Manual

Controversial handbooks or manuals--whether designed to introduce the reader to a given faith, help her convert others, or protect her from being converted--pop up regularly in the "Religion" section at your friendly neighborhood Barnes & Noble, but they've got quite an extensive history.  I own a few of the nineteenth-century variety, most of them anti-Catholic: James Begg's A Handbook of Popery, R. P. Blakeney's Manual of Romish Controversy, Justin D. Fulton's How to Win Romanists, Charles H. H. Wright's A Primer of Roman Catholicism, and so on.  Since these books are intended either to protect the reader from the blandishments of Rome or to help her convert unsuspecting Catholic neighbors, it's not surprising that most of them look like catechisms.  The Protestant's Manual; Or, Reasons for the Reformation departs from that norm: it consists of seventeen repurposed Religious Tract Society publications.  While there's no publication date, and I can't find any sign of the book in the BL or COPAC, the tracts date from the late 18-teens to about 1840.  (There's a long tradition of "manuals" for Protestants, going back to the late Reformation.)

The Protestant's Manual is hardly a seamless whole--the book isn't continuously paginated, the tracts are out of numerical order, and the typefaces vary from tract to tract--so did the compiler have some internal logic in mind?  The anthology starts with a historical sketch of the English Bible, immediately followed by an extract from Martin Luther on justification.  Then follows the longest tract (40 pages), about the conversion of an Irish Catholic named Andrew Dunn.  At first glance, the apparently nineteenth-century Dunn looks a little out of place, since he is immediately followed by the very sixteenth-century Catherine Parr (and extracts), Lady Jane Grey (and more extracts), and the Rev. John Bradford (yet more extracts).  Then we're back to the Bible again, with a brief tract on sola scriptura, extracted from a lecture by Joseph Fletcher.  Fletcher pops up again with another extract, this time on the role of Scripture reading and preaching in the Reformation.  Somewhat puzzlingly, we suddenly zip back to the fifteenth century for the martyrdom of Lord Cobham.  After that, there are four tracts by George Hamilton on extreme unction, the Biblical sanction for Protestantism (the old "where was your church before Luther?" question), Roman Catholic "heathenism" (the old "you stole your rites from the pagan" routine), and the worship of the saints.  Finally, we finish up with three tracts on the Scriptures: a series of prooftexts, laid out as a catechism, intended to refute Catholic claims; directions for reading the Bible; and a critique of claims that the Bible cannot be easily understood, and is therefore unsuited for common reading.

There appear to be logics involved here, not logic.  On the one hand, it makes sense that the collection begins and ends with the Bible: we start with the Bible's historical significance and end with how and why it is to be read now.  Given the manual's subtitle, it also follows that Luther on justification should appear very early on.  And Catherine Parr, Lady Jane Grey, and the Rev. John Bradford have clearly been lumped together as exemplary sixteenth-century figures.   On the other hand, it's not clear why Fletcher's and Hamilton's tracts appear where they do (why isn't Fletcher with the other Bible tracts?), and Lord Cobham is out of place, no matter how you look at it (he belongs with Queen Catherine and co.).  In other words, the book partly conforms to an overarching plan, and partly...doesn't; it's as though the editor couldn't figure out if the book should be read straight through or simply consulted on a need-to-know basis. 

That leaves us with the rather popular Mr. Dunn, whose narrative was last reprinted in 2001.  To hazard a guess, I suspect that Andrew Dunn's presence in a book supposedly devoted to all things Reformation has to do with what's frequently dubbed the "Second Reformation"--the Protestant evangelical missionary movement in Ireland, which kicked into high gear during the late 1820s.  (See here for a brief introduction.)  The book thus reminds the reader that the "reasons" for the Reformation have not been entirely displaced by the Reformation; the Reformation is an ongoing project, not a completed event or series of events.