The ends of life: Roads to fulfilment in early modern England By Keith Thomas, Oxford, £20

Christopher Hill, who was the tutor and mentor of Keith Thomas at Balliol College, once remarked in private conversation, “Will there ever be another book like Religion and the Decline of Magic’’. That book, written by Thomas when he was in his late thirties, became a classic of early modern European historiography immediately after its publication in 1971 and has not been dislodged from that high perch. It is Thomas’s misfortune that he is forced to live under the shadow of that great book. Anything he writes will always be measured by that book. This is unfair to him and to the two (including this one) subsequent books that he has written. The fact that this book does not have the magisterial command of in no way detracts from its mastery of sources and the lucidity of its exposition.

The purpose of this book is simple. It seeks to explore how people in early modern England sought to live fulfilling lives, what constituted for them a life well-spent. The simplicity of the purpose camouflages the complexity of finding answers to the question.

What makes a life well-spent? The question is daunting since even today the answer would vary according to a person’s status, his education and so on. In early modern England, between roughly 1530 and 1780, Thomas’s chronological boundaries, answers would probably have been more varied. A group of law students who broke into a London brothel in 1606 and smashed its windows announced, that they wanted “to do something that they may be spoken of when they were dead.’’ They would have been forgotten, of course, if they hadn’t been rescued from obscurity by Thomas.

Thomas identifies his subject as “the central values of the English people’’ in his chosen period. He looks at work and vocation, wealth and possessions, military power, honour and reputation, friendship and concern with afterlife and posterity.

Needless to say Thomas arrives at no unambiguous and definite conclusions. Given the nature of his questions and his sources, he cannot. He emphatically refuses to arrive at overarching generalizations or any grand theory. He brings his readers close to his period through extensive quotations from well known writers, scholars and anonymous and simple people. Through these quotations we gain insights into the mentalities of different kinds of people, drawn from various strata of society.

Thomas writes that his life’s work has been “a retrospective ethnography of early modern England, approaching the past in the way an anthropologist might approach some exotic society.’’ This would explain his reluctance to draw large conclusions. He is aware that his text comes close to being “a collage of quotations.’’ But his arrangement of the quotations often pushes the reader to think in a particular direction. The only problem that refuses to go away regarding Thomas’s methods is his refusal to question his sources. This Thomas has very few doubts about the evidence before him.