positions on
the effect of the death of Jesus on original sin and postbaptismal actual sin, the author
discusses Catholics and venial sin, but not mortal sin.
Despite such reservations, the book should be read by anyone interested in the reli-
gious history of Tudor England.
Xavier University John J. LaRocca
Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. By Frederic Spotts. (Woodstock and New York:
Overlook Press, 2003. Pp. xxii, 456. $37.50.)
Almost all biographies of Adolf Hitler have noted his artistic obsessions, particularly
with opera, painting, and monumental architecture. But before the publication of this
study, only Joachim C. Fest suggested that Hitler "regarded cultural productions as
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the real legitimation of his achievements as a statesman" (Hitler, 1973, p. 528).
Echoing this view, Frederic Spotts, a former American career diplomat, argues
that Hitler was convinced "that the ultimate objective of political effort should be
artistic achievement" (xi). The author relies primarily on published and unpublished
sources that document Hitler's comments on art and on the diaries and memoirs of
Joseph Goebbels and others from Hitler's former entourage. For specialists, the book
covers familiar terrain. Still, the work is valuable for both the general reader
and scholars because it is the most comprehensive and competent single-volume
summary of Hitler's artistic views and his attempts to implement them during the
Third Reich.
Spotts agrees with contemporary observers, like Albert Speer, and biographers,
such as Joachim Fest, that Hitler was interested in power only as a means for "achiev-
ing his cultural ambitions" (15). The author concentrates on Hitler's efforts "to create
a culture-state in which Germans were to listen to music he liked, attend operas he
loved, see paintings and sculptures he collected and admire the buildings he con-
structed" (401). Spotts describes his taste in the visual arts and music as reactionary.
However, in architecture, Hitler was an "eclectic functionalist" who eventually
accepted modern technology, including skyscrapers. The author recounts in great
detail Hitler's unsuccessful efforts to create quality Nazi music, paintings, and sculp-
tures. Hitler was able to denigrate modern art and purge Jews from the artistic world
in Germany, but he realized himself that the Nazi era produced no great painters. And
even though he did less harm to music than he did to painting or sculpture, there was
no music revolution either. In time, Hitler hoped that the Bayreuth Wagner festivals
would "Wagnerize" Germans. Hitler failed to produce great Nazi works in music and
the visual arts, but according to Spotts, he had at least "the minimal ability and the
maximal power to construct the buildings he wanted" (335). But his major urban
reconstruction plans were not realized except, perhaps, in the Autobahn (highways),
which the author claims Hitler saw as "aesthetic monuments" (386).
Spotts's discussion of Hitler's artistic tastes and plans is illuminating and interest-
ing, but he does not offer a satisfactory explanation of how genocide and culture were
connected in Hitler's mind. The author acknowledges that Hitler's two major goals
were "racial genocide and the establishment of a state in which the arts were supreme"
(30). And he notes that race "established an indivisible link between his cultural and
political views" (16). Yet Spotts maintains that "racial genocide and the military dom-
ination of Europe did not grow out of his aesthetic ideals" (11). Still, the reader is
left with a valuable discussion of Hitler's artistic visions, and that, of course, was the
author's primary goal.
Mississippi State University
Johnpeter Horst Grill
When the King Took Flight. By Timothy Tackett. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2003. Pp. xiii, 270. $24.95.)
The Bourbons reigned in France for approximately two hundred years from the six-
teenth to the eighteenth centuries, but the two most determining events during that
893
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