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

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Reformation and Early Modern Christianity Renaissance Literature and Culture Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

Abstract

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 ofExsurge Domine, the Papal condemnation of Luther, and suggests a solution to the vexed question of the ‘real’ authorship of Henry'sAssertio 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.

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References

1987The English Reformation Revised 1963A Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to 1500 1969I diarii di Marino Sanuto 1982The Henrician Reformation: The Diocese of Lincoln under John Longland, 1521-1547 1979Archbishop Grindal, 1519–1583 1982Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York 1985Contemporaries of Erasmus

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2004A. G. Dickens and his critics: a new narrative of the English Reformation 2018Reformacja w Polsce a dziedzictwo Erazma z Rotterdamu 1999Writing history in England 2013Reading and Writing during the Dissolution: Monks, Friars, and Nuns 1530–1558 1999Middle English lives 1999Early Middle English 1999The experience of exclusion: literature and politics in the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII 1999Vox populiand the literature of 1381

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