Once Again, The Case of Richard Hunne

1969 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon K. McBride
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Other ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Sir Thomas More ◽  
Historical Controversy

On the morning of 4 December 1514, a certain London merchant-tailor, Richard Hunne by name, was found hanging in his cell in the Lollards' Tower at St. Paul's. On the surface this event might seem to be of little concern to anyone except Hunne. However, the death of this moderately well-to-do London businessman became caught up in the agitation against the clergy which presaged the Reformation in England. Indeed, Richard Hunne's case has become, as well, the focal point of a major and long-lasting historical controversy over the responsibility for Hunne's death. This controversy arises out of contradictory and confusing reports of the circumstances surrounding the event and the peculiar actions of the authorities, both royal and clerical, over an attempt to fix the responsibility for the death. One major body of source material, particularly the writings of Sir Thomas More, holds that Hunne had committed suicide and is supported by the decision of a royal court which found those accused of Hunne's death to be innocent. The other, which includes several Protestant chroniclers and writers, holds that Hunne was murdered by the ecclesiastical authorities of London and is supported by depositions from a coroner's inquest into the matter.The alleged facts of Hunne's death, minor event though it may have been, served to fan a wave of excitement in London, particularly since the event fell upon thoroughly receptive ears. The current anticlericalism received a major stimulus from Hunne's death.It is difficult to document the extent to which anticlericalism was present in London, let alone England at large, in the early years of the sixteenth century, but there was a dispute between the parishioners of London and their rectors over such matters as tithes, offerings and mortuary fees.3 In addition there had been some action, in an official sense, against the greatly abused benefit of clergy.

The Morean Legacy at St Monica’s

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-175
Author(s):  
Victoria Van Hyning
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Long Line ◽  
Textual Data ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Sir Thomas More ◽  
Name Writing ◽  
Own Name

This chapter investigates the importance of women’s education and Latinity to the first chronicler of St Monica’s, who composed anonymously, but whom I have identified as Mary Copley, a descendant of Sir Thomas More. Copley was well-educated, and descended from a long line of well-educated men and women whose learning, she believed, was critical to the survival and flourishing of English Catholicism after the Reformation. Copley’s attention to More’s legacy at St Monica’s is more sustained than would have been possible had she written under her own name. Writing anonymously, she subsumes her concerns into the stories and voices of the other women and their family members who are represented in this significant early modern chronicle. Copley’s is the first of four detailed case studies of what I call ‘subsumed autobiography’: when an anonymous author, through the very vehicle of her anonymity, shapes a text around her own experiences, politics, theology or ideology to such a degree that the work can be read as an expression and exploration of the author’s selfhood. The case of Copley’s authorship rests on combined analyses of prosopographical, manuscript, and textual data, and provides a methodology for identifying anonymous authors.

The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in Renaissance Italy

1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. J. McNair
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
The One

Between the execution of Gerolamo Savonarola at Florence in May 1498 and the execution of Giordano Bruno at Rome in February 1600, western Christendom was convulsed by the protestant reformation, and the subject of this paper is the effect that that revolution had on the Italy that nourished and martyred those two unique yet representative men: unique in the power and complexity of their personalities, representative because the one sums up the medieval world with all its strengths and weaknesses while the other heralds the questing and questioning modern world in which we live.

Erasmus the Theologian

2016 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 498-515
Author(s):  
Greta Grace Kroeker
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Reformation

Erasmus of Rotterdam developed from a classical humanist to a Christian humanist theologian in the first two decades of the sixteenth century. In the early years of the Reformation, his theological work responded to the theological debates of the age. Although many contemporaries dismissed him as a theologian, he developed a mature theology of grace before his death in 1536 that evidenced his efforts to create space for theological compromise between Protestants and Catholics and prevent the permanent fissure of western Christianity.

Ven. Robert Sutton of Stafford a Note on his Family and Early Life

1953 ◽  
Vol 2 (02) ◽  
pp. 150-166
Author(s):  
D.M. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Present Note ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Other ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Catholic Faith

Robert Sutton is a name that occurs quite often in sixteenth century records. It was borne by two of the English martyrs under Elizabeth I, the only two, among the three hundred and sixty martyrs at present officially listed, to bear identical names. One of these was a layman, a school-master, hanged at Clerkenwell in October 1588 for being reconciled to the Catholic faith (1). The other was a secular priest hanged, drawn and quartered at Stafford a year earlier (2). The present note concerns the priest, but since further contemporaries of these two martyrs also had the same name, others, too, will be mentioned in the course of investigating the early years of the Ven. Robert Sutton, the priest martyr of 1587.

Saint or Schemer? The 1527 Heresy Trial of Thomas Bilney Reconsidered

1989 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Walker
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Ambiguous Figure ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Significant Figure ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Sir Thomas More ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

On 8 December 1527 two scholars, Thomas Bilney and Thomas Arthur, carried penitential faggots at St Paul's Cross as a token of abjuration of heresy. With this act both men formally cleansed their souls and brought about their reconciliation with the Church. Far from being the end of a story, however, this ceremony proved to be the beginning of a controversy which has survived until the present day. For Thomas Bilney subsequently renounced his abjuration and became a significant figure in the early Reformation in England, eventually dying at the stake as a relapsed heretic in 1531. And yet, despite the importance attributed to him as a reformer, Bilney is now, as he was then, an ambiguous figure whose relationship with the Catholic Church and precise beliefs have never been conclusively determined. Many writers have claimed Bilney as a champion of their particular causes or have sought to identify his place in the wider movements of the Reformation. For the Protestant John Foxe he was a martyr, albeit a flawed one, for the reformed faith, who refused to the last to be intimidated into a second abjuration. For Sir Thomas More, in somewhat mischievous mood, he was a Catholic saint brought to realise the error of his ways at the stake and reconciled to the Church with almost his last breath.

Refraining the Reformation

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (144) ◽  
pp. 598-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Reform Process ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
The Reformation

The Reformation in Ireland has never lacked chroniclers, defenders and detractors. The reason for this is not hard to discern. The older literature that grappled with the processes of religious change in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ireland was based on a number of well-recognised and widely agreed propositions. The first of these was that confessional and political positions were inextricably linked, and the fate of one served not only as a proxy for the other but as an explanation for the trajectory of change; thus, to explain the failure of the reform process to strike deep roots in sixteenth-century Ireland, one had only to invoke the failure of the Tudor conquest.

Anabaptism and English Sectarianism in the Mid-Sixteenth Century

1979 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 59-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Loades
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
Radical Nature ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Return Home ◽  
To Come

From about 1528 onward radical protestants of various kinds from the Low Countries began to seek refuge in England from the pressures of persecution in their homelands. Until the advent of Thomas More as chancellor, persecution in England was sporadic and rather lax. The royal authority had not hitherto been invoked, and the lollards were not commonly of the stuff of martyrs, which induced a certain complacency in the English bishops when faced with the challenges of nascent protestantism. After More’s brief tenure of office was over, persecution under royal auspices continued, but on a very much smaller scale than in the Netherlands, so that the incentive for radicals to come to England, either permanently or temporarily, remained. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them lived in London, Norwich and other towns of the south-east over the next twenty years. A few, like Jan Mattijs, were burned in England, others, like Anneke Jans, met the same fate on their return home, but many lived and worked peacefully, attracting remarkably little attention. Considering their numbers, and the radical nature of their views, they seem to have made only a very slight impact upon their adopted country. A few Englishmen, like that ‘Henry’ who turned up as the sponsor of the Bocholt meeting in 1536, embraced their ideas wholeheartedly, but for the most part the effect seems to have been extremely piecemeal and diffuse, producing a wide variety of individual eccentricities rather than anything in the nature of a coherent movement. However, the presence of these radicals and their English sympathisers has always served to confuse students of the reformation, not least by appearing to justify contemporary conservative attempts to discredit protestantism as a Tower of Babel.

Forgetting Custom?

2020 ◽  
pp. 159-193
Author(s):  
Stephanie Elsky
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Generative Power ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sir Thomas More

The final chapter explores the most extreme political usage of custom: to resist or even overturn a monarch. I argue that just as custom was invoked to justify popular rebellion during the sixteenth century, so too is it called upon to navigate their contentious staging in The Book of Sir Thomas More, a play that William Shakespeare is generally thought to have helped revise after its censorship, and Hamlet. I explore how the former play makes use of proverbs to recuperate rebellion from the charge of innovation while the latter play uses custom within a narratio, or description of offstage events by a messenger, to open up a space for the possibility of revolution, a concept and practice associated with breaking from the past. Drawing on political theology, this chapter contends that Hamlet discloses the possibility of custom’s enduring, generative power.

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 real Thomas More?

1980 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 611-617
Author(s):  
G. R. Elton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Real ◽  
The One ◽  
Clear Idea

How well do we really know Thomas More? Directed to one of the most familiar figures of the sixteenth century, the question must appear absurd. Even without the aid of stage and screen, surely everyone has a clear idea of England's leading humanist, great wit, friend of Erasmus and other Continental humanists, author of Utopia, family man, man of convictions, ultimately martyr. The familiar Holbein portrait seems to sum it all up, as does at greater length the much admired biography of R. W. Chambers. Chambers, in fact, completed the picture when, to his own satisfaction and that of others, he disposed of ‘inconsistencies’ discerned by earlier observers between the cheerful reformer and ‘liberal’ of 1516 on the one hand, and the fierce opponent of Lutheran reform and savage polemicist of 1528–33 on the other. No man's personality in that age, not even King Henry's, seems more fully explored and more generally agreed than More's.

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