The English Campaign against Luther in the 1520s (The Alexander Prize Essay)

1989 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 85-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Rex
Keyword(s):  
Popular Religion ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
International Dimension ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Vexed Question ◽  
Prize Essay

SINCE the days of John Foxe, ecclesiastical historians of the 1520s have concentrated on the Odysseys and Passions of the earliest English Protestants. Their Catholic opponents, with the notable exceptions of John Fisher and Thomas More, have been largely ignored. The object of this essay is to redress the balance by examining the English commitment to orthodoxy in the 1520s, a commitment made primarily by the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, but seconded enthusiastically by the academic community. It aims not to rewrite the entire ecclesiastical history of the decade, but merely to draw attention to an important though neglected element in the story. Nevertheless, it hopes to be a contribution to the reassessment of the English Reformation that has been carried out in much recent research. The essay is primarily an investigation of polemics, rather than of politics or of popular religion. Beginning with Henry VIII's decision early in 1521 to take up the pen personally against Luther, it draws out the connection of this with the promulgation in England of Exsurge Domine, the Papal condemnation of Luther, and suggests a solution to the vexed question of the ‘real’ authorship of Henry's Assertio Septem Sacramentorum. It investigates the continuation of this polemical assault on Luther by English scholars; and examines its international dimension, gathering evidence of the patronage and cooperation extended to Luther's continental opponents by the English authorities. In conclusion it proposes that the strongly orthodox commitment of the English authorities in the 1520s ebbed away only as the pressing needs of the ‘King's Great Matter’ occasioned competing, and ultimately conflicting, intellectual priorities.

Persecution and Toleration in the English Reformation

1984 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 163-187
Author(s):  
G. R. Elton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Real ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
External Pressures ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

The century of the Reformation, in England as elsewhere, sharpened all conflicts and augmented persecution. As the unity of Christendom broke up, the rival parties acquired that sort of confidence in their own righteousness that encourages men to put one another to death for conscience sake; an era of moderation and tolerance gave way to one of ever more savage repression. To the openminded willingness which characterized the humanism of Erasmus and More as well as the Rome of Leo X there succeeded the bigotry typical of Carafa, Calvin, Knox and the English puritans; only the gradual evaporation of such passions, produced by each side’s inability to triumph totally, produced a weariness with religious strife which made the return of mutual sufferance possible. That, at least, is the received story. Historians of toleration, as for instance Jordan and Lecler, firmly described the history of persecution in this way. Jordan identified six developments which led to its decline in sixteenth-century England: a growing political strength among dissident sects, the impossibility of preventing splintering and preserving uniformity, the needs of trade which overrode religious hostility, experience of travel, the failure to suppress dissident publications, and finally a growing scepticism which denied the claims to exclusive truth advanced by this or that faction. In other words, only two things moved men, once they had fallen away from the generosity of the pre-Reformation era, to substitute an uneasy toleration for a vigorous persecution: the external pressures of experience and the decline of religious fervour. By implication, men of power called for repression and only those who could not hope to win favoured toleration, until general exhaustion set in. It is a convincing enough picture, and much evidence no doubt supports it. But it is a picture—a general and rather schematic panorama which makes little allowance for the real opinions of individuals. On this occasion I should like to test it by looking at the attitudes of two highly articulate sixteenth-century Englishmen—Thomas More, humanist and loyal son of the universal Church, and John Foxe, humanist and faithful protestant. Both, we know, were men of sensitivity and sense. How did they stand to the problem of persecution?

The Historical Faith of William Tyndale: Non-Salvific Reading of Scripture at the Outset of the English Reformation*

2009 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 661-692 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Weil Baker
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
God's Word ◽  
The Reformation

AbstractThis essay argues that for William Tyndale, not only was scripture not sola, but it did not have to be read solely as scripture, that is, the salvific word of God. It could also be read with historical faith, a term that Tyndale borrowed from the German Reformer Philip Melanchthon and used to signify “believing in scripture as one would a non-scriptural history.” Tyndale did not exactly advocate this approach to scripture, but he recognized it as having at least some validity, given the role of human agency and authority in the transmission of God's word. More broadly, the notion of historical faith in scripture reflects the Reformation elevation of what John Foxe called the “truth of history” along with that of scripture. In the polemical writings of Tyndale and later English Protestant Reformers, scripture served both as a means of personal salvation and as a source of historical evidence against the Catholic Church. As a source for this kind of evidence, scripture was cited in conjunction with non-scriptural histories and in ways not discernibly different from those in which such histories were cited. Tyndale's historical faith is not, then, as his opponent Thomas More dubbed it, an “evasion” borrowed from Melanchthon, but rather a part of the complex and developing relationship between scripture and history during the English Reformation.

‘The Eye of the Typhoon’: Shakespeare and the Religious Controversies of his Time

2009 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-458
Author(s):  
Peter Milward
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Sir Thomas More ◽  
History Of ◽  
Wide Gap

In between those two great humanist lawyers and lord chancellors, Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis Bacon, it may be maintained without undue exaggeration that there is a wide gap, even a yawning chasm, in the understanding of all too many scholars concerning the intellectual history of what has come to be known as ‘Early Modern England’. When we ask whose were the main intellectual and spiritual influences on the minds of Englishmen during the period, the names commonly offered for consideration are mostly those of foreigners such as Machiavelli and Montaigne, Erasmus and Rabelais, Luther and Calvin—if in English translation. Closer to home may be added the names of More himself, his adversary William Tyndale, John Foxe with his Book of Martyrs, and Richard Hooker with his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

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