Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England: History, Rhetoric, and the Origins of Christianity 900451435X, 9789004514355

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Note to the Reader
Introduction: the Cultural Production of National Identity
Chapter 1. Making Time, Tradition, and Truth: the Origins of the English Christian Origins Debate
Chapter 2. Framing Space: Territory, Ethnicity, and Culture
Chapter 3. Authorizing Origins: Martyrology, Hagiography, and the Varieties of Supernatural Authorization in Christian Foundation Narratives
Chapter 4. Experiencing Origins: Founding Figures in Ritual and Material Culture, or Public History and the Realm of the Everyday
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Lauren Horn Gri���n (PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara) is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Louisiana State University. Her research and teaching focus on religion, politics, media, and technology.

Supplements to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 22 9 789004 514355

ISSN: 2214-3270 brill.com/smtr

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FA B R I C AT I N G F O U N D E R S I N E A R LY M O D E R N E N G L A N D Lauren Horn Gri���n

In Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England, Lauren Horn Gri���n argues that in order to understand nationalisms, we need a clearer understanding of the types of cultural myths, symbols, and traditions that legitimate them. Myths of origin and election, memories of a greater and purer past, and narratives of persecution and mission are required for the production and maintenance of powerful national sentiments. Through an investigation of how early modern Catholics and Protestants reimagined, reinterpreted, and rewrote the lives of the founder-saints who spread Christianity in England, this book o�fers a theoretical framework for the study of origin narratives. Analyzing the discursive construction of time and place, the invocation of forces beyond the human to naturalize and authorize, and the role of visual and ritual culture in fabrications of the past, this book provides a case study for how to approach claims about founding ��gures. Serving as a timely example of the dependence of national identity on key cultural resources, Gri���n shows how origin narratives – particularly the founding ��gures that anchor them – function as uniquely powerful rhetorical tools for the cultural production of regional and national identity.

SUPPLEMENTS TO METHOD & THEORY IN THE STUDY OF RELIGION

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FA B R I C AT I N G FOUNDERS IN E A R LY M O D E R N ENGLAND History, Rhetoric, and the Origins of Christianity Lauren Horn Gri���n

Lauren Horn Griffin - 978-90-04-51436-2

Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England

Lauren Horn Griffin - 978-90-04-51436-2

Supplements to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion Editorial Board Aaron W. Hughes (University of Rochester) Russell McCutcheon (University of Alabama) Kocku von Stuckrad (University of Groningen)

Volume 22

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Lauren Horn Griffin - 978-90-04-51436-2

Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England History, Rhetoric, and the Origins of Christianity

By

Lauren Horn Griffin

Lauren Horn Griffin - 978-90-04-51436-2

Cover illustration: Statue of St. Augustine of Canterbury, Palermo Cathedral, Italy. Photograph by Tupungato. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Griffin, Lauren Horn, author. Title: Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England : history, rhetoric, and the origins of Christianity / by Lauren Horn Griffin. Description: Leiden : Boston : Brill, [2023] | Series: Supplements to method & theory in the study of religion, 2214-3270 ; volume 22 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023024076 (print) | LCCN 2023024077 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004514355 (hardback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004514362 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Fathers of the church–History and criticism. | Fathers of the church–Influence. | Religious thought–England–16th century. | Christianity and culture–England–History–16th century. | England–Church history–16th century. | Christianity–Origin. | Religion–Methodology. | Religion–Study and teaching. | Church history–16th century. | Catholic Church–Doctrines–History–16th century. Classification: LCC BR67 .G698 2023 (print) | LCC BR67 (ebook) | DDC 270.1–dc23/eng/20230717 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023024076 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023024077

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2214-3270 ISBN 978-90-04-51435-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-51436-2 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by Lauren Horn Griffin. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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Contents Acknowledgments vii Abbreviations viii Note to the Reader ix Introduction: the Cultural Production of National Identity 1 1 The Arrival of Christianity in England 9 2 Supernatural Authorization 13 3 Religion versus History: Our Own Categories and Classifications 4 Memorializing Origins 19 5 Chapter Overview 21

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1 Making Time, Tradition, and Truth: the Origins of the English Christian Origins Debate 26 1 The Early Church and the Empire of England 33 2 Denigrating the Old Past 38 3 Creating a New Past: John Bale and Epochal Time 43 4 Human History and Universal Truth 51 5 Conclusions 56 2 Framing Space: Territory, Ethnicity, and Culture 60 1 From Precedent to Acts of Identification: Legitimizing Edward and Mary 63 2 Changing Places: Shifting Conceptions of Space in Jewel and Fox 68 3 Nicholas Harpsfield’s Archipelagic Narrative 73 4 Space and Ethnicity: Anglo-centrism in Stapleton and Persons 88 5 Conclusions 96 3 Authorizing Origins: Martyrology, Hagiography, and the Varieties of Supernatural Authorization in Christian Foundation Narratives 99 1 An Unbelievable Origin Narrative 104 2 Reframing Miracles: from Conversion to Confirmation 124 3 Founder-Saints and the Construction of Space and Time 129 4 Case Study: St Winefride 133 5 Conclusions 140

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vi

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4 Experiencing Origins: Founding Figures in Ritual and Material Culture, or Public History and the Realm of the Everyday 144 1 Landmarks and the Production of History: the Augustine Story in Public Spaces 151 2 Authority and Audience: Antiquarian Accounts of the Conversion of the North 156 3 Territorialization of Memory: Local Founder-Saints throughout England 165 4 Liturgy, Time, and Narrative 172 5 Collections of Saints’ Lives: Foregrounding the Celtic Legacy 180 6 Conclusions 186 Conclusion Bibliography Index 222

191 199

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Acknowledgments I offer a special thanks to my mentors, friends, and colleagues who read this book and generously offered feedback, including Stefania Tutino, Ann Taves, Sears McGee, John Stewart, Matthew Flanders, Ciara Eichhorst, and Russell McCutcheon. I am especially grateful to Stefania Tutino for giving such thoughtful attention to my work and for offering patience and encouragement. She is truly a model researcher and teacher, and I consider it a special privilege to have worked with her. Also, this book would not exist without the gentle but consistent encouragement of Russell McCutcheon, to whom I am forever grateful. I would like to acknowledge the libraries and organizations who funded this project, including the Huntington Library, Corpus Christi College at Oxford, the UCLA Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, and the Virgil Cordano, OFM, Endowment in Catholic Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. I am grateful to the colleagues and friends I met at the University of Alabama and the University of California Santa Barbara, with whom I shared my thoughts and ideas. I am also happy to use this occasion to thank my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Louisiana State University, especially Brad Storin and Mari Rethelyi. On a personal note, I would like to extend thanks to my parents for their continued support. To my partner, Chad, who read more drafts than he cared to. And to Flannery and Lulu, for bringing joy, levity, and perspective. I also want to say a special thank you to my son, Augustine – I was pregnant with Augie when I wrote the bulk of this book, and he made the long writing days less lonely with his constant (if involuntary) presence.

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Abbreviations BL CCCC CRS CUL Bodl. EETS PRO PS SAL SCL STC

British Library Corpus Christi College, Cambridge Catholic Record Society Cambridge University Library Bodleian Library, Oxford University Early English Text Society Public Record Office, recently given the title “The National Archives” Parker Society Society of Antiquaries of London Salisbury Cathedral Library A Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, first compiled by A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave; 2nd ed, revised and enlarged, begun by W.A. Jackson and F.S. Ferguson, completed by Katherine F. Pantzer, 2 vols., 1976–1986).

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Note to the Reader Throughout this work I use “evangelical” to refer to proto-Protestant thinkers and, later, “godly” to refer to more radical English Protestants, often called Puritans; I use “conservative” interchangeably with “Catholic” in the English context. I also use “English Church” to refer to English Christianity in general, and I use “Church of England” when I am discussing the institution specifically. I avoid the term “Anglican” altogether, as I am focusing on the sixteenth century. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own (the original can be found in the footnotes). In quoting early printed material, I have modernized the spelling, punctuation and capitalization.

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Lauren Horn Griffin - 978-90-04-51436-2

Introduction: the Cultural Production of National Identity Origin, although a thoroughly historical category, has, nevertheless nothing in common with genesis. Origin does not at all mean the formation or becoming of what has arisen, but rather what is arising out of becoming and passing away.1 Walter Benjamin

∵ This book is about how origin narratives – particularly the founding figures that anchor them – function as uniquely powerful rhetorical tools for the cultural production of national identity. After England’s break with Rome, early modern Catholics and Protestants strategically reimagined, rewrote, and reinterpreted the lives of the saints who brought Christianity to England. My analysis centers on how these articulations of English Chrisitan origins functioned as a key ingredient of national identification. The early modern debates over origins provoked other inquiries as well, contributing to broader conversations on historical knowledge, epistemological certainty, divine immanence, narratives of persecution, and spatial understandings of culture. The story of the arrival of Christianity was, like all quests for origins, a rhetorical enterprise. Articulating where something originated naturally involves conceptions of creation or eternal metaphysical existence. In other words, discourses on origins are often used to set apart the human (or nations) from that which is material, historical, and temporal. They are told through texts as well as through images, monuments, and place names – sprinkled throughout the realm of the everyday. Tudor historians and theologians from across the confessional spectrum used stories of the arrival of Christianity in England to draw a continuous line to a deep past, to rhetorically construct the territory of England, and to negotiate changing conceptions of divine interaction with the human world. Serving as a timely example of how “religious” myths and

1 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), 45.

© Lauren Horn Griffin, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004514362_002Lauren

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national consciousness have long been mutually constitutive, this book shows how, regardless of confessional commitment, early modern writers produced conflicting English Christian origin narratives that ultimately functioned as a powerful force for national identity. Many have argued that the theological contests among Protestants shaped English political culture and led to the creation of a distinct national identity. Of course, English national identity (like all identities) was and is a fluid construct, better understood as a process or a series of acts of identification.2 Perhaps it is more fruitful, then, to illuminate how these acts of identification worked. I argue that it was the debates themselves – having to produce and defend myths of Christian origin – that comprised the process of national identification. In other words, I hope to show that it was not a particular Protestant (or Catholic) idea that produced and shaped an English national consciousness, but rather that the act of having to rearticulate the arrival of Christianity, and particularly its founding figures, served as a key driver for the ongoing rhetorical production of a distinctly English national identity itself. Catholics, just as much as reformers, participated in and contributed to this process. This English example has broader implications for our understanding of the nationalism that would later develop, showing that it was not as a system of rhetorical tropes that somehow created social and political reality, but rather how rhetorical tropes emerged out of particular historical, political, and social conditions. In particular, I offer a theoretical framework for how discourses of origin are used to shape national and regional identities. Though scholars debate when nations began and what exactly becoming a “nation” entails, I show (through the example of early modern England) how national identification is culturally produced and maintained through debates over founding figures. England provides an apt example for this type of analysis, as it is often understood to be one of the earliest to develop a clear national identity, and because it has shaped the cultural production of other nations through its colonial projects. While nationalism is usually defined by particular economic, bureaucratic, and legal institutions, I want to focus here on earlier cultural forms of nationhood that would later be used to frame those institutions. There is no felt

2 Jean-François Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Bayart argues that fixed cultural identities do not exist, and he shifts focus instead to continuous “acts of identification.” These moments, images, and events are posed and reposed in different times and places for different political purposes. I use “acts of identification” throughout this book to signal this shift in focus from identity – static and homogenous – to the subjectivity-shaping forces themselves.

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national identity without the cultural symbolic cultivation of it. Only with certain cultural resources like myths of origin and election, memories of a golden age, and narratives of persecution do national sentiments emerge.3 This is not to argue that nations merely arose out of or in opposition to the cultural systems of medieval Europe (thus ignoring the complex set of factors that led to modern nationalism), but rather that if we want to understand “religious nationalism” today, we must recognize the dependence of national sentiment on these particular cultural elements. Thus I argue that those key elements, produced through narratives of Christian origin, did not just influence English national identity – they comprised it. In other words, I hope to show how the term “religious nationalism” is, in many ways, redundant and, for the early modern period, anachronistic. Furthermore, as the case of early modern England shows, unpacking the cultural resources of national identity highlights its inherent ethnocentrism. While many scholars have recognized this, scholars and journalists often normalize the versions familiar to them while casting others as backward or unsophisticated. For writers in early modern England, understandings of an ethnic past (regardless of actual lines of descent) framed their conceptions of the present, and ideas of past ethnic communities were inherently connected to ideas of confessional communities. Some historians have argued that Protestants had to locate reform-minded episodes in the Catholic past because modern ideas of progress were not there to lionize innovation. The idea that this particular society valued tradition over innovation, whereas many modern societies value the opposite, is an oversimplification. Early modern expressions of disdain for innovation (displayed with countless deployments of “innovators” as an insult for one’s opponent) must be read in the context of interconfessional debates. The commitment to ideas of precedent and tradition is not unique to the pre- or early modern past, nor does it preclude new interpretations and representations of historical events. Even in our own twenty-first century political landscape, we see how constructions of “deeply rooted traditions” are constantly deployed to make important political and moral decisions.4 I argue that the central issue is not shifting

3 Anthony Smith identified some of these same cultural traditions as foundational for nations in The Cultural Foundations of Nations: Hierarchy, Covenant, and Republic (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008). 4 For an example from the current-day U.S., see the Dobbs v Jackson Supreme Court Decision, which depends on the construction of a “deeply rooted tradition” that stands outside of social reality. “Dobbs v Jackson Decision, Annotated,” The New York Times, June 24, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/24/us/politics/supreme-court -dobbs-jackson-analysis-roe-wade.html.

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societal values, but rather how certain topics are set aside and imagined as immune from innovation, both then and now. This is something that the field of religious studies does very well: it asks how certain aspects of social life are set apart as sacred, and how that is used to frame our social worlds, presently and historically. Rather than casting early modern writers as blindly bound by tradition (and ourselves, by contrast, as rational evolvers), we can highlight instead their ability to rhetorically cordon off ideas of truth from the messiness of human history (which may seem like a very modern strategy, indeed). As I trace how doctrine and practice developed during the sixteenth century, it is worth stating the obvious: early modern Catholics and Protestants (like many still today) did not want their theology to appear to have changed. The veracity of their theological claims depended on constructions of immutability, of Truth (and not because of a unilateral lack of appreciation for innovation). Because Tudor historians were using the English past in arguments over an English ecclesiastical institution, articulations of Englishness, which were already based on ethnicity and expressed through Christian myths and symbols, became fully blown statements of national identity, complete with themes of sacred kingship, divine chosenness, special mission, and narratives of persecution and sacrifice.5 Though an English national sentiment existed before the break with Rome, confessionalization was a critical factor in the development of a strong national identity. England – along with other emerging nations of Europe – had to be articulated in Christian terms. These cultural resources of English national identity would go on to shape the cultural resources of other nations, particularly the United States. In fact, I first became intrigued by discourses on origins during the heated debates over the Ten Commandments monument on the Capitol lawn in my home state of Oklahoma in the United States. After years of cultural controversy and legal battles, the state Supreme Court ordered the monument be removed in 2015 due to its violation of a constitutional ban against the use of public property to promote a religion. The responses to this controversy reveal several strategies for negotiating contested national, local, and religious identities. Some deployed a strategic use of terms and categories: in the ruling, the court noted that the Ten Commandments are “obviously religious,” while Christian lawmakers, wanting the monument to stand, argued that it

5 Again, this lines up with themes highlighted by Anthony Smith in The Cultural Foundations of Nations.

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was indeed not religious, but rather historical.6 While those lawmakers used the category of history to help them strategically construct “the secular,” sentiments expressed by local folks from both sides of the debate demonstrate the impossibility of such a separation. Some centered ideas about representation, explaining that since the majority of Oklahomans identify as Christian, the monument appropriately represents “us.” Some deployed the idea that the nation was founded on the freedom of religion, while others voiced the familiar claim that America has always been a Christian nation. Each of these statements can be read as acts of identity formation rooted in ideas about the past. Perhaps more than anything, I noticed how the discourse became centered around “the values we were founded upon” and “what our founding fathers intended.” After all, what do ancient documents written in Hebrew have to do with the admission of a territory into a modern nation-state like the United States? Indeed, state lawmakers attempted to construct a unique connection of the Ten Commandments to the “founding” of Oklahoma. The House bill that proposed its display explained that the Ten Commandments “are an important component of the moral foundation of the laws and legal systems of the State of Oklahoma” and that they “represent a philosophy of government held by many of the founders of this state and nation.” These arguments about origins both reflect and are shaped by the complex and, for many, inseparable relationship between what it means to be Oklahoman and American, as well as how that relates to a Christian identity (or “Judeo-Christian,” a recent category fabricated with other relationships and contexts in mind).7 The bill also invokes God’s ordination of “civil government” as well as the “limited authority” that civil government can have in relation to individual rights. The display of the monument is necessary, according to the bill, “to help the people of … Oklahoma to know that the Ten Commandments are the moral foundation of law.”8 It explicitly states that the monument is not meant to favor one religion 6 Abby Philip, “Oklahoma’s Ten Commandments Statue must be removed, state Supreme Court says,” Washington Post, June 30, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts -of-faith/wp/2015/06/30/oklahomas-ten-commandments-statue-must-be-removed-state -supreme-court-says/ (accessed August 1, 2021). 7 For an overview of the recent rise of this term see K. Healan Gaston, Imagining JudeoChristian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy (United Kingdom: University of Chicago Press, 2019) and Anya Topolski, “14. A Genealogy of the ‘JudeoChristian’ Signifier: A Tale of Europe’s Identity Crisis” in Is there a Judeo-Christian Tradition?, eds. Emmanuel Nathan and Anya Topolski (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), 267–284. 8 Oklahoma State Legislature, Ten Commandments Monument Display Act, HB 1330, 52nd Legislature, 1st session, introduced in House on January 6, 2009, http://webserver1.lsb.state.ok .us/cf_pdf/2009-10%20INT/hB/HB1330%20INT.PDF.

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over others, as it would be one among many monuments on the Capitol lawn, but rather it is meant to acknowledge the Christian roots of the state and the nation.9 This brief example displays the strategies for utilizing discourses of origins (i.e., roots, birth, beginnings) to fabricate meanings and identities. First, the Oklahoma bill constructs notions of time, i.e., that there is a linear accessible past, and that a correct recounting of that past is the key to properly organizing ourselves in the present. It is clear these conversations are not really about any “true meaning” of the Ten Commandments or how the ancient Hebrews actually organized themselves. We can see, instead, how it aims to manufacture and authorize a particular identity by appealing to an idea of continuity with a deep past. But discourses on origins depend as much on manufacturing space as they do on manufacturing time. Creating, from the land that had belonged to Indigenous Americans, the place of “Oklahoma” was a move that was just as much rhetorical as it was legal. A little over a century after gaining statehood, these Oklahoma lawmakers continue to participate in the fabrication of place as they re-narrate Oklahoma’s founding and negotiate spatial understandings of regional and national culture. Indeed, this place was “ordained,” as the bill says, by God. This supernatural decree not only functions to authorize Oklahoma as a Christian place, but also to make further pronouncements about the relationship between the supernatural and the human.10 Furthermore, the monument itself, apart from the version of the past presented in the bill, tells a variety of stories that depend on the particular audiences interacting with it. Indeed, as the monument has since been removed, the space where the monument used to stand tells yet other stories, from narratives of persecution (by conservative Christians who read its removal as their victimization by a “woke mob”) to triumph (by liberal pluralists and those who advocate “freedom from religion”). Appeals to origins depend on discursive constructions of time and place, the invocation of forces beyond the human to naturalize and authorize, and the role of visual and ritual culture in fabrications of the past – this is the focus and structure of this book. Each chapter examines a particular dimension of a nation. The first chapter focuses on the construction of time and tradition in order to prefigure a national destiny. The second chapter examines the construction of territory, as

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Natalie Schachar, “Oklahoma’s Ten Commandments case is part of an age-old battle in U.S.,” Los Angeles Times, July 9, 2015. https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-ten -commandments-20150709-story.html (accessed June 20, 2021). Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (United States: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012), 27–28.

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each of these historians participated in a process of territorialization through the stories of the founder-saints that functioned to create attachments to the homeland. The third chapter looks at how history and territory are divinely authorized, functioning to set them apart as immune from historicization. The final chapter focuses on community, particularly how spaces, place names, and rituals surrounding founding figures strengthened both regional and national consciousness. Though the term was not used at the height of the Oklahoma Ten Commandments controversy in 2015, some might refer to this attempt to tie Christian identity to state and national identity as “Christian nationalism.” In the 2020s, debates rage in both the United States and Britain over ethnic, religious, and national identity. In the U.S., scholars and journalists have sounded alarms over the recent rise of Christian nationalism, an amorphous term often used to identify the view that the U.S. is a Christian nation (whatever that may mean).11 In the British context, scholars have explored the construction of ethnic, national, and cultural identities in sites of friction like the campaign for Brexit.12 I hope this book on the early modern period can provide some historical context for these current debates as well as serve as a historical example of how religious and national identity have always been inextricable, as the cultural resources of national sentiment would be commonly classified as “religious” material. Although not yet a modern nation-state, England in this period was nevertheless a cultural product, constructed through a variety of myths and symbols. Just as many do today, early modern writers strategically deployed discourses of origins to maintain and/or challenge those identities. To be certain, there is much to unpack about contemporary uses of the past to support particular constructions of race, religion/culture, gender, and national identity in both the U.S. and in Britain (as well as in India, Brazil, Germany – the list could go on), but I fear that recent discourses on Christian nationalism imply that this is a new phenomenon with new rhetorical strategies, and that “belief” in the religious identity of a nation is necessarily the key driver of a particular type of political action. First, failing to understand the centrality of

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See, for example, Sam Perry and Andrew Whitehead’s Taking America Back for God (United Sates: Oxford, 2020). See Robert Schertzer and Eric Taylor Woods, “English Nationalism and the Campaign for Brexit,” The New Nationalism in America and Beyond: The Deep Roots of Ethnic Nationalism in the Digital Age (United States: Oxford University Press, 2022); Kenneth Brophy, “The Brexit Hypothesis and Prehistory,” Antiquity 92, no. 366 (2018): 1650–58.

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ethnoreligious myths and symbols in producing national identities obscures the ways in which these discourses have long been used to exclude, oppress, and dominate. Articulations of national consciousness or identity have always been used to shore up power, to draw social boundaries, and to create hierarchies. Second, situating current deployments of Christian nationalist rhetoric within a longer history can help us see what is different about its deployment in the 2020s (e.g., placing it in the context of our all-encompassing digital media). This book shows that claims of a nation’s special guidance and protection by God is and has been a tool in the cultural toolbox that can be used in a variety of ways. Using the biblical Revelation to reconceptualize the Christian past, early modern historians planted the seeds of claims to special national election. Similarly, Catholics mobilized the documentary and physical evidence of local historians to display Roman Catholic footprints on every inch of the isles in hopes to render an English identity apart from Catholic tradition unthinkable. Apocalyptic thought beckoned them toward the time to come, while ideas of restoration contributed to narrations of a past that had been greater and purer. My examples from Tudor England show that ideas about the direct connection to a pure past, imagined communities based on ideas of ethnicity and territory, and claims to divine providence or election have long been deployed to legitimate power. Like many other movements aimed at the restoration of a greater past, early modern historians across the confessional spectrum wanted, at least in part, to restore the wholeness of the beginning. This book traces how nostalgia and apocalypticism became integral parts of these projects, just as they are today.13 My embrace, methodologically, of the spatial turn in history not only highlights Christian acts of identification in relation to British, Roman, universal, and local ones, but also how founding figures and their sites can be used to anchor them. Many early modern historians were making a shift in the production of England as place, which involved discursive constructions of confessional identity and ethnicity. Some drew on broader conceptions of “Britain” in service to a distinctly English national sentiment (as the titles of their works show). They were reconsidering the role of the divine in human time and space, which led to debates about what humans could know about the past and how God could confirm that knowledge. The Christianization of England was not only constructed and contested in manuscript and print 13

For just one example of contemporary apocalyptic and nationalist rhetoric, see Thomas Salek and Andrew W. Cole, “Donald Trump Tweets the 2014 Ebola Outbreak: The Infectious Nature of Apocalyptic Counterpublic Rhetoric and Constitution of an Exaggerated Health Crisis,” Communication Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2019): 21–40.

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histories, but also in hagiographies, martyrologies, liturgical reenactments, shrines, place names, and the landscape itself. In other words, it was baked into the realm of the everyday, further naturalizing certain founding myths. What follows analyzes the multiplicity of circumstances of those telling the tales and how these narratives addressed the cultural needs of the communities that produced them. Why were discourses on the Christianization of England such effective cultural tools for national identification? And more broadly, what aspects of identity formation can origins highlight that other discourses on the past might not? Instead of reading these texts to better understand early modern English Catholics or how this period shaped Catholic identity, I highlight the fluid, constructed, and heterogenous nature of confessional and national identity. This contributes yet another example of the instability of our terms and categories, breaking down the dichotomies we often use to organize the past (e.g., continuity versus change, religion versus history, unity versus contention). It can be easy for us, as contemporary scholars operating in a postmodern paradigm wherein knowledge is contingent and history is no longer read as totalizing, to look back at early modern scholarship and point out the ways they constructed mythic medieval pasts to support their own sociopolitical needs in the present. But my hope, in dissecting early modern discourses on origins, is to highlight how the rhetorical deployment of origins functions remarkably similarly today in order to present identities as static, consistent, and given. On the other hand, the focus on historical investigations into the Briton and Anglo-Saxon past reveals how the earliest of “early modern” writers were already questioning whether universalist ideas could be found in human history. Each chapter in this book reflects on the theoretical assumptions hidden in some contemporary scholarship on early modern Europe, particularly implicit definitions of religion and (as necessarily accompanies it) assumptions of the secular.

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The Arrival of Christianity in England

There was never a singular reigning myth of the arrival of Christianity in England, but the story of Saint Augustine, “Apostle to the English,” was a popular foundation narrative for English Christianity. Early medieval Britain was populated by the British, Picts, Irish and Anglo-Saxons. In 600 C.E., many British and Irish communities were already practicing Christianity, while the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons occurred at the end of the sixth century and during the seventh century. The Venerable Bede’s widely respected Historia Ecclesias-

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tica Gentis Anglorum told of how Pope Gregory the Great sent a missionary named Augustine to convert King Ethelbert of Kent in 597. Focusing on the Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England in the seventh century, the main figures in this story are Ethelbert, whom Augustine converted to Christianity with the help of his Frankish (and already Christian) wife Bertha, and the missionaries Mellitus and Justus. According to Bede, an eighth-century Northumbrian monk known as the “Father of English History,” Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Roman mission spread to the North of England (the most powerful region at the time) where the Northumbrian kings converted to the faith. With the help of the Hiberno-Scottish mission in the 630s, local missionary saints continued to spread the gospel across the island during the seventh century, establishing churches and monasteries throughout the countryside.14 The stories of the spread of Christianity across the regions of England feature many beloved converter-saints, from King Oswald to St. Boniface. These figures tended to be very popular locally, but some also garnered national and even international fame and devotion. There were other popular stories of conversion involving Joseph of Arimathea (the biblical figure who donated his tomb for the burial of Jesus) and even the apostles Peter or Paul. While the legacy of Augustine of Canterbury was written into the liturgy, the stained glass, and even the landscape itself via healing wells, trees, and landmarks, so were the legacies of founders like Joseph of Arimathea and the second-century King Lucius. Bede’s history shows that the Anglo-Saxon era witnessed the emergence of a historical interpretation that viewed English ethnicity as superior and divinely chosen. This perspective, supported by biblical and providential interpretations laid the groundwork for the perception of English exceptionalism. But it was the heavy use of and engagement with Bede’s history during the sixteenth century that solidified ideas of English chosenness and mission. Returning to an origin story itself – to the arrival of Christianity in England – was a powerful force for national identity; regardless of the varieties of intra- and interconfessional versions, each drew on the common myths, symbols, and traditions of the Briton and Anglo-Saxon past that strengthened claims of special national election. In other words, regardless of the actual content of the narratives or the beliefs and practices they were meant to bolster, these origin narratives

14

Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, eds. Judith McClure and Roger Collins, Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). The Augustine narrative is recounted in Book I, chapters 23–34, and the rest of the book covers the spread of Christianity throughout England.

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ultimately functioned to produce and maintain a powerful national sentiment (at least for the elites engaged in these rhetorical battles). The Augustine narrative in particular became problematic for the Henrician evangelicals, who first began to seek a historical basis for ecclesiastical separation from Rome. The conversion of King Ethelbert established the link between the English Church and Rome; indeed, the Gospel had been sent by none other than Pope Gregory the Great. Many Henrician reformers attempted to draw on earlier conversion stories, particularly that of King Lucius. Catholics were also engaged in a variety of contemporary conversations about doctrine, ritual, and supernatural activity in human history that are reflected in their own reconsiderations of the past. On one end of the confessional spectrum, some historians attempted to completely rework the Augustine narrative by claiming that certain regions of Britain were early outposts of True Christianity, repressed for centuries by the Anglo-Saxons and their Roman Catholicism, and that the ancient Britons preserved the pure version of the faith. Others reinforced the idea of the English Church as the proud heir of their Angle ancestors with a Christianity that came directly from Rome. In the middle of these two poles, historians and hagiographers framed space (e.g., England, Britain, Europe), its inhabitants (e.g., Britons, Celts, Picts, Angles, Saxons, Jutes), and its traditions (e.g., pagan, Catholic, evangelical, godly) in a variety of ways. I chose “early modern England” as opposed to “Britain” for the title of this book because the writers I engage with were concerned with England as a nation. While many historians drew on a more inclusive British idea, they relied on narratives of an older and purer England to construct it, and they did so in service to an English identity that was in flux. Having to articulate, again and again, England’s Christian origins consequently marked out their cultural heritage from that of their neighbors. The scholarly consensus has been that after the Henrician break with Rome, reformers wanted to eschew ties with the Anglo-Saxon past and depict themselves as heirs of the older, purer Christianity of the ancient Britons. Complicating this, I show how some reformers valued the Anglo-Saxon past and I highlight the wide variety of timelines they provide for when the Roman church went awry. Similarly, some Catholic historians also drew on a broader British identity to show how the Catholic past was deeply ingrained in each region of the isle. Futhermore, while the arrival of Christianity was being articulated and rearticulated in a variety of contexts, not all stories of founding figures explicitly centered the “blessed nation.” Local and regional concerns, especially for those outside of London, were often felt more acutely than the jurisdictional jostling going on in Hampton Court. In ritual and material culture,

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local founder-saints relayed the story of Christianity’s arrival, not Augustine of Canterbury or Joseph of Arimathea. Some scholars have argued that the development of an emerging national consciousness disrupted earlier regional identities, positioning the two in competition with each other.15 I argue that regional pride was not necessarily in contrast to national identity; on the contrary, strong local identities actually supported an ascendent English national sentiment. Antiquarians enhanced national identity through the territorialization of memory and displaying local examples of England’s sacred past. I also analyze how the arrival of Christianity in England was told through hagiographies, breviaries, liturgical calendars, shrines, place names, and the landscape itself to show how English people might have experienced these origin stories through active participation. Thus origin stories are not static, but rather dynamic, situational, and relational. They were not only shaped by the Protestant challenge, but also by events on the Continent, local and regional concerns, and theological and ideological questions that predate the break with Rome. There was no singular Catholic narrative or “side” in the debates over the origins of English Christianity. They were deployed differently in different contexts as the memory of the past was continuously contested in disparate cultural settings. For example, debates over the story of the arrival of Christianity in England became especially heated in the middle of the sixteenth century, with reformers such as John Bale and John Foxe and Catholic scholars such as Nicholas Harpsfield and Thomas Stapleton creating different historical lines to the pure original Church. Their conflicting historical accounts were indeed written in direct response to one another and thus cannot be divorced from their polemical context, but they were also simultaneously responding to a range of intraconfessional needs. Moreover, Irena Backus has argued that while there was certainly controversy over the founding figures, the historians and theologians of this period were also genuinely interested in historical sources.16 Often, the more confessionally conservative or reformist a sixteenth-century historian was, the more they are talked about in contemporary scholarship as “ideological,” implying that certain authors were committed to the real history while others were merely using sources to score political or theological points. But

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Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Irena Backus, Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615) (Boston: Brill, 2003).

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many early modern historians took a careful interest in antiquarian sources and material culture, and they were worried about losing them to the destruction of reform. As Stefania Tutino has argued, it was their ideological commitments that motivated them to seek out the documents and materials of the past.17 Rather than construct some as ideological and others as neutral or objective, I hope that the texts I examine in this book, when taken together, highlight the ways in which historical knowledge is never a stable entity – agents on their own – that shape institutions and identities. Indeed, the same sources were read in diametrically opposed ways and put to opposing political uses by the scholars from across the confessional spectrum. Different historians drew upon different items from the archive of Catholicism’s past, often held together in tension with one another.

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Supernatural Authorization

Debates over the arrival of Christianity provide a sharp example of how discourses on origins attempt, as Jacques Derrida says, to set something “holy” apart from the traces that surround it.18 In other words, how do discourses on origins participate in efforts to locate something beyond human time, and to create something of absolute value that is exemplary and normatively binding? Questions about roots or beginnings necessarily involve conceptions of creation, genesis, or arrival. Thus, origin stories, perhaps more than any other inquiry into the past, highlight this tension between the particular and the universal, or between history on the one hand and ideology or theology on the other. Among historians in early modern England, there were various levels of doubt and confidence in the possibility that human events can legitimize or even describe divine institutions, and beliefs about the relationship between the two did not always correspond to confession. Felicity Heal has argued that many Protestants did not think human history could shed light on divine truth, though they did recognize the power of history in “persuading men to the true faith,” building their polemical works around historical examples.19 Stefania

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Stefania Tutino, Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-Reformation Catholic Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Jacques Derrida, “Faith and knowledge: The two sources of ‘religion’ at the limits of reason alone,” Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar, (New York: Routledge, 2002), 40–101, quote on p. 85. Felicity Heal, “Appropriating History: Catholic and Protestant Polemics and the National Past,” Huntington Library Quarterly 68 (2005), 112.

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Tutino, on the other hand, has demonstrated how some early modern Catholic historians also doubted appeals to history in shedding light on universal, theological truths, while others’ confidence in the idea of God’s truth provided an epistemological certainty about the truths that human documents and historical evidence could reveal.20 Using the example of Catholic historian and theologian Cesare Baronio, Tutino shows how theological commitment inspired critical methodology.21 Baronio uses the metaphor of a mosaic, gluing together little stones and marble to create a whole representation, to describe his methodology and view of history.22 The fragments of human history are thus arranged in a preordained design, and this design is divine truth “in the sense that for Baronio God’s Truth has both drawn the contours of history and left some traces along the way.”23 Similarly, Alexandra Walsham has argued that while sola scriptura may have limited history’s theological implications for some, confessional commitment provided a vital incentive to go digging in the archives for historical precedent.24 In other words, for early modern historians across the confessional spectrum, these foundation narratives linked the timelessness of the true Church to a specific historical, geographical, and cultural space. In fact, Catholic and Protestant historians were often on the same side of questions regarding the relationship of history to theology. This book displays, then, the range of responses to questions about the relationship between the temporal and the spiritual, or even the particular and the universal, and explores how these shifting conceptions impact the authorizing function of discourses on origins. Any claim seen as transcendent or universal becomes naturalized and read as beyond the possibility of contestation – as if it comes from beyond history and politics. While early modern historians and hagiographers debated the nature of divine intervention, what mattered in the end was the ability of the supernatural – whether immanent or transcendent – to confirm correct doctrines, narratives, and meanings. Whether the saint of history can be contacted in the present via intercessory prayer, or whether one views human 20 21

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Stefania Tutino, Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-Reformation Catholic Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Tutino, Shadows of Doubt, 74–112, and “‘For the Sake of the Truth of History and of the Catholic Doctrines’: History, Documents, and Dogma in Cesare Baronio’s Annales Ecclesiastici,” Journal of Early Modern History 17, no. 2 (2013): 125–159. Baronio to Gregory XIII, s.d., in Albericius, Epistolae et Opuscula, vol. I, Epistola II, quoted in Tutino, Shadows of Doubt, 85. Tutino, Shadows of Doubt, 85. Alexandra Walsham, “History, Memory, and the English Reformation,” The Historical Journal 55, no. 4 (2012): 899–939.

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history as controlled by the divine, the authorizing function of miracles and supernatural intervention remains. So while the shift from miraculous healer to virtuous exemplar in some reinterpretations of saints and martyrs affected the ways in which the past and present was imagined, these figures still functioned to legitimize a specific version of Christianity from the foundation of the English church – whenever and wherever that was. While ideas about God’s confirmation of truth through miracles, signs, and wonders were depicted differently by different historians, the question remained: how would one distinguish between true martyrs and “the devil’s martyrs”?25 This focus on the authorizing function of founding figures highlights the theme of persecution, not miracles, as central for folks across the confessional spectrum who wanted to show continuity between the ancient martyrs and their own current situation. In this way, persecution and the construction of martyrdom that Anne Dillon has so thoroughly dissected is a central feature of early modern discourses on origins, functioning not only to transmit ideas about power and sanctity but also to draw social boundaries.26 “We” emerge victorious from an embattled and illustrious past, “they” continue to threaten that legacy. Saints, heroes, and martyrs – along with their attendant themes of purity, persecution, and sacrifice – were useful in constructing national histories as well as celebrations of more local, regional culture. Indeed, an overemphasis on the Catholic retainment and reliance on miracles and the immanence of the supernatural – while not inaccurate – could inadvertently construct Catholics as more “religious” and thus less modern than their Protestant counterparts which, I argue, masks how early modern Protestants (not to mention many still today) mobilize supernatural or (more broadly) transcendent ideas to legitimate particular claims of national identity.

3

Religion versus History: Our Own Categories and Classifications

The relationship between history and theology in the pre-modern world led historian Arnaldo Momigliano to argue that “any ecclesiastical historian who

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Thomas More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, in The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, eds. T. Lawlor, G. Marc’hadour and R. Marius (New Haven, 1981), vol. 6, part I, 421–2, quote on 423. See Dillon, Construction of Martyrdom, 5–7.

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believes in Christianity is bound also to be a theologian.”27 Of course, scholars like Hayden White and Jacques Derrida showed that we can approach all history – not just “church history” or “religious history” – as products of social actors embedded in particular contexts; the pasts we read, whether from the sixteenth century or now, are the results of people creating identities with the materials available. We are arguably more aware of this when dealing with “church,” “sacred,” or “religious” materials, but tend to be less critical of work we have decided is less ideological, often using the category of history to construct the opposing category of religion. Thinking beyond our categories of “history” and “religion” (and presuppositions about objectivity or ideological motivation) allows us to reframe these historical debates with new objects of study in mind. This reframing shows that “religious” or “sacred” sources do not stand outside of culture and poltics, sometimes interacting with them. On the contrary, “sacred” materials actually provide the very cultural foundations for any political or national identities. Hagiographies, martyrologies, and the visual and ritual culture surrounding converter-saints constituted public memory just as much as manuscript and print history. Furthermore, our contemporary scholarly terms like “devotional” or “ritual” versus the more secular “reenactment” not only construct definitions of religion as interior, but also obscure the ways reenactments of national or regional histories powerfully authorize versions of the past and raise them to the level of enduring universal timelessness in precisely the same way. It does not take “saints” or “sacred” sources to do this; indeed, this book highlights how the Protestant exemplar functioned, in many ways, the same as the Catholic saint in the production of a national consciousness. Hagiography is often categorized as something akin to mythology, another category seen as fanciful as opposed to history, which is “rational.” In Theorizing Myth, Bruce Lincoln traces how the category of “myth” has been deployed to deride certain kinds of stories (often told by “others”).28 Looking at contemporary scholarship on the early modern period, we can see how categories of “religion” (e.g., “hagiography,” “devotional sources,” and even “sacred”) construct ideas of early modern culture (especially Catholic culture). In other words, studies of early modern England often use the category of “history”

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Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Origins of Ecclesiastical History,” in Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley, 1990), 132–152, quote at 137. Quoted in Tutino, “For the Sake of the Truth of History and of the Catholic Doctrines,” 127. Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (United Kingdom: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

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to manufacture a sort of secular in opposition to “religious” texts and artifacts. For example, in her groundbreaking study of English antiquarianism, Jan Broadway emphasizes that her contribution will be to add local history to the conversation, as scholars are accustomed to the idea that religion shaped early modern identity, but the extent to which history did this is “less appreciated.”29 But sources of “local history” need not be set in opposition with sources of “religion.” Indeed, most of her examples would likely be categorized as “religious.” In other words, it is Christian myths, figures and symbols themselves that serve as the resources of local history. We can and should read histories as discourses on religion just as we can and should read materials considered devotional as historiographical. This book seeks to complicate standard patterns of “religious” and “national” history assumed in current scholarship and, beyond that, to emphasize contemporary historians’ construction of the concept of religion (often via terms like “sacred” or “enchanted”) in opposition to an implied “secular,” or, at least, implications of a more rational and thus modern outlook. The recent rise in the use of “sacred history,” presumably intended to broaden the category of history to include cultural data (e.g., hagiographies, shrines, etc.), contains those powerful theoretical assumptions.30 In many ways what we are doing is not so much highlighting the ways in which “religious” stuff shaped early modern “political” or “national” (read: secular) stuff, but rather underlining the very fabrication of these categories themselves. In this book I am reading accounts of the past, whether labeled hagiography or history, as narratives of the origins used by people to address their present concerns. This approach is similar to those of Peter Brown and Peter Burke, who have demonstrated the centrality of saints and martyrs in premodern European culture. Elizabeth Castelli’s work on early Christian martyrdom shows how stories about past suffering actually serves cultural or political goals in the present, making these effective figures for constituting collective memory in both pre-modern and modern contexts. In the early modern period in particular, Anne Dillon has demonstrated the ways in which the concept of martyrdom shaped Catholic identity, while Simon Ditchfield has detailed the range of cultural work that saints can do, especially with regards to historical

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Jan Broadway,“No Historie so Meete”: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England. Politics, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). See, for example, the chapters of Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World, eds. Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield and Howard Louthan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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narratives.31 In a variety of ways, then, founding figures have the potential to serve as fundamental tools for manufacturing a national sentiment. Early modern England provides an interesting case study for these theoretical questions precisely because of the scholarly debates between cultural continuity and monumental, abrupt change. In recent decades, scholars have reconsidered English Catholicism in particular during this period. Some, like Eamon Duffy and Alexandra Walsham, have demonstrated that Catholic traditions were strong, popular, and vibrant leading up to the Reformation. Others, including Anne Dillon and Peter Lake, have explored how polemic and martyrdom completely reshaped Catholicism in the sixteenth century.32 Other debates about “the Reformation” (i.e., Did it come from above or below? Was it gradual or sudden? Were people desperate for change or were they forced into it kicking and screaming?) have traditionally mapped on to “Catholic versus Protestant” perspectives of the story. Keeping in mind these trajectories here, I narrow in on the debate over the arrival of Christianity in England in order to investigate how early modern Christians from across the confessional spectrum created such a variety of origin narratives shaped by contextually specific concerns including regional loyalty, Continental relationships, and shifting conceptions of historical truth. While investigations into early modern historiography usually focus on the data itself (i.e., to gain a “fuller picture” or “clearer understanding” of the period), I want this book to serve as a historical example of how groups manufacture and employ founding figures to maintain and/or 31

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Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Peter Burke, “How to Become a Counter Reformation Saint,” in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz (London: German Historical Institute, 1984), 45–55; Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Simon Ditchfield, “Thinking with Saints: Sanctity and Society in the Early Modern World,” in Saints: Faith Without Borders, eds. Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 157–190. Eamon Duffy, Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society Under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) and The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011); Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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challenge national identity. In many ways, then, these chapters work through the contemporary scholarly (re)production of confessional categories, time periods, and the event of “the Reformation” as much as they investigate early modern fabrications of the past. Scholars have seen “Protestants” in Henry’s regime in the 1520s, they have identified “medieval miracle traditions” in a period we now call (early) modern, and just as we engage in radical reflections about the nature of historical knowledge and postmodernist conceptions of the “past,” scholars find reconsiderations of the “truth” of historical knowledge into sixteenth-century sources. Indeed, several recent studies have reflected on the ways in which our investigations into “the Reformation” are really more about the present than the past.33 In other words, “the Reformation” is such an interesting example precisely because it is continuously manufactured by us scholars ourselves. In tracing their ancestry back to pre-Roman Christianity in England, the lives of past martyrs became crucial building blocks in the new Protestant origin narrative. Similarly, for Catholic historians, English saints were unique and useful figures in their ability to connect space (i.e. England, Britain, Rome, Europe, Heaven) and time (i.e. the present with recent and ancient history). Saints, like other heroes of history, can function as liminal figures – conduits between the living and the dead. By bridging ideas of then and now as well as human and divine – whether through biblical typology or by serving as a channel for miraculous wonders – these figures can represent a specific golden age of the past.

4

Memorializing Origins

The past is not only created and recreated in written histories, but also memorialized in the liturgy and in shrines, images, statues, and place names. People visited these sites, and the stories of founders and martyrs were represented through ritual and material culture. Though a large portion of the book engages in discourse analysis and historiography, I also explore how liturgy, material culture, and the landscape itself produce English Christian origin narratives. In analyzing how visual markers and place names created origin

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See Ethan Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief: The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012); Stefania Tutino, Shadows of Doubt (2014).

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narratives and shaped collective memory in early modern England, I was continuously drawn back to the debates about the Ten Commandments on the Oklahoma State Capitol Lawn. The decade-long battle over the relatively small sculpture demonstrates our understanding of the power of symbols in public narrative, especially the ways in which those symbols are deployed to maintain, resist, or challenge the status quo. Rather than classify some objects or spaces (e.g., a saint’s healing well) as sacred and others (e.g., the name of a town) as profane, I draw on Bourdieu’s notion of “symbolic power” to describe how parish churches, shrines, and even the landscape (e.g., sacred trees, springs, etc.) operated as highly coded symbolic monuments. Monuments naturalized England’s Christian origins and its status as an especially “blessed nation.” Furthermore, local figures were often the dominant ones in material culture, which served to continue the production of a regional pride that was still a powerful collective identity for many. But regional identity need not be seen in contrast to national identity; I will show how connections to local founder-saints contributed to the sacralization of the physical environment and the understanding of England as a chosen people, thus bolstering English national sentiment. Dissolution and destruction add yet another layer to the storytelling power of objects and materials. While some objects and artworks were destroyed after Henry’s break with Rome, others remained in their place, some bearing the marks of defacement. The vacant space where a monument used to be also renarrates the past, telling a particular version of history (whether of persecution in the face of or triumph over evil) to a particular audience. While much of the visual and ritual culture of medieval Christianity continued during the sixteenth century, painting a different picture of the past from those playing out in national histories, they nevertheless developed new layers of meaning as government policies changed. Dissolving monasteries, attacking some of the more “fanciful” urban sites of devotion, and “stripping the altars” of certain ritual aspects of the mass changed not only the landscape but also the stories it told, reworking – but more importantly, reinforcing – regional pride as well as a distinctly English identity. Antiquarians from across the confessional divide preserved, reframed, or, in some cases, rehabilitated aspects of medieval traditions. Furthermore, as we can see in cases like that of St. Winefride or Joseph of Arimathea, some Protestants still reserved the notion (even if modified or qualified) that certain spaces served as points of access to divine power and sources of healing from illnesses. Even though the regimes following the break with Rome discredited many saintly traditions, they erected new ones in their

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place, reconstituting the memory of the medieval past in new materials.34 Stories of the past became intimately connected to these spaces, territorializing memory. The vitality of devotion to founder-saints attests to their rhetorical and affective power in legitimating national identity. The culture surrounding founder-saints, through the renarration of their lives on feast days, watching their stories acted out on stage, and making pilgrimages to their holy sites, requires actions that imitate the plot of the story, connecting the devotee to the historical moment.35 The hagiographies, pilgrimages, shrines, and material culture surrounding these figures reveal that a sense of the past could often revolve as much around space and place as around time.

5

Chapter Overview

The first chapter traces the development of the questions surrounding the arrival of Christianity in England in the first decades after the break with Rome. The historical arguments of Henrician evangelicals during the 1520s and 1530s were composed to support jurisdictional and political changes, but the ways they rearticulated the arrival of Christianity in England ultimately led to epistemological questions that prompted a rethinking of the discipline of history and probed the very relationship between historical knowledge and truth itself. The historical works of reformer John Bale signaled a clear shift in the conversation about England’s Christian origins, beginning the process of constructing a new past through “hidden” saints as well as providing a model for later historians and theologians to negotiate the extent to which supernatural authorization could be discerned from human history. By using the biblical Revelation to view particular history in light of a cosmic scheme, Bale’s work participates in a variety of conversations about time in this period, including apocalypticism, restoration, and the imagination of distinct epochal change over time. Chapter 2 focuses on how historians framed the arrival of Christianity in terms of space in order to fabricate a national identity that had been complicated by the political events of the mid-sixteenth century. While some reformers framed their spatial history by constructing “Britain” as a singular

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See Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Paul Ricoeur, “Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 131–144, quote on 142.

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territorial and cultural body in order to claim a pre-Roman Catholic Christian ancestry,36 I show how some Catholic historians (e.g., Nicholas Harpsfield) also used the archipelagic “Britain” in order to construct a translocal nation that was thoroughly Catholic, from Dover to Durham. For those who lived a substantial part of their lives abroad like Thomas Stapleton and Robert Persons, however, Anglo-Saxon heritage was a defining element of their English Catholic identity. Rather than view territorial and ancestral claims solely along confessional lines, I show how other factors shaped their origin narratives. Nicholas Harpsfield, using the methods of a local historian, ended up with a more archipelagic narrative that did not highlight a shared ethnic heritage in the same way that Stapleton and Persons did. Ultimately, this chapter highlights how narratives of a great, unified past have long been deployed during times that feel polarized, and how the construction of territory and ethnohistory is central to that project. Chapter 3 examines the role of miracles and supernatural activity in Christian origin narratives, shifting focus from time and space to the ongoing reassessment of where to locate the boundaries between the temporal and the transcendent. Because the founders of English Christianity were saints, they simultaneously act as representations of a specific, historical person and as an archetypal “sufferer for Christ.” Exploring the inter- and intraconfessional debates over miracles, divine immanence, and martyrdom in the histories of founder-saints, this chapter argues that the supernatural authorizing function did not depend on a more or less immanent God nor on more or less fantastical miracles. Again, reframing this question from a Catholic versus Protestant framework reveals persecution and sacrifice to be an operative ingredient in discourses on origins. Using heroes and founding figures to imagine one’s own embattled state and bravery in the face of persecution was, and still is, a powerful rhetorical tool for the production of national identity. My final chapter draws upon material and ritual culture to access quotidian representations of English Christian origins, examining how breviaries, calendars, landmarks, place names, saints’ lives, and shrines produced a national consciousness for people on the ground (not just elites). Though local figures were often the dominant ones in these sources, I argue that regional pride functioned to bolster national identity (not compete with it) through

36

In “The Construction of England as a Protestant ‘British’ Nation in the Sixteenth Century,” Renaissance Studies 18, no. 4 (2004): 582–608, Alan MacColl explores an influential sixteenth-century conception according to which “British” meant exclusively English and Protestant. See also Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 80–84.

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this sacralization of the physical environment. Regional antiquarians, too, enhanced national pride through each local example of England’s sacred past. In the twenty-first century, battles still rage over how public monuments (marking space) and public calendars (marking time) construct particular versions of the past and draw social boundaries that include and exclude. The active participation of the people in these narrative representations serves as an affectively powerful tool for manufacturing a golden age, strengthening sentiments of national sanctification and chosenness. Indeed, these landmarks existed long before the challenges of reformers, and I argue that the debates of the sixteenth century, though divisive, produced narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice that only strengthened national sentiments. The founder-saints who Christianized the island also sacralized the “nation.” In recent decades, scholars of early modern England have described how the nation was conceived of and produced by pamphleteers, playwrights, and antiquarians. Scholars like Herbert Grabes have shown how myths of an “elect nation” proliferated in literary sources,37 and scholars like Christopher Highley have shown how Catholics, not just Protestants, shaped discourses of patriotism and Englishness.38 While Highley’s work foregrounds the intraconfessional debates among British Catholic communities, I want to highlight how it was precisely these debates (from across the confessional spectrum) that contributed to the production of a strong national identity. This is not to say that a shared national sentiment produced homogeneity or unity; indeed, origin narratives continue to be imagined as unifying media, so much so that the frame of solidarity or shared identity overshadows continuous contention and negotiation. But it did strengthen themes of divine chosenness and narratives of persecution that would continue to manufacture England’s national identity (and that of later nations), which in turn shaped how social boundaries were drawn and who was included and excluded. By focusing on the ways in which the founding figures of English Christianity packaged narratives of election, a past golden age, persecution, and mission, I argue that sixteenthcentury debates over the Christianization of England became a central force for national identity. Unpacking Tudor narratives of the Christianization of England contributes to a variety of other discussions on early modern Catholicism, including changing conceptions of the past, the production of space and spatial under-

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See Writing the Early Modern English Nation, (Leiden: Brill | Rodopi, 2001). Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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standings of culture, and the ongoing construction of sainthood and martyrdom. This book engages with questions of intellectual history on the rise of historical criticism, epistemological uncertainty, and conceptions of time; it also engages with cultural and material histories on devotion, space, and memory. Bringing these two strands together through an investigation of English Christian origin narratives in the sixteenth century highlights powerful cultural resources of national identity formation. Stories of origins – founders, tradition, roots – work so well precisely because they appeal to the ultimate precedent, strategically narrating what we are doing now as something we have always done while, at the same time, rendering invisible other aspects of what we used to do. Thus saintly figures, it has been said, are good to think with.39 Scholars love to use this phrase, “good to think with,” which was coined by the structural anthropologist Claude LéviStrauss in 1962. Literary and cultural critic Marjorie Garber explores why this phrase is so popular in her book Loaded Words, concluding that it is so useful precisely because it carries its own validating power. It helps us explain why we as scholars of humanities and social sciences do what we do and why it matters. The phrase, she says, “seems to explain the work of the humanities to the world – as if the humanities were not in the world, not the same as the world, not the language of the world.”40 Without appealing to deities or a spiritual realm, scholars use rhetoric to construct the humanities as something outside of the world – thus these rhetorical strategies are not relegated to the early modern period nor to “religious” debates. If we are interested in how people set things apart as immune from historicization or as outside of social reality, discourses of origin are prime places to look. While I highlight their rhetorical and affective power, I do not wish to convey that there is something sui generis about medieval figures like, say, Augustine of Canterbury, that made them powerful tools in the early modern Catholic toolbox, just as there is nothing new about the ways contemporary right-wing Catholics in the U.S. have mobilized images of medieval knights to manufacture cultural roots over and against particular “others.”41 Much like contemporary religious/cultural 39

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See Ditchfield, “Thinking with Saints: Sanctity and Society in the Early Modern World,” in Saints: Faith Without Borders, eds. Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 157–190. Ditchfield applies Stuart Clark’s premise that demons are “good to think with,” both for early modern people and for historians examining the early modern past; see Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Marjorie Garber, Loaded Words (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). See the interpretive essays at Uncivil Religion: January 6, https://uncivilreligion.org/home /index (accessed July 21, 2022).

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productions of national identities, these examples from Tudor England show how tradition has long been used to construct a pure past, to produce communities based on ideas of ethnicity and territory, and to claim supernatural authorization to legitimate power in the present. The ways in which founding figures continuously embody, resist, complicate, and transform the mutually constitutive relationship of religious identity and national consciousness was as true in the early modern period as it is now.

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Chapter 1

Making Time, Tradition, and Truth: the Origins of the English Christian Origins Debate Origin narratives raise questions about the relationship of humanity with the supernatural, transcendent, or universal. They are often used to set apart the human (or certain groups of humans) from that which is material, historical, and temporal. Perhaps more than any other inquiry into the past, origin stories highlight this tension between a particular history and ideas about theological or ideological truth, or (more broadly) between narrative and reality. This chapter examines debates over the arrival of Christianity in England during the reign of Henry to explore the ways these questions were framed, explored, and answered in the sixteenth century. Can episodes from our own particular, human past shed light on universal truth or things beyond the human? Can the divine speak through, act in, or guide human history? These questions, of course, were posed in a very specific socio-political context in which power and authority hung in the balance. Power, after all, depends on what counts as truth.1 While the immediate concern for Henry’s regime in the 1520s and 1530s was a political problem rather than a theological or historical one, rehashing the story of the arrival of Christianity in England ultimately shaped conceptions of time and imagined temporal epochs. Writing the founding figures of Christianity in this period ultimately led to epistemological questions that prompted a reconsideration of the authority of human history as well as the relationship between the particular and the universal. In addition, scholars have argued that the confessionalization process begun in the sixteenth century led to the construction of discrete national identities because of, first, political and jurisdictional changes,2 but also because of reformers’ revival of the Old Testament and modeling of Israel.3

1 As Foucault put it, “[Relations of power] are indissociable from a discourse of truth, and they can neither be established nor function unless a true discourse is produced, accumulated, put into circulation, and set to work. Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power.” In “Society Must be Defended,” 24. 2 See Heinz Schilling, “Confession and political identity in Europe at the beginning of modern times,” Concilium, vi (1995), 3–13. 3 Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

© Lauren Horn Griffin, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004514362_003Lauren

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However, the historical writing of English Catholics shows that ideas of chosenness and sacred land were already present in England (and not especially Israel-inspired). Similarly, this chapter shows how the reformer John Bale focused much more on the book of Revelation, as opposed to the Hebrew Bible, to construct England as a chosen and sacred place. Regardless of their particular positions regarding theology, doctrine, or practice, it was the return to these Anglo-Saxon and British sources (in service to those political and jurisdictional shifts) that led to strong articulations of national consciousness from writers across the confessional spectrum. The Henrician break with Rome provided an opportunity to reconsider the relationship of the present English Church with its “origins.” Henrician evangelicals located a variety of reform-minded practices in the medieval past, while conservatives (both in England and later in exile) had to rearticulate the arrival of Christianity in England in light of contemporary challenges as well as other shifts that predate Henry’s break with Rome. The use of history in ecclesiological and theological arguments was not new; for example, historical argument was a key factor in fifteenth-century debates over conciliar versus papal power.4 Many conservatives were not shy about deploying the historical fact that Christianity in England came (in one way or another) from Rome. Reformers, in turn, dealt with this in a number of creative ways. While some historians across the confessional spectrum were up front about history’s limitations regarding doctrine or its secondary nature to scripture, they were invested nevertheless in the historical lineage of Christianity in England. Felicity Heal’s and Stefania Tutino’s work has shown that underneath specific historical-theological battles lay questions about the ability of temporal history to shed light on larger, universal truth. On one hand, Heal has argued that many Protestants thought there was no theological need to understand the Church – English or Universal – over time, because scripture contained all the answers to doctrinal and ecclesiological questions. On the other hand, as Irena Backus has shown, sola scriptura did not necessarily invalidate appeals to history, and Protestant historians did not have to temper claims of scriptural infallibility in order to appeal to history.5 Like Heal, Carlo Ginzburg explains that confidence in theology was often matched by a lack of confidence in previous historical narratives. Nuancing this a bit, though, he argues that while early modern historiography was moving away from an emphasis on narrative,

4 See Irena Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615) (Boston: Brill, 2003). 5 Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity, 253–324.

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historians embraced documentary and physical evidence as the proper way to reconstruct the past. Ginzburg reads this shift toward evidence as articulating “distrust in the possibility of being able, with the help of rhetoric, to evoke the past as an accomplished fact. Its place was taken by an awareness that our understanding of the past inevitably was uncertain, discontinuous, lacunar, based only on fragments and ruins.”6 Updating Ginzburg, Stefania Tutino has demonstrated that it was precisely the confidence in the idea of God’s “truth” that provided assurance that some smaller truth could be gleaned from those very fragments and ruins.7 On the other hand, Tutino shows that some early modern Catholic historians (even without sola scriptura and even given the theological authorization of tradition) expressed doubts based on the error and bias involved in human history.8 In the end, we get a complex picture of early modern ideas of history that do not fall neatly along confessional lines. But the appreciation of antiquarian evidence shows how English historians from conservative to reform-minded understood that smaller, more particular historical truths could be found along the way via documentary evidence and ancient objects. While Henrician evangelicals like William Tyndale and Robert Barnes stated that history could not justify doctrine (a task was reserved for scripture alone, properly interpreted), they readily entered into historical debates and made historical claims and judgements to buttress normative arguments regarding the Church.9 Though Tyndale set out to discredit monastic chronicles, he was careful to point out that they still contained enough truth to be used as a record of the corruptions of the Roman Church.10 Similarly, Barnes

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8 9

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See Carlo Ginzburg, “Description and Citation,” in Carlo Ginzburg, Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 7–24, quote on 24. Tutino, “‘For the Sake of the Truth of History and of the Catholic Doctrines’: History, Documents, and Dogma in Cesare Baronio’s Annales Ecclesiastici,” Journal of Early Modern History 17, no. 2 (2013): 125–159. Tutino, Shadows of Doubt, 9. Doubts about appeals to history and appeals to sola scriptura were made by Protestants throughout the debate; see Miles Coverdale, “The Old Fayth,” in Works, ed. G. Pearson, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1844), 1:1–83; Edward Dering, A Sparing Restraint of many lavish untruths, which M. Doctor Harding doth challenge (London, 1568); Laurence Humphrey, Jesuitismi pars secunda (London, 1584), 297; Andrew Willet, Synopsis Papismi (London, 1592), 55–57. See also Felicity Heal’s treatment of these writers and their attitude toward historical precedent in “Appropriating History,” 106–111. Tyndale, Obedience of a Christian Man (Antwerp, 1528), cxlvij and clvij. Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, 2011, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A14136.0001 .001, accessed 14 January 2021.

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traced changes in doctrine through public papal statements to argue that any change over time was inherently corrupt. These creative uses of the past still participated in historical arguments over said past. At the other end of the spectrum, many conservatives were willing to compromise on reassessing monastic works and rearticulating the past, including criticisms of the papacy, Church hierarchy, monasticism, saint cults as well as arguments regarding the unworthiness of individual popes. John Bale, a major focus of this chapter, serves as a prime example of how historians could hold a commitment to sola scriptura alongside a commitment to historical knowledge. Like Cesare Baronio and his “mosaic,” described above, throughout Bale’s work the idea emerges that human documentary history contains some “truth,” if only they could be found, read, and assembled correctly.11 Ginzburg detects the merging of data and description in sixteenthcentury ecclesiastical history, using Cesare Baronio’s Annales Ecclesiastici as an example.12 Similarly, I argue that Bale can be seen as one of these early mergers, combining antiquarianism, with its focus on primary source evidence and material history, and ecclesiastical history, with its description of past belief and practice. While Bale’s historical narratives were certainly constructed and shaped by his social reality (like everyone), his confessional commitment did not preclude all historical criticism; in other words, Bale and his ilk were not necessarily any more beholden to the constraints of ideological interpretation than anyone else.13 In addition to these particular conclusions based on documents and physical evidence, historians across the confessional divide came to view the overall arc of history as a cosmic scheme. Whether this belief in a cosmic scheme is anchored in scripture, the bodies of saints, miracles, or an understanding of the providential hand of God, their belief in universal truth was the impetus for their research into the documents and artifacts of the human past. In the 1530s and 1540s, Bale was able to construct a new national narrative by mapping out a set of English evangelical “saints” beginning with the earliest days of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. Both English and Continental conversations about early Christianity were informed by Bale’s typological reading of the universal

11 12 13

Baronio to Gregory XIII, s.d., in Albericius, Epistolae et Opuscula, vol. I, Epistola II, quoted in Tutino, Shadows of Doubt, 85. Ginzburg, “Description and Citation,” 22–23. For arguments about the unique bias of those with strong confessional commitments, see Cunningham, “A Little World without the World,” 222; Oates, “Elizabethan Histories of English Christian Origins,” 182–184.

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“True Church” throughout history and his ability to relate this to the invisible spiritual community he mined from the records of the medieval English past. Prophecy had long been used to contextualize individuals and peoples, and English reformers dealt with a variety of ecclesiastical, doctrinal, and historical ruptures by employing a historical interpretation based on prophetic scriptures. Of course, like many other restoration movements before and after, historians across the confessional spectrum wanted, at least in part, to restore the wholeness of the beginning, so “primitivism” and apocalypticism instinctively became part of these projects. The quest for the original true church was well underway on the Continent, as Catholics challenged reformers with the questions about the history of their non-Roman Christianity. Some responded by asserting that an authentic Christian tradition had always existed, claiming to be heirs of groups and individuals whom the Church had for centuries either dismissed or quashed as heretics. Indeed, this was the goal of Matthias Flacius and the Magdeburg Centuriators in Germany, who produced an ecclesiastical history emphasizing the continuity of the true faith throughout the first 1300 years of Christianity.14 Ideas about innovation are necessarily related to ideas about tradition, with the former constructed in opposition to the latter. Some recent work has argued that Protestants struggled to locate a variety of beliefs and practices in a Roman Catholic past before the idea of progress emerged to understand “innovation” as positive. In other words, the reason they had to write themselves back into the past is because “early moderns” did not appreciate the new, but rather were bound by tradition. But just as Patricia Ingham did in her reconsideration of innovation in the material of the Middle Ages, we can provide a more nuanced view of the relationship between old and new in the sixteenth-century quest for founding figures.15 Rather than depict early modern historians as bound by tradition, we can see them grappling with a variety of moral questions brought on by a separation from the Roman Church. Instead of portraying their commitment to tradition as a sign of backwardness or an allergy to innovation, we can ask how writers (both then and now) use tradition to construct ideas of universal, stable and enduring timelessness in order to naturalize and authorize. Historians from across the confessional

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On the problem of the antiquity of Protestantism in general, see S.J. Barnett, “Where was your Church Before Luther? Claims for the Antiquity of Protestantism Examined,” Church History 68 (1999): 14–41. Patricia Ingham, The Medieval New: Ambivalence in an Age of Innovation (United Kingdom: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

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divide were able to map English events onto prophecies in the biblical Revelation or onto conceptions of a universal Christendom.16 While local human history could be seen, as Matthew Parker later argued, as a “puddle of men’s traditions,” in the right hands it could also be used to construct Tradition that stands outside of time and space. In this way, we could read the critical views on history expressed by folks like early sixteenth-century scholar William Tyndale through to seventeenth-century bishop Robert Abbot not as unadulterated ideas about the discipline of history and its value, but rather as rhetorical devices used to mine universal truths from particular pasts. Mobilization of the Anglo-Saxon past was not new; in the Middle Ages, a revival of Anglo-Saxon history served to legitimize Norman rule and an Anglo-Norman “English” ethnic identity through rearticulations of origin myths and shared history.17 Similarly, the circumstances of the 1520s and 1530s provided an opportunity to articulate, again and again, these myths of origin which, consequently, began to mark out their cultural heritage as distinct from that of their neighbors. The separation from Rome emerged not in the construction of a cosmic narrative but rather as an urgent legal need during the reign of Henry VIII: a divorce from Katharine of Aragon. After entertaining many possible solutions to this matter with no result, Henry’s inner circle was convinced that the only answer was to get the case out of the hands of the pope. Justifying a complete shift in ecclesiastical authority was a major undertaking, so finding precedents and historical examples was crucial in legitimizing the English Church’s jurisdictional separation from Rome. In the following decades, appropriations of the Christian foundation narrative would be put to a variety of uses, but in the context of the 1520s and 1530s, this early debate was more about solving a political problem than a theological or historical one. An explicit counter to Bede’s Augustine narrative, in fact, grew out of this attempt to work out ecclesiastical authority in England. Thus, the earliest reworkings of this episode in England’s history did not emerge because of a spiritual desire of reformers to find their theological ancestors. Rather, they grew out of practical concerns about jurisdiction and the autonomy of the British monarch.

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See Katherine Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain 1530–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). Firth’s book outlines how the Tudor apocalyptic tradition, which grew from the Marian exiles, continued by changing and adapting in accordance with new political controversies until it became one of the major contributing factors to the English Civil War. Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), see especially 49-53.

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Because the Henrician Church was brand new and explicitly trying to work out its identity, this was a time of shifting religious policies and practices, making the labels of “Catholic” and “Protestant” anachronistic.18 It can be easy to read some writers as holding on to an enchanted past and others advancing toward the demystification of reality, or to see the skepticism of “godly” historians as progress toward a less ideological narrative. In this chapter I hope to highlight the diversity of positions across the confessional spectrum, as many conservatives expressed doubt about both the accuracy of historical works and about the behavior of Catholics in the past, and many reformers – though they too expressed doubt and invoked the primacy of scripture – went on to creatively use the past to construct ideas of national divine election and inspired tradition. There is much more variation across a broad confessional spectrum that one might think at first blush, especially when centering the focus on other aspects of contemporary social reality, i.e., regional pride, interactions with those on the Continent, intraconfessional debates, and broader epistemological shifts. This chapter also demonstrates how the construction of a Protestant past was a distinctive shift that came only after a first generation of evangelicals had fully disengaged from various medieval historical narratives. Before Bale’s narrative, other reformers provided a revision of the legacy of the Roman past, replete with “corruptions and innovations,” which had to be deconstructed before a new story could be built from the ruins. In Bale’s historiographical works composed during his first exile on the Continent, there is a distinctive shift in focus from listing the errors of the medieval Roman Church to the actual composition of a reformed history, and by the time he wrote Actes of the Englysh Votaryes in 1546, he had a defined “constructive” agenda for the English past in particular. Teasing apart these two steps reveals the extent to which these early Henrician writers shaped discourses on the origins of Christianity in England. By the mid 1540s, Bale’s work changed the conversation about England’s Christian origins, not only through constructing a new narrative through “hidden” saints, but also in providing a model for Protestants to negotiate the relationship between history and theology. Finally, through the example of Bale, I show how mapping the particular history of England onto the cosmic story in his interpretation of the biblical Revelation (1) provided a golden age as well as key events and figures through

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See Peter Marshall, “Is the Pope Catholic? Henry VIII and the Semantics of Schism,” in Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England, ed. Ethan Shagan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 22–48.

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which to imagine the shared past of the community, (2) contributed to the construction of a tradition that stands outside of time and space, and (3) contributed to new conceptions of time itself. Bale’s epochal periodization constructed a clear picture of temporal changes, or difference between times or eras, that was often neglected in medieval historiography.19

1

The Early Church and the Empire of England

When the Pope refused to grant Henry VIII a divorce from Katharine of Aragon, Henry’s Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wolsey, began to pursue other solutions. For two years, a team of scholars led by Edward Foxe, Bishop of Hereford, gathered both Anglo-Saxon laws and Roman conciliar decrees from monasteries in order to make the case that Henry’s divorce should be handled in England, not Rome. The anthology that resulted, the Collectanea satis copiosa, was given to Henry in 1530 and was meant to demonstrate that England was an autonomous region within the Catholic Church and that the king, not the pope, had jurisdiction over it.20 One of the documents included in the Collectanea was a letter, allegedly from Pope Eleutherius himself, which records how the second-century British King Lucius was so awed by the miracles of Christians that he desired conversion and requested the presence of missionaries. As Felicity Heal has explained, the pope’s reply explained that Lucius was already “God’s Vicar in his Kingdom,” which seemingly stated that Lucius had sacred as well as temporal authority over his realm. If Lucius was the first publicly professed Christian, he could be credited with converting the entire country to Christianity. This story provided Henry’s apologists with a founding figure who could not only legitimize their own state-sponsored reformation but also make England the first Christian nation due to its King’s early conversion. This information eventually resulted in the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals and the 1534 Act of Supremacy, ending papal authority in England.21

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Hans-Werner Goetz, “The Concept of Time in the Historiography of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory, Historiography, eds. Gerd Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J. Geary, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 139–66. BL MS Cotton Cleopatra E vi, ff. 37v–38. For more on the Lucius legend, see Felicity Heal, “What Can King Lucius Do for You? The Reformation and the Early British Church,” English Historical Review 120.487 (2005), 593–614. The Lucius story is also recorded in Bede, but Bede explains how Christianity died out in England due to the Diocletian Persecution. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Lucius

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Thomas Cromwell justified this jurisdictional move, here summarized in the famous preamble to the first of a long series of parliamentary statutes: Where by diverse sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one Supreme Head and King having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial Crown of the same, unto whom a body politic compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of Spirituality and Temporality, be bound and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience.22 Cromwell thus found in the Lucius material what he saw as a historical precedent for ecclesiastical independence from Rome. By claiming that England was an “empire,” in the sense that it was not answerable to any other governing body, he cleverly grounded this change on the authority of history. In 1534 Edward Foxe, prolocutor of the convocation regarding Henry’s marriage to Katherine, conducted an investigation and comparison of papal and royal authority that resulted in his De vera differentia regiae potestatis et ecclesiasticae, in which he argued that early British Christianity had not been corrupted (due to the right of English kings) until the pope began to interfere in the English Church. Despite both of these documents, problems with this historical narrative remained: most notably for this context, Lucius was converted via Rome, as Pope Eleutherius sent two missionaries, Faganus and Davianus, who arrived in Britain to baptize the king and the English people. The missionaries rededicated the old temples to the Christian God, putting “an end to paganism throughout almost the whole island.”23 Thus this story of Christian origins ultimately suffered from the same problem as that of Augustine of Canterbury: a Christianity sent from a pope and a Church set up by Rome. Lucius was not the only alternative to Augustine to be proposed as the founding father of Christianity in England. Arguably the most popular preAugustine Christian origin narrative centered on Joseph of Arimathea, the

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story was more influential, as it emphasizes Lucius’ virtues and gives a detailed, if fanciful, account of the spread of Christianity during his reign. See Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, eds. Judith McClure and Roger Collins, Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Book 1, chapter 6, 14–16, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Penguin: London, 1966), 124–125. “Act in Restraint of Appeals” (1533). Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin, 2015), 124–125.

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biblical figure who donated his tomb for the burial of Jesus. William of Malmesbury’s twelfth-century De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae was the first to connect Joseph to the Apostolic mission to England.24 According to this text, Joseph was sent by the Apostle Philip to convert the Britons. Arriving in Glastonbury with the Holy Grail, he and his party converted the locals and planted the seed for the English Church. While Joseph does not appear in any writings by Geoffrey of Monmouth himself, he becomes associated with the Galfridian tradition, which refers not just to Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain, but also the other medieval legends that became associated with his story. In Roman Invasions, John Curran argues that it was fifteenth-century writer John Hardyng who most emphatically inserted Joseph into the Galfridian narrative.25 This larger narrative tradition includes the story of Joseph founding a Christian community, receiving support from King Arviragus, and being buried at the mythical island of Avalon. Because Joseph had become part of these popular Arthurian legends, he was already firmly established in the English historical imagination. Furthermore, having been sent directly by the Apostles, Joseph was not associated with Rome. Indeed, Joseph predated the Roman conversion by several centuries, making England one of the first nations to receive Christianity. Though this legend became popular a century prior, Henrician reformers used it for their particular sixteenth-century needs. John Bale, for example, focused on the Joseph of Arimathea legend in his Actes of Englysh Votaryes and The Vocacyon of John Bale. John Foxe, drawing on Bale, also highlighted Joseph as proof that English Christian origins did not come from Rome. Citing Tertullian, Origen, and Bede, Foxe concluded that Joseph “laid the first foundation of Christian faith among the Britain people.”26 On the other hand, as we will see in the next chapter, this foundation narrative was criticized by opponents for its “legendary” qualities, and some reformers were uncomfortable with the relics, miracles, and especially the monastic

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The original copy of this work is not extant, and the later editions contain interpolations by the monks of Glastonbury Abbey. Antonia Gransden has argued that the Joseph legend was added later in order to increase pilgrimage to the abbey. See her Historical Writing in England II, c. 1307 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1996), 399. See also Gransden’s “The Growth of the Glastonbury Traditions and Legends in the Twelfth Century,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27 (1976): 337–358. John Curran, Roman Invasions: The British History, Protestant Anti-Romanism, and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530–1660 (Cranbury: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 38. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of Matters Most Speciall and Memorable, Happenyng in the Church with an Vniversall History of the Same (London: John Day, 1583), II, 129. Hereafter, Foxe, A&M.

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nature of Joseph’s foundation narrative.27 Joseph of Arimathea, then, was a popular founding figure even before Henry’s break with Rome, and the story was both beloved and criticized before and after Henry’s regime began to seek precedent for the English Church. By the reign of Elizabeth, historians suggested that St. Peter or St. Paul had brought Christianity directly to England.28 Both John Jewel and John Foxe, drawing on the ninth-century Patriarch of Constantinople Nicephorus, claimed that Paul made a mission to England on his way to Spain.29 In the early seventeenth century, the Jesuit Robert Persons used Byzantine hagiographer Simeon Metaphrastes to claim that Peter preached the Gospel in England, establishing an even stronger connection between England and Rome, as “the first Bishop of Rome went in person to convert our country.”30 Later, the Catholic missionary Richard Broughton will also make the case for Peter. William Camden, the moderate Protestant, actually accepted that both Peter and Paul had visited the island and established Christian Churches.31 A direct Apostolic origin of English Christianity was attractive and thus used by historians across the confessional spectrum, even into the seventeenth century, despite the lack of documentation or a robust tradition to support them. By the early seventeenth century, reformers made attempts to install other biblical figures as the founding figure of English Christianity. For example, Robert Cotton draws on Eusebius to celebrate Simon Zealot, one of the twelve Apostles, and Aristobulus, one of the seventy disciples of Barnabas who was apparently made “bishop of Britain.”32 Jack Cunningham has detailed how reformed writers wanted to establish a tradition even beyond the Apostolic

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29 30 31

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Thomas Fuller, Church History of Britain from the birth of Christ until the year 1648 (London, 1655), 7; Simonds D’Ewes, The Primitive Practise for Preserving the Truth (London, 1645), 28. For a fuller discussion of the Joseph legend, see Cunningham, “A Young Man’s Brow and an Old Man’s Beard,” 251–259. See for example, John Jewel, A Replie unto M. Hardinges Answere (London, 1565). Jewel was the first reformer to focus on St. Paul as the founder of English Christianity, and he provided Nicephorus, the ninth-century Patriarch of Constantinople, as his source. See also William Camden, Remaines Concerning Britain (London, 1605), in which he argued that Peter himself could be the establisher of the British Churches using the writings of Theodoret and Sopronius. Jewel, Works, III, 163–164; Foxe, A&M, II, 129. Robert Persons, A Treatise of the Three Conversions of England (London, 1603), 14–16. William Camden, Remaines, 4. Richard Broughton, An Ecclesiastical Protestant History of the High Pastoral and Fatherly Chardge and Care of the Popes of Rome, over the Church of Britain (Saint-Omer: Boscard, 1624), 13–15. Robert Cotton, A Brief Abstract of the Question of the Precendency of England and Spain (London, 1642), 3.

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Church, tracing their country’s biblical connections back to Noah and the flood in Genesis. Writing at the turn of the sixteenth century, Italian historian Annius of Viterbo claimed to have found fragments of a text by Berossus, writing in the third century BCE. According to this text, Samothes the giant, Noah’s grandson, was given France and the Island of Britain to repopulate after the flood. Over time, the Samothean people ruled the island until the invasion of Albion, another giant and the son of Neptune. As John Bale explained, “Albion was a giant, like as afore said Samothes was before him, but also for that his father Neptunas was taken for the lord or great God of Sea.”33 In his study of English antiquarians, Graham Parry credits Bale as the first to introduce Samothes to an English-speaking audience.34 This legend connected the kings of England to Noah, thus making them descendants of the Israelites, the original chosen people.35 A few decades after this legend appeared in Bale’s Illustrium majoris Britanniae scriptorum (1548), Annius’s fragments were found to be forgeries by Annius himself, and the Samothes account was dismissed as mere fable.36 These various figures offer interesting foundation narratives, some free of connection with Rome but with a firm connection to the Apostolic Church, or even ancient Israel. From the ancient writers mentioned above to medieval sources like Gildas, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and William of Malmesbury, early modern historians had plenty of versions of the arrival of Christianity on which to draw.37 This quick survey of origin narratives from before and after the break with Rome shows how historians used a variety of figures – some connected to Rome, some biblical figures, some native Britons – and their choices did not fall neatly along confessional lines. Figures did not necessarily fall out of favor due to new historical “rigor” – legends lived on in “serious” his-

33 34 35

36

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John Bale, Votaryes, 11; quoted in Cunningham, “A Little World without the World,” 219. See also Holinshed, The Historie of England (London, 1577), 2. Graham Parry, Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 57. For the weaving of Noachic history with the history of nations, see Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 28–31. In addition to Bale, this legend was included in John Caius’ Historia Cantabrigiensis Academiae (1574), William Harrison’s Description of England (1577), Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) and Anthony Munday’s A briefe chronicle (1611) before the forgery was discovered. See Graham Parry, “Berossus and the protestants: Reconstructing protestant myth,” The Huntington Library Quarterly 64 (2001): 1–21. For a longer discussion of the giants and other alternative founding fathers, see Cunningham, “A Little World without the World,” especially 205–212.

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torical works long after skepticism and criticism were thought to have changed early modern understandings of the past.

2

Denigrating the Old Past

Before a new narrative of early English Christianity could be written, Henry’s historians had to delegitimize previous conceptions of the past that had been taken as given and neutral. While Henrician evangelicals, for the most part, accepted that the Saxons were evangelized from Rome in some capacity, their main focus was showing the corruption that followed Rome’s involvement. Reform-minded historians identified different time periods for when the Church began to grow corrupt. Some focused on the Anglo-Saxon conversion as the emergence of corruption, while others pointed to later centuries. For Bale, as we will see, the seeds of corruption were planted even before Anglo-Saxon arrival, with Irish and Scottish monks. Some historians pointed to the turn of the eighth century, so Bede’s account of St. Augustine was just on the edge of this “declining time.” An early appearance of this thesis came from William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man in 1528. He argued both for sola scriptura as well as the supreme authority of the monarch, and he was extremely critical of what he saw as the corruptions and superstitions in the Church. While this work is not usually classified as history, Tyndale drew on examples from the early Church to support his claims. In the section titled “Against the pope’s false power,” Tyndale argued that leadership of the church had been corrupt since 700 AD, when a rapid increase in papal power began.38 By setting this date over a century after the conversion of the English people by Augustine of Canterbury, Tyndale was not attempting to challenge the conversion story recorded in Bede, the English Church’s Roman origins, nor St. Augustine as founding figure. Tyndale did, however, make one claim regarding the medieval Church that would play a significant role in subsequent histories: during the corrupt centuries after the early church, there were also sincere believers, the “elect” or chosen ones of Christ, within the corrupted visible Church.39 Though Tyndale set out to denigrate the version of history penned by lying monks, he was careful to point out that their chronicles still contained enough truth to be used as a record of the corruptions, errors, and innovations of the Roman Church,

38 39

Tyndale, Obedience of a Christian Man, xl-xlviij. Tyndale, lxxiij.

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and thus provide proof of the illegitimate expansion of papal power over that of the king.40 In other words, Tyndale argued that the chronicles provided a legitimate record of the past, we just have to read them differently. His primary evidence of the medieval Church’s failure was the growing corruption of monks. Criticism of monasticism and “monkish” writers was a recurrent theme in the works of these early evangelicals – it provides space to use, yet allow for distrust of, writers like Bede, William of Malmesbury, and Matthew Paris. This creative use of historical material in Obedience of a Christian Man will be influential later on, especially with John Bale. Another favorite topic of Tyndale, papal corruptions, would be taken up by reformer and scholar Robert Barnes. Barnes’s magnum opus, Vitae Romanorum pontificum (1536), traced the increasing corruption of the popes in hopes to highlight their immorality. Helen Parish has detailed how Barnes, like Tyndale, mined monastic histories and chronicles for material with which he could then turn back upon those very monks, attacking the medieval Church and its institutions.41 Barnes was not critical of Pope Gregory, Augustine of Canterbury, or Bede. Indeed, he credits Gregory the Great with the arrival of Christianity in England and relies on Bede as the main source for this section of his history. Barnes did not argue for papal usurpation of temporal power nor did he emphasize scandal in the private lives of individual popes – he even avoided the term “antichrist.”42 Korey Maas argued that Barnes’s reluctance to apply “antichrist” to the pope is significant, because wrapped up in this term are questions about the status of the Roman Church prior to the split and about whether there was enough remaining truth in the Roman Church for at least some Catholics to be saved.43 Instead of tackling these broader issues at this point, Barnes documented papal public statements, highlighting the changes they had made in regard to doctrine. In this way, Barnes presented doctrine as divine truth that stands outside of time and space, thus any “changes” made by those with temporal power were, by definition, corrupt. Histories of monasteries and popes, then, became a key component of evangelical writings as the means by which they could show the medieval Church to be corrupt, and thus begin to dismantle this traditional historical paradigm.

40 41 42

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Tyndale, cxlvij and clvij. Helen Parish, Monks, Miracles, and Magic, 21–24. For more on the use of “antichrist” in Protestant polemics, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 93–127. Though Milton focuses on the seventeenth century, he points out that there were differences of nuance amongst Protestant polemicists. Korey Maas lays this argument out in great detail in the study, The Reformation and Robert Barnes (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010).

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In practice, if not in theory, for these evangelical writers, human history could indeed shed light on a divine institution, and they continued to use historical examples, not to prove the veracity of a new Protestant church (yet), but to prove the depravity of the old one. While many conservatives certainly pushed back against this narration of the medieval Church, others were open to compromise on certain issues. Many doctrinally conservative members of Henry’s inner circle were tired of dealing with what they saw as a corrupt and tyrannical papacy, so the initial break with Rome appealed to them as well.44 The theological and liturgical implications of this ecclesiastical and political break had not yet been fully realized, and the diversity of historical responses reflects a spectrum of the different positions that one could construct. On the other hand, emphasizing the primacy of scripture over history and tradition put conservatives on the defensive. For them, authority in the Roman Catholic Church was not only constructed via scripture but also liturgy, miracles, saintly bodies, and more. Indeed, as Simon Ditchfield has shown, local traditions were popular, valued, and important vehicles for authorizing versions of the past and creating a collective memory.45 On these grounds, English humanist and lawyer Thomas More defended the supremacy of the pope, medieval Church traditions, and the history of the Church as it was recorded. Though none of those were perfect, More conceded, they were indeed of the True Church of Christ. In 1532, just months before the Act in Restraint of Appeals was put forth, More composed a Confutacyon of Tyndales Answere. In it, More argued that if the Church had been corrupt since the days of the primitive community, then no sacraments could have been administered properly, and thus during all those centuries no one could have been a true Christian. The argument of Tyndale and others, that true “elect” individuals had existed within a corrupt Church, was unthinkable to More because it would mean that they, too, would have received tainted sacraments from a wicked institution, and thus could not be elect.46

44

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For more on the conservative desire to reform, see Ethan Shagan, “Confronting Compromise: The Schism and Its Legacy in Mid-Tudor England,” in Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England, ed. Ethan Shagan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 49–68. Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Thomas More, A Confutacyon of Tyndales Answere (London: Rastell, 1532), 89: “[Tyndale argues that] there had been a great gap in Christendom this xv.C.year. And where had Christ’s promise been then all this while? With his elects? Nay if this church have had all this while false sacraments, Christ hath had none elects all this while. For they have used, what so ever Tyndale say, the same sacraments that their neighbors did.”

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Based on the sacramental theology in this period, conservatives like More were able to use their confidence in the sacraments to their advantage. Sacraments play a physical role in salvation, even for a humanist like More. The imputation of grace functioned to of bind together the unbroken line of Christians. According to More, a past proto-reformed “elect” person would have been a part of the Catholic Church – the only permanent body of believers – communing with and taking sacraments alongside everyone else. Because there were no other bodies of believers with different beliefs and practices that could trace their lineage back to Jesus and the Apostles, the Church could not be reduced to “two or three heretics buzzing in a corner.”47 More therefore made the Church, i.e. the visible body of Christ, a key challenge to the historical claims of evangelicals: “The common and perceptible multitude of men professing the name and faith of Christ is the Catholic Church by whose teaching the Scripture is determined and the faith is learned and recognized with certainty.”48 Thus, given More’s view of the Church, an alternative history tracing the lineage of only “the elect” among us would be impossible. Though supernatural authorization is the subject of chapter three, I want to touch on the relationship between the human and supernatural in the sacramental theology of Henrician conservatives and its impact on historical knowledge. While, as we will see, Catholic historians like Nicholas Harpsfield and Thomas Stapleton were tackling the question of miracles and other supernatural phenomena in the lives of the saints who comprised their national histories, More and others were more concerned with this unbroken line between the Apostles and Catholics in the present. The direct lineage of Christians practicing over time was not only important for setting precedent or guiding tradition, but also for physically conferring salvation itself. This made human history a matter of cosmic significance. The extent to which the history of the Church in England could bear on soteriology which impacted all of Christendom was something that each of these founding figure stories – from evangelical to conservative – had to address. Stephen Gardiner, a bishop and known conservative in the Henrician regime, employed a specific strategy in this regard. He took a different approach toward the evangelical challenge, which scholars have called negotiation, compromise, or accommodation.49 In his 1535 De Vera Obedientia, Gardiner provided two helpful arguments for the clergy to comply with Henry’s 47 48 49

More, Confutacyon, 62. More, Responsio ad Lutherum (London, 1523), 201. For more on accommodation in early modern English Catholicism see Shagan, “Confronting Compromise,” 49–68; Lisa McClain, Lest We De Damned: Practical Innovation and

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new settlement, and neither one involved reinterpreting nor holding fast to a particular past. First was the argument from obedience: the Bible requires obedience to the temporal ruler in all things unless obedience to God himself was compromised. The second was a criticism of the current pope: the people of England had “bid the bishop of Rome farewell” because it was only natural to “turn such a chaplain out of the doors” who had been “hired or prayed to minister divine service, yet hath not showed himself faithful and diligent in his office.”50 Gardiner uses this concept of obedience to the temporal ruler – one that would be advantageous for those arguing for Henry VIII’s ecclesiastical authority – to disrupt sola scriptura, which is why the response of Gardiner outlined in De Vera Obedientia has been described as “the most original work of theory to be associated with the Henrician settlement.”51 Many people, both in England and on the Continent, shared Gardiner’s criticisms of the papacy, Church hierarchy, monasticism, and saint cults. Moreover, arguments regarding the unworthiness of individual popes had been made many times in the past, most recently by humanist critics of Julius II.52 By proposing a measure of compromise between core theological tenets and new ecclesiastical and political arrangements, Gardiner, unlike More, lived to fight another day against the more radical reforms being proposed. Perhaps, as Ethan Shagan and others have suggested, many Catholics who lived through that process believed that it did not affect the core of their religious identity.53 Either way, by supporting Royal Supremacy and by arguing that popes can be and have been corrupt in the past, Gardiner avoided engaging in the debates over historical precedent like More and other conservatives. Conservatives like Gardiner, however, did not fully realize the impact that their comprimises would have on the collective memory of England’s Christian past and the cultural production of English and/or British national consciousness. Though More and Gardiner had different responses to the evangelical challenge, they both recognized that corruptions and abuses were a reality in both the past and present of the Roman Church, which served as a general point of agreement between the conservatives and evangelicals regarding

50 51 52 53

Lived Experience Among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 (New York: Routledge, 2004); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Stephen Gardiner, De Vera Obediencia Oratio (London, 1535), Sig. G iiii. J. K. McConica, English Humanists and Reformation Politics Under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 128. See, for example, Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly (1509; printed in Paris, 1511). Shagan, “Confronting Compromise,” 49.

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Church history. While a more critical look at the Roman Church’s past would certainly have an impact on the Church’s history and memory – both for England in particular and for the universal Catholic Church – it does not compare to the more thoroughly reinterpreted historical narratives that were to follow, turning the old story on its head, making heroes of villains and heretics of saints. This historical quest began, then, as a jurisdictional and political crises, but it was this key historiographical move, not fully underway until John Bale, which began to identify the English Church as separate from Rome, reshaping the relationship between religious and national identities in early modern England.

3

Creating a New Past: John Bale and Epochal Time

The passage of the Act of Six Articles in 1539 marked another shift in the religious policies of Henry’s regime, including a return to more traditional beliefs and practices and a ban on Protestant tracts. Thomas Cromwell was executed the following year. After this halt, if not reversal, of Henry VIII’s commitment to ecclesiastical reform, many evangelicals fled to the Continent, where they continued to produce even more outspoken controversial writings. This is the context in which John Bale, a priest from Suffolk who had recently left the Carmelite order and converted to Protestantism, produced his most popular histories and catalogues.54 Upon the fall of Cromwell, Bale fled to Switzerland and spent the next few years between the Low Countries and Frankfurt with Protestant historians, including Matthias Flacius and the Magdeburg Centuriators, who were in the process of rewriting a universal Protestant history. Bale, influenced by Tyndale and Barnes, had continued the evangelical historical project of disengaging with the popish past, but after his time on the Continent he began to recognize the need to rewrite that same past: after all, the 54

For more on Bale’s historical works, see F.J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, 79–120; Leslie P. Fairfield, John Bale: Mythmaker for the English Reformation (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1976); Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics, and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Rethinking the Henrician Era: Essays on Early Tudor Texts and Contexts, ed. Peter Herman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Peter Happé, John Bale (London: Prentice Hall International, 1996); Timothy Graham, The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England: Documents by John Bale and John Joscelyn from the Circle of Matthew Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 1998); Thomas Betteridge, Tudor Histories of the English Reformations, 1530–83 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); and Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale: Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson, eds. Helen Barr and Ann M. Hutchison (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005).

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“correct” English Church needed a location in time and space leading up to the present. In addition to several plays, during this exile Bale produced his two narrative histories, The Image of both Churches (Antwerp, 1545) and The Acts of English Votaryes (in two parts, published in 1546 in Antwerp and 1551 in London). He also published a catalogue, Illustrium maioris Britannie Scriptorum … Summarium in 1548, and a number of anti-Roman martyrologies.55 Bale’s historical works, when taken together, reimagine the English past through a reformed reading of the biblical narrative, offering a narrative history that could legitimize particular political and ecclesiological reforms. As Leslie Fairfield’s work demonstrated, Bale was able to show how biblical prophecies were playing out, not only in human history, but specifically in English history.56 Indeed, the particular history of the Church in England was necessary to authorize the broader Protestant interpretation of universal history. One of the first major works Bale wrote during this exile was the Image of Both Churches, originally published in Antwerp and reprinted in London in 1548, 1550, 1560, and 1570. In it, Bale interprets the story of the Church in light of the book of Revelation, mapping human history onto prophetic imagery with the “true” church on one hand and the “false” church – Roman Catholicism – on the other. He depicts the decline of the “false” church as slow at first and increasing until the present day. As Alexandra Walsham and others have pointed out, this version of history was predicated on the belief that God continues to intervene in human affairs, guiding both momentous and mundane events.57 Indeed, to Bale, human history was a story of divine judgments. In Image, Bale argued that though the Apostles and the early bishops of Rome “from Peter to Sylvester” were faithful, corruption soon set in: “Thus crept they up in hypocrisy day by day, till such time as John of Constantinople contended with Gregory of Rome for the supremity … then were these holy fathers compelled to tarry and leisure, and under crafty colors to wait their prey.”58 Based on the representation of seven church ages in Revelation 2–3, Bale divided church history into seven ages: the first three centuries after Christ constituted 55

56 57 58

For more on Bale as a playwright, see Greg Walker, Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Peter Happe, John Bale (New York: Twayne, 1996). Of twenty-four plays known to have been written by Bale, only five are still extant. His first play (and most widely read today), King John, was based on the historical material in Tyndale’s Obedience, and depicts Henry VIII as the successor to King John who attacks papal tyranny and completes England’s schism from the church of Rome. Fairfield, John Bale, especially chapter 4, “The English Past,” 86–120. Walsham, “History and Memory,” 905. Bale, Image of Both Churches, 503.

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a “golden age” of Christianity, encompassing both the initial period of Apostolic purity and the time of the primitive church when the popes and Church Fathers still followed the truth. The third age, or the fourth through the sixth centuries, was largely positive in Bale’s view; however, anchored by the establishment of the Church under Constantine, he detects the initial slips, which marks the beginnings of the Church’s moral decline by its partnership with the Roman state. Bale moves on to the fourth age – the seventh through the tenth centuries – which for him is a turning point, as the corruption of papal power reaches completion. He designates the beginning of papal tyranny with Boniface III and his assumption of the role of “bishop of the whole world” at the beginning of the seventh century, and “out of the corrupted and depraved scriptures” took “popish laws and decrees.” Bale set the end of the primitive Church, appropriately, at 666 AD, soon after the Roman Church entered England with St. Augustine.59 In addition to the growing corruption of Roman Church during the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, Bale mentioned Jews, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians, explaining that “innumerable sects of perdition” followed “under the Romish pope in Europe, under Mahomet the false prophet in Africa, and under Prester John in Asia.”60 Indeed, he draws affinities between these other “others” in order to construct Roman Catholicism “other” itself. During the fifth age, the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, the misuses of scripture turned into pure evil: “in the other age afore they did but creep into the hearts of men through the glitterings of hypocrisy and dissimulate sanctity. But here they have obtained the power, seat, and authority of the beast.”61 This marked the release of Satan from captivity. Bale characterized the sixth age, from the fourteenth century until the present, by the growing tensions between reformers preaching the truth (e.g., John Wycliffe) and the Roman Church, which was waging war on the real Christians. As Richard Bauckham has demonstrated, popular medieval writings on the prophecy of the Antichrist were widely read in the sixteenth century and influenced the writings of Continental reformers like Martin Luther and Francis Lambert. However, Bauckham notes, this medieval theme was “Protestantized” in the hands of the Tudor evangelicals, whose application of Revelation to the English past prompted a creative reimagining of the nature and presence of

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Bale, Image of Both Churches, 87; Bale deliberately misdates the appointment of Theodore of Tarsus to 666 in order to emphasize the apocalyptic connection. Bale, Image of Both Churches, 320. Bale, Image of Both Churches, 483.

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the antichrist in the Church.62 Bale was thus a pioneer in his particular application of this theme, outlining the papal role in the expansion of the influence of the Antichrist in the English Church. This growth of the influence of the Antichrist in the papacy was reflected in the degeneration of the Church from Apostolic purity. After tracing the historical conflict between “true” and “false” Churches through the seven ages, Bale worked his way up to the present, seventh age. It began with the split from Rome and marked the coming of the millennium on earth, anticipating the Second Coming. William Tyndale and Robert Barnes are among the leading representatives of the true religion that Bale gave for the present age.63 In outlining the rise and take-over of the Antichrist in the English Church and highlighting local “Protestant” heroes along the way, the Image of Both Churches marks a shift from exposing the errors of the medieval Church to actively constructing a Protestant past. Bale did not invent this application of the seven-age pattern of Revelation – it had long been used by chroniclers. But in this particular social and political environment, Bale was able to successfully deploy this method to construct a the particular reformed British past. He developed a historical periodization that made sense both with the political context of the English Reformation and with historical-theological conversations on the Continent.64 Indeed, after Image, Bale turned his interest even more intently on relating the local history of the English Church to a universal narrative and to the cycle based on Revelation. With contemporary martyrs in mind, Bale continued his construction of history with a number of evangelical martyrologies with anti-Roman Catholic themes. He writes not only of contemporary martyrs but also of saints throughout history, persecuted under the tyranny of Rome. He divides these English martyrs into two classes: those who died for the pope and those who died for Christ. Only the latter, he argues, are true saints. Indeed, once Augustine entered England, the Roman Church began to produce martyrs for the True Church: In England here, since the first plantation of the pope’s English Church by Augustine and other Romish monks, two kinds of martyrs hath been: one of monastery-builders and chantry-founders, whom the temporal princes and secular magistrates have diversely done to death, sometime

62

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Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse, Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millenarianism, and the English Reformation: From John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman (Oxford: Sutton Courtenay, 1978). Bale, Image of Both Churches, 374–394. For more on Bale’s periodization scheme, see Fairfield, John Bale, 87–88.

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for disobedience, and sometime for manifest treason … The other sort were preachers of the gospel, or other martyrs, poor teachers hereof in corners, when the persecution was such that it might not be taught abroad … these Christian martyrs were never solemnized of them … but they have been holden for condemned heretics ever since.65 With this, Bale transforms the medieval saints of the Catholic Church into criminals, explaining their “heroic” deaths away with charges of disobedience and treason. Similarly, he transforms sinners into saints, painting medieval “heretics” as the true hidden saints who were persecuted and martyred at the hands of the Church. In addition to reworking martyrologies, Bale also began to reinterpret Bede’s account of the Augustinian mission. For example, upon the arrival of the Roman missionaries in Kent, Bale notes: “Well armed were they with Aristotle’s artillery, as with logic, Philosophy, and other crafty sciences, but of the sacred scriptures, they knew little or nothing.”66 Bale also highlights one particular episode in the foundation of the English Christianity, reversing Bede’s portrayal. Bede had described a meeting between the Roman missionaries (lead by Augustine) and the British Christian monks on the island in which they tried to work out common belief and practice. After the British monks refused to accept Roman ways, Augustine prophesied that they would die at the hands of the Anglo-Saxons for their obstinacy. When they are eventually killed (long after the death of Augustine) by a pagan Anglo-Saxon king, Ethelfrid, Bede concludes that they had gotten what was coming to them since they rejected the true faith.67 Bale reinterprets this story, making the British Bangor monks into martyrs for the True Church and the Roman Augustine a persecutor. He highlights Dionothus, abbot of the monastery at Bangor, who refused to preach or baptize in the Roman manner and was thus killed, according to Bale, at the order of Augustine.68 Thus Bale explains the tensions between the Britons and the Saxons, ultimately siding with the pre-Roman British Christians, making them the spiritual ancestors of the reformers in England.69 In

65 66 67 68 69

Bale, “The Examinations of Anne Askewe, 1547” in Select Works of John Bale, D.D., ed. Henry Christmas, PS (Cambridge, 1849), 188. Hereafter Bale, “Anne Askew.” Votaryes, 22r; Happe suggests that this Bale is suspicious of classical works due to his association of Aristotle with medieval scholasticism. See Happe, John Bale, 55. Bede, Ecclesiastical History, Book II, chapter 2. Bale, “Anne Askew,” 187–189. Dionothus is called Dinooth in Bede’s text, and Bede mentions him only in passing. Bale, Illustrium Majoris Britaniae Scriptorum … Summarium, f 50r-v.

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this way, he begins to chart a new Protestant history through “hidden” saints like Dionothus. This episode will also become important to subsequent historians, including the Magdeburg Centuriators, Nicholas Harpsfield, and Thomas Stapleton, who elaborate on this conflict between Augustine and the Bangor monks. Bale is among the earliest historians to make the connection between English Protestantism and the early Britons, setting up a tension between national, ethnic, and religious identity that both conservatives and reformers will deal with in the next decades.70 In addition to Continental examples including the Waldensians and the Albigensians, Bale continues to trace the history of the True Church with English martyrs and key figures of Lollard history, such as John Oldcastle.71 In addition to compiling and translating Oldcastle’s trial documents, Bale adds his own commentary and analysis. For example, he contrasts the virtue and humility of Oldcastle at his execution with the sleaziness of Thomas Becket at his, describing Becket “in his prelate’s apparel, in the head Church, before the high altar, among religious monks and priests, and in the holy time of Christmas, by his own seeking.”72 In this way, Bale establishes the lineage that was lacking in previous histories of the medieval period; however, in contrast to the sacramental theology of conservatives like More that made the unbroken lineage important for the supernatural transmission of salvation, Bale’s history was not so explicitly related to doctrine. Bale continued his reconstruction project in his Actes of the English Votaryes, which was published in two parts in 1546 and 1551, along with many later editions. Votaryes includes a much harsher and broader description of alleged monastic corruption than his earlier account of the Carmelite order in England, Anglorum Heliades (c. 1539), which demonstrates a shift in his thinking that took place after his first exile. Votaryes covers the period of the Church in England from its beginnings, when Joseph of Arimathea first brought Apostolic Christianity to Britain, to the time of King John. It argues that the votaries, following the Antichrist, destroyed what had been built by Adam, Noah, Moses, and Christ. The evidence for this, he says, has been collected out of the legends of the monks themselves.73 Like his predecessors, he describes the corruptions of the medieval Church and the steady expansion of ecclesiastical authority through the centuries. But in addition to deploying

70 71 72 73

For more on the ethnic issues surrounding the arrival of Christianity in England, see Curran, Roman Invasions, 26–27. Bale “Anne Askew,” 41. Bale “Anne Askew,” 55. Happe, John Bale, 55–57. Bale, Votaryes, 3r-6v.

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medieval history to prove the corruption of the cult of the saints and other “superstitious” practices, Bale addresses more clearly the question of Christian origins in England. He argues that Christianity arrived in England as early as the first century when Joseph of Arimathea was sent by Philip the Apostle to convert the Britons. They settled at Glastonbury and began to spread Christianity throughout the island.74 Recorded by Gildas as early as the sixth century, the Joseph of Arimathea legend was expanded in the ninth-century Life of Mary Magdalene by Rabanus Maurus, which was used by William of Malmesbury in the thirteenth century. Bale argued that it was Joseph who had converted the Britons, connecting them directly with the Apostolic Churches which were established long before the corruption of Rome set in. The “primitive” Church was tainted by the expansion of monasticism, and with the arrival of Augustine and his monks, the Church itself began to deteriorate. Augustine “was not of the order of Christ as was Peter, but of the superstitious sect of Benet.” He brought with him candles, relics, and other “popish” paraphernalia, and his story is littered with false miracles.75 For Bale, the spread of monasticism was a marker of the decline of the Church and, as Helen Parish has shown, Bale eventually homes in on the disastrous consequences of clerical celibacy. Parish shows how the celibacy theme served as a critical development on which Bale could construct the identification of the True Church and the English Christian past.76 Joseph, preceding monasticism and celibacy, was closer to the “pure” Apostolic Church, had no Roman association, and could be constructed in line with reformed principles. Bale also included a version of this story in his Vocacyon of John Bale (1553), an autobiographical account of his time as a Bishop in Ireland during the reign of Edward. In this later work he highlighted the benefits of the Joseph narrative even more explicitly: The Apostle Philip sent Joseph of Arimathea to Britain to preach the gospel, linking British Christianity to “the school of Christ himself,” and explicitly states that this faith came “from Jerusalem, and not from Rome.” Bale posits the first signs of adulteration arrived through Celtic Christians like Ninian and St. Patrick, who imported “a heap of ceremonies,” but the real corruption came from the Saxon invasions: “then entered in another swarm of monks much worse than the other.”77 While Bale mentioned that King Lucius was “the first Christian king of this region” at the end of Image, he emphasizes

74 75 76 77

Bale, Votaryes, 15r-v. Bale, Votaryes, 24r. The subject of miracles will be discussed further in chapter 3. Helen Parish, Clerical Marriage and the English Reformation: Precedent, Policy and Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). Bale, Vocacyon, 12v-14r.

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Joseph as founding father of English Christianity. He also denigrates the missionary saints who came from Ireland and Scotland, emphasizing that it was England in particular who had the oldest and purest Christianity. This distinction would have important implications for the negotiation of religious and national identity, as we will see in the next chapter. Some reform-minded historians drew on a broader British identity to combat the history of the Roman Catholic Church on the archipelago, while others did not identify corruption in the Church until centuries after the Anglo-Saxon arrival. Notably, then, Bale uses the native Britons, mostly Welsh, to construct a distinctly English identity vis-à-vis the Anglo-Saxons, the Irish, and the Scottish. Bale continued to develop this historical narrative in his first bibliographic work, Summarium Maioris Britannie Catalogus … Summarium, which was printed in Wesel in 1548, presumably for an international audience. Like many early modern English historians Bale was upset by the loss of manuscripts during the dissolution of the monasteries. The Summarium was his contribution to preserving and cataloguing remaining manuscript holdings. This catalogue can be read as a work of history and of hagiography, as it organizes and describes the lives of founding figures to construct a narrative. Bale arranged the texts using the same periodization of history that he employed in the Image of both Churches, including a summary of the authors’ contribution to English history. He continued to trace the history of “true” Christianity in England in his vitae of illustrious figures. For example, Bede himself is treated as a saint and member of the “elect,” as Bale writes about his life and virtues apart from his prolific writings: “Bede [was] called ‘Venerable’ because of the modesty of his lifestyle.” Though he was among “so many monsters of superstition,” he was one of England’s “pure fruits,” comparable to Lot among the Sodomites or the Philippians in the middle of their depraved nation.78 This eulogy is a microcosm of the theses driving Bale’s historiography: disengaging from the Roman Catholic past, finding the “elect” of the “true” Church in England in particular, using these figures to construct a new memory of the medieval past, and relating the local history of the English Church to a universal apocalyptic narrative. For Bale, then, history and hagiography are not separate genres. As Felicity Heal has noted, while Parker and others looked to Eusebius as a model, Bale took his cue from the tradition of Jerome, who, with the additions of Gen-

78

Bale, Summarium, f 50v: “ob vitae modestiam”; “inter tot superstitionum monstra”; “castos fructus.”

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nadius in the fifth century, recorded the lives of illustrious Christians.79 They used one hundred lives to trace the Christian tradition in their collection, and it ends with Gennadius himself, a device Bale uses in both his bibliographic works. His works on Anne Askew and John Oldcastle combined with the hagiographic material in Image and Votaryes, as well as his own autobiographical Vocacyon of John Bale, laid the groundwork for a full English Protestant martyrology, and thus a reconstruction of England’s Protestant past. By marking the end of the early Church even earlier and by locating a hidden history for England in particular through its “true” martyrs, Bale had begun to construct a new past for the Church in England in order to legitimate present action. Not only did a typological reading of the English past read universal truth into particular history, but it also influenced early modern understandings of time itself. Reading the medieval past through the lens of the Revelation, Bale created clear periods of history that allowed early modern people to view themselves as living in a fundamentally different time than epochs past. HansWerner Goetz has shown, in his study of the concept of time in the historiography of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that while medieval chroniclers took care to record historical chronicle events in the correct chronological order, they lacked an analysis of temporal change and did not seem to conceive of differences in times and centuries.80 Though Bale’s influences for this epochal reading come from Swiss reformers, especially Francis Lambert and Sebastian Meyer, Bale was one of first to apply this apocalyptic narrative to Britain, providing a basic pattern of ecclesiastical history that would be used by English reformers and conservatives for decades to come.81

4

Human History and Universal Truth

Though Bale believed in the primacy of scripture, he also believed that an understanding of human history could be informed by it. Of course, Bale stated that the theological truth of the Bible was above any truths that could 79

80 81

Heal, “Appropriating History,” 114. See also G.E. Minton, “‘The Same Cause and Like Quarrell’: Eusebius, John Foxe and the Evolution of Ecclesiastical History,” Church History 71 (2002), 715–742, quote on 735. Goetz, “The Concept of Time in the Historiography of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” 139–66. Francis Lambert, Exegeseos in sanctam Divi Ioannis Apocalypsim Libri VII (Marburg, 1528); Sebastian Meyer, In Apocalypsim Ioannis Apostoli … Commentarius (Zurich, 1539). For more on the influences of these and other Swiss reformers on Bale during the first exile, see Fairfield, John Bale, 86–88.

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be found in human history: “Yet is the text a light to the chronicles, and not the chronicles to the text.”82 But Bale and other reform-minded historians were able to retain the importance of the founding figures and saints of the early Church by claiming that the biblical text can provide a guide to finding the truths of human history. As we have seen, Bale used biblical prophecies to interpret historical events, charting the ongoing conflict between the True and the False Churches. This typological reading was influential in the later decades of the sixteenth century, as it reinforced the relationship between human history and the divine word – between documentary evidence and theology. Bale showed that the relationship between sacred scripture and temporal history was possible because the book of Revelation prophesied the future of all humankind.83 While, as we have seen, many early modern historians marshaled examples from the past in order to accomplish specific political or ecclesiastical goals, Anthony Grafton shows how the genre of ecclesiastical history developed in other ways. Church history was in conversation with other genres of history, and innovative thinking about the Christian past resulted from this dialogue.84 The merging of primary source data recorded by antiquarians and the narrative history of the early medieval church provided by ecclesiastical historians can be seen in the works of Bale. Antiquarianism and hagiography will be taken up more fully in chapter four, but I want to briefly mention these themes here in order to emphasize Bale’s innovation not only in the construction of a new historical narrative, but also in his approach to history. The influence of John Leland and the antiquarian movement shaped Bale’s narrative histories. Bale eventually completed an edition of Laboryouse Journey after Leland’s death and, influenced by the growing quest for precedents by antiquarians, Bale became committed to documenting his examples. In his preface to Leland’s Laboryouse Journey, Bale lamented the lack of an English history that reflects his own beliefs and values: “And bring you into the light, that they kept long in the darkness … to restore us to such a truth in histories, as we have long wanted.”85 He believed that the truth about the past

82 83 84

85

Bale, Image of Both Churches (Antwerp, 1545), 253. For more on apocalypticism and typology in early evangelical reformers, see Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, especially chapters 1 and 2. Anthony Grafton, “Church History in Early Modern Europe: Tradition and Innovation,” in Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World, eds. Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield and Howard Louthan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–26. Bale, “The Epistle Dedicatory,” 3.

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could indeed be found in human documents, and he (and others, like Leland) must become “diligent searcher(s) of the Antiquities” to mine the truth out of previous chronicles.86 Like Cesare Baronio and his “mosaic,” described above, throughout Bale’s preface the idea emerged that human documentary history contains some “truth,” if only they could be found, read, and assembled correctly.87 Arnaldo Momigliano has explained that the antiquary collected fragmentary data but did not produce a descriptive historical account, while historians weaved a rhetorical narrative from secondary sources.88 Carlo Ginzburg detects the merging of data and description in sixteenth-century ecclesiastical history, using Cesare Baronio’s Annales Ecclesiastici as an example.89 Similarly, I argue that Bale can be seen as one of these early mergers, combining antiquarianism, with its focus on primary source evidence and material history, and ecclesiastical history, with its description of past belief and practice. In his preface to the second part of Image, Bale explained that he put “many allegations both of the scriptures and doctors … to signify unto them that I did nothing therein without authority.” Visiting libraries throughout England and the Continent, Bale’s goal was to collect and digest a mass of information in order to offer a reliable story: “And undoubtedly the gathering of those places was so laborious unto me as the making of the commentary, which nevertheless I thought well bestowed for the comfort of my brethren.”90 He searched for new sources and used them (e.g. the Fasciculi Zizaniorum, which contained information he used in his Protestant martyrologies),91 and he became even more dedicated to recovering and preserving sources after the dissolution. Bale’s tour of Carmelite libraries throughout England as well as France and the Low Countries resulted in his detailed bibliographic works, which helped Matthew Parker put together his extensive library at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. Parker even acquired many collections from Bale himself upon his death, and Parker’s 1572 De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae is indebted to Bale’s archival searches. Bale’s work was also used by Matthias

86

87 88 89 90 91

Bale, “John Bale to the Reader,” in John Leland, The laboryouse journey [and] serche of Johan Leylande, for Englandes antiquitees. [London: Printed by S. Mierdman for John Bale, 1549]. STC 15445, 7. Baronio to Gregory XIII, s.d., in Albericius, Epistolae et Opuscula, vol. I, Epistola II, quoted in Tutino, Shadows of Doubt, 85. Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” in Studies in Historiography (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1966), 1–39. Ginzburg, “Description and Citation,” 22–23. Bale, “Preface,” 380. Bodl. MS e Musaeo 86, this is a collection of documents that describes the Carmelite examination of Wyclif and his followers, and thus it outlines Wycliffite doctrine.

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Flacius and Magdeburg Centuriators on the Continent, mostly for the amount of information it contained.92 Though Matthew Parker is often credited with sparking an interest in the study of Anglo-Saxonism, Bale, Leland and other antiquarians had already been studying the Anglo-Saxon period.93 Far from a mere collector of evidence, Bale provides description and rhetorical narrative along the way. Indeed, his prose itself has been criticized by both his contemporaries and modern historians and, as his writings grew more and more acerbic over time, he earned the moniker “bilious Bale.”94 This broader contextualization can even be seen in Bale’s bibliographic works. In Summarium he begins each entry with a biography and an annotated bibliography that often attempts to situate the work in its historical context. Combining these authorial comments with his data, Bale merges “citation and description” in his construction of a new past for Protestants in England. His organization of the British past, whether arranged according to the seven seals in Image or the four ages of rise and fall in Votaryes, emphasized the inextricable link between “true” Christianity and Britain, rendering the conception of the latter dependent on definitions of the former. While Bale’s historical works are often read as a contrast to the humanist historical thought of the sixteenth century, he actually combines elements of national and ecclesiastical history, hagiography, and antiquarian methods. His work, in many ways, defies the neat genres and complicates narratives of scholarly progress often read back into the early modern period. Influenced both by the evangelical desire to show the corruption of the medieval Church and by the quest of antiquarians like Leland to recover the medieval past, Bale recognizes the need to compensate for the materials lost after the dissolution of the monasteries.95 He, like other Protestant historians and antiquarians, was upset by the destruction of documentary and physical sources of the past, and he felt it was up to them to recover it and record it as best they could: This would I have wished (and I scarcely utter it without tears), that the profitable corn had not so unadvisedly and ungodly perished with

92 93 94 95

N.L. Jones, “Matthew Parker, John Bale, and the Magdeburg Centuriators,” Sixteenth Century Journal 12 (1981): 35–49. For a more wide-ranging look at Bale’s contribution to British medieval studies, see McKisack, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). See Oliver Wort, John Bale and Religious Conversion in Reformation England (London: Routledge, 2015), especially 49–60. See Parish, Monks, Miracles, and Magic, 28.

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the unprofitable chaff, nor the wholesome herbs with the unwholesome weeds: I mean the worthy works of men godly-minded and lively memorials of our nation with those lazy lubbers and popish bellygods.96 So, while he certainly read these materials through his confessional lens and used it in formation of his confessional identity, he nevertheless wanted to save these historical sources.97 Bale’s desire to find truth in the past pushed him to uncover sources and to be meticulous about those sources, especially in his bibliographic works, which in turn laid the foundations for both conservatives and reformers for decades to come. In lamenting the loss of manuscripts in his preface to Leland’s Laboryouse Journey, Bale repeatedly connects national history with universal truth. For Bale, the history of England was a source of divine truth, and the love of country was inextricable from godly wisdom: “The most worthy monuments of this realm so miserably perished in the spoil. Oh, that men of learning and of perfect love to their nation were not then appointed to the search of their libraries, for the conservation of those most noble antiquities!”98 For Bale, love of nation was the reason for gathering these sources – the “most worthy commodity of your country” – and he believed that providing (correct) commentary would reveal “wisdom godly.”99 The particular story of England is thus vital for uncovering the divine truth of the universe. And indeed, love of country is a prerequisite for approaching divine wisdom. Bale’s belief that God shaped the events of history provided his confidence in the idea that the story he found in human documents and the landscape contained the truth.100 Even as early as the first half of the sixteenth century, we see the seeds of the idea of England as a special nation, and the production of English and reformed identity as co-constitutive. Though Bale did not end up writing the comprehensive history of England he wanted, he took the first steps in creating a history for an evangelical Church in England, even before what would become the Church of England 96 97 98 99 100

Bale, “John Bale to the Reader,” 5. Again, Backus persuasively argues this in regard to historians on the Continent in Historical Method and Confessional Identity. Bale, “Epistle Dedicatory,” 2. Bale, “John Bale to the Reader,” 6. In addition to Tutino’s Shadows of Doubt, on this aspect of history and theology see also Dmitri Levitin, “From Sacred History to the History of Religion: Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity in European Historiography from Reformation to ‘Enlightenment,’” The Historical Journal, 55 (2012): 1117–1160; Walsham, “History, Memory, and the English Reformation,” 899–939; Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History, 153–179.

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had been established. Bale was influential not only in providing a new history, but also in providing a model for the negotiation of the relationship between local and universal, or between the truths of history and theology. On one hand, his merging of primary source documentation and rhetorical narrative reveals historical innovations taking place in the discipline of history in the early modern period, while on the other hand his commitment to saints, signs, and wonders as well as his biblical typological reading of human history highlights the enchantment humans could (and still do) read into their own stories. His desire to reconstruct England’s Protestant past was later realized in the histories of John Foxe and Matthew Parker, but the enterprise begins here with Bale, a decade before the Elizabethan settlement. The idea that Bale’s historical project reconstructed an institution’s history before the institution even existed highlights the fact that history does not merely describe the object itself, but actively constructs it.

5

Conclusions

English Christian origin narratives were used to find legal precedent, create shared values, and establish patterns over time. These stories created solidarity and emphasized difference, depending on their context. They also shaped ideas of time, temporal change, and periodization. These examples of histories composed by those closest to the crown were initially written to deal with the legal battles between their monarch and their pope. Bale’s story provided a golden age as well as key events through which to imagine the shared past of the nation. Of course, questions about the role of history in matters of theology, the character of the English Church, and England’s relationship with political powers on the Continent did not, indeed, originate in Henrician England. A quick look at the medieval histories they debated shows just how long running those questions could be. This chapter reframes questions about origins (even the origins of origins) as continuous acts of identification, posed and reposed in different times and places for different political purposes.101 Bale’s authoritative history was a working result from various social sites within and outside England that not only fabricated a particular version of the past but also constructed ideas of what human knowledge and divine truth looked like. I returned to these debates over origins during the Henrician era not to discover, as I quipped in the title, the origins of the origins debate,

101

Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 92.

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but rather to (as Foucault says) “make viable all of those discontinuities that cross us.”102 In other words, my goal was to highlight that stories of the arrival of Christianity in England had already manufactured a sense of Englishness, that historical material had already been used in theological debates, and that ideas of divine election and “blessed nation” were not invented by Bale. What is evident in this period is the complexity and fluidity of the attitudes toward the Henrician religious settlement, the new opportunity to revisit narratives of Christian origin, and the varieties of founding figures that became (and remained) popular before, during, and after Henry’s break with Rome. Alternative foundation narratives were newly conceived as answers to the contested issues within the Henrician settlement: how to justify the jurisdictional move away from Rome, and whether or not a different Church (with a past all its own) was to follow. When, exactly, did the Church become “corrupt”? When did the pope become evil? What is the role, now, of the King in the Church? In answering these questions, the early Henrician evangelicals and their more conservative counterparts reflect the flexibility of historical thought vis-à-vis their political circumstances. A typological reading of the true Church throughout history and mapping the events of the English past onto the narrative of the biblical apocalypse gave historians one method for bringing the past to bear on the present or, in other words, for negotiating the relationship between history and theology. Writers like Bale began to construct an invisible spiritual community and a history of English Protestantism in particular from the records of the medieval past, relating the local history of the English Church to a universal narrative and to the cycle based on Revelation. While the first generation of reformers had started to dismantle traditional historical paradigms, only in the later historical writings of John Bale did a new narrative begin to take shape. Bale also contributed to new ways of conceiving time, as his epochal periodization constructed a clear picture of temporal changes, or difference between centuries. Though this chapter uses Bale’s work as a primary example, the other works examined here and in subsequent chapters show that there was no singular reformed or Protestant historical narrative. Some historians highlighted the corruption of the Church early on, even in the second century, while others looked at the tenth century as the moment when the Church began to go awry. Some saw Bede and Augustine of Canterbury as laudable figures, while

102

Michel Foucault, “Nietzche, genealogy, history” in D.F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, 139–164 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 162.

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others wrote them as villains. Some reformers seized on the opportunity to highlight a figure like Joseph of Arimathea as a pre-Roman founding figure, while others accepted the Christianization of the Anglo-Saxon people from Rome. Some chose to construct a primarily British national consciousness, while others highlighted the purity of the English Church over and against the Irish and Scottish. Catholic writers, too, varied in their depiction of the arrival and spread of Christianity. The choices made by early modern historians do not always fall neatly along confessional lines. The works examined here demonstrate the fluidity between hagiography, historiography and mythology, and reveal just how contingent those categories really are. With the rejection of traditional authority came the rejection of the Roman past that had legitimized it. Largely accepting its Roman origins, many writers stressed the increasing corruption of popes and monks throughout the Middle Ages. After Henry’s reform-minded agents reworked the Christian foundation narrative to justify a jurisdictional separation from Rome, Bale’s historiographical work set the stage for debates over the Anglo-Saxon Church that would explode in the second half of the sixteenth century. Through their use of English Christian origins – complete with themes of martyrdom, perseverance, persecution and conversion – evangelical writers and their Catholic interlocutors reframed the medieval past over and over again, providing key cultural resources of national identity. Later, Protestants like James Calfhill and Mathew Sutcliffe would write against using the “puddle of men’s Traditions, devised by men’s imaginations” to legitimize belief and practice. This line even appears in the first Book of Homilies that developed the reformed doctrine of the Church of England.103 In the early seventeenth century, Bishop of Salisbury Robert Abbot reminded historians that those seeking religious truth “cannot study the Chronicles for the finding of it.”104 Abbot, however, not only stated that human history could not shed light on divine truth, but he also doubted the truth of histories at all, as they were composed by humans and thus prone to error and bias. He explained that the only thing historical works revealed was “the private affection of the author, rather than any testimony of public faith.” Yet, despite all of these warning statements around studying the chronicles, the main argument of his treatise is that we can and must locate the true history of the early Church through the likes of the Albigensians and Lollards, drawing a line from 103 104

Gerald Bray. The Books of Homilies: A Critical Edition (United Kingdom: Lutterworth Press, 2016). Robert Abbot, The True Ancient Roman Catholike v. Dr Bishops Reproof of The Reformed Catholike (London, 1611), 206.

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them to contemporary Calvinists. Even in the work of a man who expressed deep distrust in the historical accounts he has received, he still believes there is some truth to be mined by the careful reader, and that there is value in articulating lineage and tradition.105 Abbot goes on explain what looks like a pretty postmodern proclamation, that the past is really about the concerns of the present: “to the devices of their own times, they apply the phrases of former times, and corrupt the meaning of former times, by speaking in the language of their own times.”106 As Tutino shows in Shadows of Doubt, while early modern historians/theologians did not see the fractured relationship between narrative and reality in the same way postmodern intellectuals do, some of them began “to harbor some doubts on the firmness and tightness of the bond connecting language, human truth, and divine Truth, and thus they started to perceive the fragility of the system.”107 What we can understand from this examination of Henrician origin stories is that histories are the products of particular social actors embedded in specific contexts, and to some extent many of these early modern historians recognized that. They became adept at finding inaccuracies in the chronicles of medieval monks, and they proceeded to expound on how medieval versions of history were interpreted through their own social, political, and confessional concerns. They asked what we could gain by looking to the past, and how far this knowledge could go in revealing universal truths. My analysis of these debates over the arrival of Christianity reveal how this historical moment forced a widespread reconsideration of origins that not only strengthened a sense of national identity, but also led to new conceptions of time and epistemological questions about historical knowledge and truth.

105

106 107

For more on early modern epistemological uncertainty and insecurity, see Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Stefania Tutino, Uncertainty in Post-Reformation Catholicism: A History of Probabilism (New York: Oxford University Press. 2018); and Ethan Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 2019). Abbot, The True Ancient Roman Catholike, 207. Tutino, Shadows of Doubt, 4.

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Chapter 2

Framing Space: Territory, Ethnicity, and Culture Quoting the famous line of human geographer Nigel Thrift that reads “space is the stuff of geography,” historian Courtney Campbell adds that time is understood as the “stuff” of history. She contends that while this may make for a nice dichotomy, we actually study time and place as parallel concepts. Sometimes, however, they will merge to form “spatial history,” in which questions of “place” and “scale” become the central ones.1 How are “places,” or our conception of physical spaces, naturalized? How are boundaries and scale produced and defined by social processes?2 I read the early modern historians I explore in this chapter as both data (exploring processes by which certain spaces were foregrounded and mobilized as authorizing concepts) and examples of spatial historians themselves (utilizing a methodology that merges time and space to center questions of place and scale). How is space just as central as time in narratives of origin? How does constructing a setting – a place – involve conceptions of ethnicity, language, and confessional identity? While the previous chapter focused on Bale’s construction of time and his periodization, this chapter examines the contest over space to emphasize, once again, the variety of rhetorical strategies across the confessional spectrum. During the Anglo-Saxon era, the interpretation of history through a biblical and providential lens established the basis for a perception of English ethnic superiority and divine selection, long predating the break with Rome. It was the heavy use of and engagement with Bede’s history during the sixteenth century, however, that solidified ideas of English chosenness and mission. The physical markers of founding figures function to form territorial attachments; in other words, they can territorialize origin narratives in powerful ways. This, more often than not, also involves imaginations of ethnicities and ethnohistories (regardless of actual lines of descent). Nations have been, in part, formed on the basis of preexisting ethnic sentiments (even if fictive).3 Despite a complex and mixed ethnic background, a sense of common ethnicity is forged

1 Courtney J Campbell, “Space, Place and Scale: Human Geography and Spatial History” in Past and Present, 239, Issue 1 (May 2018): 23–45. 2 See Henri LeFebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Jane Wills, “Scale,” A Feminist Glossary of Human Geography, eds. Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp (eds.), (London: Taylor & Francis, 2014). 3 Smith, Chosen Peoples, 166-189.

© Lauren Horn Griffin, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004514362_004Lauren

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through tales that center Britons as well as those that center Anglo-Saxons. In this chapter, we can see English Catholic historians like Thomas Stapleton and Robert Person distinguish England from their neighbors in order to produce a stronger national sentiment in the service of their Catholic identity, while others, like Nicholas Harpsfield, draw on a broader British identity in service of the same. Because Henrician debates surrounding the arrival of Christianity in England revolved around political jurisdiction, the scholarship on the Christian foundation narrative has focused primarily on its use in the quest for the authority and lineage of the new ecclesiastical order.4 However, creating a new timeline for an emerging national Church was not the goal of the Catholic writers examined in this chapter. Addressing questions of when Christianity arrived and who brought it led to a variety of spatial conceptions for the origin stories (e.g., Britain, England, local English counties, Rome, European Christendom, Heaven) that reflect the various uses of the medieval past that emerged in the sixteenth century. This chapter transcends the current boundaries of debates concerning the role of the Christian past in order to analyze the variety of constructions of place. I examine how historians talked about England, Rome, Europe, and especially Britain in relation to confessional identities. Central to this argument is the work of Nicholas Harpsfield, treated at length here. Drawing on Bede’s history as well as political history (kings, battles, etc.), he organizes his narrative by region and brings in the topographical and material evidence of antiquarians. Harpsfield’s Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica shows how origin narratives were anchored by place. My analysis of the way space framed Christian origin narratives highlights the fluid boundaries between theology/ideology and history and between time and space. Indeed, this chapter can be read as an example of the centrality of space, often downplayed in favor of time, in analyses of origin narratives. The first part of this chapter traces how the origins conversation shifted from the early debates among Henrician evangelicals to the regimes that followed. Because the reigns of Edward and Mary were so short and contested, the history of the English Church was largely put towards legitimizing monarchical or papal authority, respectively. By the 1560s these circumstances had changed, and so had the framing of origin narratives. The second section looks

4 See, for example, Helen Parish, Monks, Miracles, and Magic: Reformation Representations of the Medieval Church (London: Routledge, 2005), chapter 2; Cunningham, “A Little World without the World,” 205–212; Oates, “Elizabethan Histories of English Christian Origins,” 165–185; Heal, “What Can King Lucius Do for You?” 593–614, and “Appropriating History,” 109–132.

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at the works of Protestants John Jewel and John Foxe in order to contextualize the variety of Catholic constructions of place in the histories that came later. While Henrician lawyers had already used the story of the arrival of Christianity in England to justify sovereign, royal authority, Elizabeth’s regime continued to build on these arguments to legitimize both her royal and ecclesiastical authority. The third section focuses on Nicholas Harpsfield and his use of an imagined united Britain. Rather than portraying pre-Augustine Christianity among the Britons as somehow antithetical to the faith that came after, Harpsfield situated ancient Britain in the context of a united, universal Church, and his description of the following centuries highlights the continuity of the faith on the island. The fourth section focuses on Catholics writing abroad, namely Thomas Stapleton and Robert Persons. They often expressed their English loyalty by celebrating the Roman Catholic history of the Anglo-Saxons over the contributions of Welsh/British, Irish, and Scottish Christians. Unlike Harpsfield, who chose to emphasize the archipelagic and universal past and present of the Catholic Church, Stapleton and Persons did their best to portray Roman Catholicism as fundamental to what it means to be English. The histories of Catholic exiles Stapleton and Persons deployed narratives of the arrival of Christianity in England in order to highlight their patriotism while fabricating a variety of spatial identities. I argue that Catholic exiles manufactured an idea of homeland that, ultimately, served to create the idea of special territory that is sanctified and set apart. On the other hand, I also pay special attention to the Historia Ecclesiastica Anglicana of Nicholas Harpsfield, as this influential work not only serves as a useful case study for analyzing the ways in which discourses on religion are often discourses on space and place, but also demonstrates the diversity of origin narrative construction among early modern English Catholics. Focusing on the unfolding of Christianity region by region, Harpsfield combines methods of local history and narrative history. He brings together Irish missionaries, Scottish monks, and Roman agents in the Christianization of the isle. Downplaying national borders and ethnic differences, Harpsfield’s history constructs a narrative meant to display the past unity of the Catholic Church, sacralizing the land and strengthening ideas of ancestral connection that served as a force for national identity. During the reign of Elizabeth, both stay-at-home Catholics and exiles had to deal with social and physical displacement. Harpsfield stayed at home in England during Elizabeth’s reign, quickly landing him in the Fleet prison, while Stapleton moved to Louvain shortly after Elizabeth took the throne. Robert Persons resigned his position at Balliol College, Oxford, and spent much of the 1570s at the English College in Rome. In their presentations of the Christian origin narrative, neither Stapleton nor Persons goes out of his way to draw

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affinities between England and other British nations (Wales, Scotland, and Ireland). Harpsfield, on the other hand, moves between regional and archipelagic discourse, constructing a comprehensive “Britain” in service to the production of an English national identity that was distinctly Catholic. Writers from across the confessional spectrum desired to construct place with respect to an imagined past that prefigured the future, and while some historians found that explicitly inserting England into an apocalyptic narrative served to authorize their story, others zoomed out to argue that their true ancestors could be found outside an Anglo-Saxon framework.

1

From Precedent to Acts of Identification: Legitimizing Edward and Mary

While the first chapter examined the reasons why the origins of English Christianity became an issue after Henry’s break with Rome, this chapter focuses on how origin narratives were reworked in the second half of the sixteenth century. Before addressing these debates during the reign of Elizabeth, I want to take a brief look at the historical concerns during the reigns of Edward and Mary. This section provides a background for these later debates, tracing how English Christian origins evolved from legitimizing the monarchy to playing a key role in larger discussions about what it meant to be Christian and English in the sixteenth century. While the Edwardian regime focused on legitimizing the boy-king through a prophetic framework, Reginald Pole largely uses Mary’s reign to highlight English Christianity’s inextricable connection to Rome. The same history, then, could be leveraged to legitimize the monarchical or the papal authority, respectively. Just as Henry’s regime was tasked with legitimizing royal supremacy vis-àvis the Roman See, Edward’s Protectors were also working to legitimize the kingship of a minority ruler. Edward became king at age nine and died six years later. Despite this short time, however, Edward’s tenure was crucial in furthering Henry’s break with Rome and Roman Catholicism, and Edward’s kingship was largely built on the idea that he was continuing the work of his father. Thomas Cranmer described how Henry, “pitying to see his subjects many years so brought up in darkness and ignorance of god by erroneous doctrine and traditions of the bishop of Rome,” brought his people into the light of the True Church, and thus Edward, “with no less care and diligence, stud-

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ied to perform his father’s godly intent and purpose.”5 Diarmaid MacCulloch has detailed how Edward’s regime portrayed England as a Christian commonwealth with Edward as a second King Josiah (2 Kings 22–23). This analogy killed two birds with one stone, legitimizing Edward both as a boy-king and as a reforming ruler – one who would return the English Church to the purity of its earlier form.6 Henry’s Royal Supremacy had been an important step for evangelicals desiring doctrinal and liturgical change, and part of pushing for those changes with Edward meant continuing to reappraise stories of the arrival of Christianity in England and the early Church. The regime promoted antipapal works that displayed the history of corruption in the Catholic Church. For example, in 1547 John Ponet published his translation of Bernadino Ochino’s A Tragoedie or Dialoge of the Unjust Usurped Primacie of the Bishop of Rome, a book made up of nine scenes portraying papal supremacy as a satanic strategy for undermining the True Church, which, thanks to the young Josiah and his father (i.e., Edward and Henry), had been restored to its original purity. In one dialogue, Christ agrees with Lucifer that his Church had become corrupted, but he outlines a plan for its recovery: Henry VIII will “deliver his dominion from the tyranny of this mischievous robber,” and his son Edward “shall purge all his kingdoms and dominions from all the superstition and idolatry of Antichrist.”7 Ochino thus connected the specific reign of Edward with the cosmic battle between Christ and Antichrist and presented Edward’s reforming kingship as the resolution of a longer historical fight. As we will see with Jewel and Foxe, this strategy – connecting the temporal political history of the earthly realm with the cosmic time of the heavenly realm – continued to be successful for Protestants in framing English history. Works such as these that traced the historical roots and ultimate collapse of papal power were built upon apocalyptic arguments begun earlier. John Bale, as we saw in the previous chapter, was among the first to apply this interpretation to English history, mapping the particular history of Christianity in England onto the book of Revelation and reading the challenge to papal authority 5 CCCC MS Parker 102 fol. 367. This was Cranmer’s written response to the articles of the rebels of 1549, quoted in Stephen Alford, Kinship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 102. 6 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London: Penguin, 2000), 30–36. Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London: Penguin, 2000), 12–15, and especially chapter 2. 7 Bernadino Ochino, A Tragoedie or Dialoge, Y1r, quoted in Alford, Kingship and Politics, 47. For more examples of typological works and their role in Edward’s kingship and reformation, see Alford, Kingship and Politics, 100–116.

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as the beginning of the end for the Antichrist. Identifying the Antichrist as the pope was often framed in a national context – England was the nation chosen to combat this evil and promote and protect the Reformation.8 Works like Ochino’s followed Bale’s example, and these narratives came to be read as both supernatural revelation and as human history. In addition to laying the foundation for later writers on both sides of the confessional spectrum, John Kind and Andrew Hadfield have shown how this framework lived on in abridged form in the Geneva Bible (1560).9 For the Edwardian regime, the primary historical goal was to trace the corruption of the medieval Roman Catholic Church and to situate Edward’s temporal reign in a spiritual, prophetic framework in order to support both his royal supremacy and his minority kingship. The Old Testament typological models, especially Josiah and Solomon, connected Edward and England’s events with the Bible and a cosmic scheme. The divine realm, then, was the space that framed the origins of Christianity in England during Edward’s reign. When Edward died in 1553 and Catholic Mary took the throne, this reading of early church history was reversed. Tasked with undoing the changes imposed under Edward, Mary reinstated the papacy. The narratives surrounding the origins of Christianity in England were marshaled again, but this time as authorizing papal authority. Reginald Pole, a cardinal who had been a leader at the Council of Trent and became Mary’s Archbishop of Canterbury, had analyzed English reform in Pro Ecclesiasticae Unitatis Defensione (De Unitate as it came to be known). He updated the treatise when Mary took the throne, providing theoretical foundations for the actions of the regime and an ideological basis for Mary’s arguments regarding both the early Church and the contemporary one.10 This text, written in response to the martyrdom of More and 8

9

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See Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of John Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 82. Evenden and Freeman note that Foxe (like the majority of English Protestant polemicists) regarded the Antichrist as a spiritual force rather than an individual, necessarily, allowing some flexibility in how the concept could be applied. It could refer to the papacy, the Turks, or both, as Luther, Bullinger, and others. John King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 61; see also Hadfield, Literature, Politics, and National Identity, 66. Rather than a more conservative fundamentalist bent on confrontation with the Protestants, Pole was part of the spirituali, a group of Catholic leaders who advocated internal reform, not a split. They, like some reformers, also desired spiritual renewal and internalization of faith by each individual. See Thomas Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince & Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8–9. Pole thus believed that he could restore and reform English Catholicism; see Mayer, Reginald Pole, 298–300.

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John Fisher, rehearsed England’s Roman conversion to Christianity and connected that to its recent miseries since leaving the Roman Church. In doing so, many have noted, Pole played a significant role in constructing martyrdom in early modern Catholicism.11 After focusing on the deaths of More and Gardiner, Pole explained how Henry had persecuted the dead by desecrating the tombs of saints (his main example is Becket, whose bones Henry had burnt).12 As Eamon Duffy has shown, Pole was not greatly interested in legal or constitutional theories of papal sovereignty, and, like the arguments advanced during Edward’s reign, there was a strong providentialist element to Pole’s historical narrative.13 In his version of history, it was clear that God had shown special favor to England from the beginning precisely through the papacy. He began his story with the British King Lucius in the second century and recounted how England received Christianity from the missionaries sent by Pope Eleutherius. After Christianity declined with the Saxon invasion, Pope Gregory the Great restored Christianity to the now-pagan land by sending Augustine of Canterbury. Since then, Pole noted, the English people have seen the popes as their fathers.14 An analytical framework that separates “sacred history” and “national” or “political” history are not useful here, since Pole is emphasizing, as Duffy puts it, “the indispensability of communion with the pope for membership in the church and access to grace, [and] the providential role of the papacy in English history.”15 There is no division for Pole between England and the pope, since the pope represents God himself. The framing of Pole’s description of the arrival of Christianity in England was thus shaped by communion with the Roman Catholic Church, and by emphasizing divine action in the

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See Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 27; Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 265–268; Christopher Highley, “‘A Pestilent and Seditious Book’: Nicholas Sander’s Schismatis Anglicani and Catholic Histories of the Reformation,” in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Palina Kewes (San Marino: Huntington Library, 2006), 147–168. Pole, Epistolarum Reginaldi Poli, Vol. 1, ed. Johann Georg Schelhorn (Brescia: Rizzardi, 1744–1757), 101; quoted in Mayer, Reginald Pole, 96. Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England Under Mary Tudor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 34–37. Pole, Pole’s Defense of the Unity of the Church, ed. and trans. J.G. Dwyer (Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1965), 241–255. This is a translation of Pole’s treatise, Reginaldi Poli Cardinalis Britanni pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione, libri quatuor (Rome: Antonius Bladus, 1537), hereafter referred to as Defense. Felicity Heal discusses Pole’s later use of the Eleutherius legend in his speech to Parliament in 1554 in “What can King Lucius do for you?”, 600. Duffy, Fires of Faith, 36.

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human figure of the pope, Pole was able to use papal history to confer divine approval to his interpretation of human affairs. In addition to reading papal power as an indispensable part of English history, Pole made a unique argument for the authority of the medieval Roman Catholic Church in England as told through saints and martyrs. Brad Gregory has noted the innovative character of Pole’s thought regarding martyrdom and the role of saints in providing a witness to truth throughout time: “After Christ’s death and resurrection, the persecuted members of his body … replicated this primordial expression of God’s will.”16 Pole called these martyrs “living books” through which we can “read the will of God” in human history. Even if one does not wish to go as far as historian Constance Furey, who argues that, for Pole, these bodies had even more authority than scripture, it is clear that he believed God’s hand was guiding human history and that one could read it clearly in the stories of the saints. Indeed, Pole claimed that “the original always has more authority than other books copied from it, so books written out in the blood of the martyrs are to be preferred above all others.”17 While Bale, Foxe, and other Protestant writers were also using hagiography (both ancient and contemporary) to trace a hidden past or to signal the true elect, Pole explained that, while scripture could be corrupted and distorted by human interpretation, we could look to the saints for the ultimate Truth. This view of history turns the claims of Protestants like Robert Abbot on their heads: while Abbot had emphasized the problem of human interpretation in historical documents, arguing that only scripture contains the answers, Pole argued that scripture also requires a reliance on human interpretation, while the blood and bodies of saints contain unadulterated truth.18 Pole showed that the story of human affairs is sacred in its own right, insofar as it repeats, perhaps as effectively as scripture can, the story of the Gospel. In this debate over truth in human history, contemporary human bodies, and scripture lies deep epistemological questions: what requires “interpretation” versus what is simply truth laid bare? How can we know the truth when we have to continuously filter it, whether it be interpreting a text or our own experience? Even in the earliest of the “modern” period, we see debates not only about the idea of history, but also about “truth,” its existence, and how we know what we know.

16 17

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Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 267. Defense, 235; for a longer discussion of this passage see Constance M. Furey, Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 79,149, and 156. Robert Abbot, The True Ancient Roman Catholike v. Dr Bishops Reproof of The Reformed Catholike (London, 1611), 206–7.

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The uses of history by the Edwardian and Marian regimes highlight their shifting priorities and the usefulness of origins in legitimizing power. While these threads will remain important for historians in the second half of the sixteenth century – after all, legitimizing the Elizabethan settlement was one of Matthew Parker’s goals in assembling his library of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts – the origins of English Christianity took on new significance. As they reconsidered what it meant to be English and Catholic or Protestant, the discourse of Christian origins both shaped and reflected the way they thought about themselves in national and confessional terms. Cranmer’s strategy, further relying on biblical typology and revelation, and Pole’s creative use of Catholic theology regarding both providence and martyrdom, set the stage for Elizabethan debates over the uses of medieval history.

2

Changing Places: Shifting Conceptions of Space in Jewel and Fox

While Pole and the Marian regime were using the history of English martyrs to legitimize the medieval Catholic Church, stories of the early Church were also becoming a central part of reform programs on the Continent. Just as John Bale had done, English evangelicals in exile during Mary’s reign were participating in conversations about the earliest Christians with Protestants in Europe. After spending time in Frankfurt and Strasbourg respectively, John Foxe and John Jewel emerged as two of the main evangelical voices centering the history of the Anglo-Saxon Church in the quest for the origins of Christianity in England. Jewel, like Cranmer before him, allowed for the use of historical examples in defense of certain doctrine, while Foxe, standing on the shoulders of Bale, produced a chronological narrative of the heroes of the English Christian past.19 A closer look at the historical works of Jewel and Foxe demonstrate the shifting historical concerns and variety of uses of the medieval past in the 1560s. After spending time in exile during Mary’s reign, John Jewel became Bishop of Salisbury under Elizabeth. In this role, he threw down the gauntlet in a public debate over the early Church in what has come to be known as the “Challenge Controversy.” In his “Challenge Sermon,” delivered from St. Paul’s Cross in 1559 and again in 1560, he dared Catholics to prove their case using

19

For more on the controversialists’ different methodological uses of historical evidence, see W.H. Southgate, John Jewell and the Problem of Doctrinal Authority (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 80–90.

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only scripture or the works of “the Fathers” for the first six hundred years of Christianity.20 Jewel is following previous claims that Christianity became corrupt after a certain amount of centuries, but it is interesting here that Jewel elevates those centuries of human history as equally important as scripture, at least in providing evidence for correct doctrine and liturgy. Jewel argued that 27 doctrines of the contemporary Roman Church were not present in the first six centuries of the English Church. Angela Ranson has argued that Jewel’s sermon offered ways for the English people to define themselves over and against their own Catholic history.21 Catholic churchman and former dean of St. Paul’s, Henry Cole, took up Jewel’s challenge with his own sermon in 1560, and thus a full-blown debate was sparked over the early Church. Jewel published his Apologia ecclesiae Anglicanae in 1562; however, Felicity Heal has shown that in contrast to his original sermon published in 1560, Jewel shifts the emphasis in his Apologia and sought to prove that the practices of the current English Church were congruent with those of the early Church.22 In the original sermon, Jewel’s goal is to point out the incongruity of the contemporary Catholic Church with the Early Church, while the Apologia shifts his focus to a construction of English Protestantism specifically, writing that the contemporary English Church was returning “unto the primitive church of the ancient fathers and apostles,” having “searched out of the Holy Bible, which we are sure cannot deceive, one sure form of religion.”23 The English Catholic community in Louvain rose to Jewel’s challenge and produced more than sixty published treatises, sermons, and pamphlets refuting his arguments.24 Jewel and his Catholic contemporary Thomas Harding spent the rest of the 1560s writing apologetic treatises for this debate, laying the groundwork for subsequent controversies over doctrine and ecclesiology by drawing on examples

20 21

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John Jewel, “A Sermon Preached at Paul’s Cross,” The Works of John Jewel, ed. J. Ayre, Vol. 1, PS (Cambridge, 1845–50), 1–24. Angela Ranson, “The Challenge of Catholicity: John Jewel at Paul’s Cross,” in Paul’s Cross and Culture of Persuasion in England, 1520–1640, eds. Torrance Kirkby and P.G. Stanwood (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 203–222. Heal, “Appropriating History,” 113. Jewel insisted in his second letter to Dr. Cole: “we have, as you know … the old doctors’ church, the ancient councils’ church, the primitive church, St Peter’s church, St Paul’s church and Christ’s church.” John Jewel, Works, 1–34. Jewel, Apologia, Works, 135. A. C. Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose, 1559–1582 (London: Sands & Co., 1950), 66; Antoinina Bevan Zlata, Reformation Fictions: Polemical Protestant Dialogues in Elizabethan England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 80–81.

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from the early Church.25 This debate with Harding made Jewel arguably the most famous English bishop at the time. Rather than a laser focus on legitimizing state or papal authority, these histories explored issues of belief and practice, and even an evangelical leader like Jewel recognized the importance of historical precedent. Furthermore, framing doctrinal debates within the particular history of the emerging English Church gave new importance to the origins of Christianity in England specifically. The space in which the debate was framed had great power in shaping conceptions of the past and thus an important role in the formation of confessional identities. Foxe unapologetically recognized the power of history, and to that end he spoke explicitly about why understanding the past – especially the English past – was vital. In his preface to the 1570 edition of Acts and Monuments, Foxe explained that he decided to write his history because anyone who does not know their past will be easily deceived and abused: “the unlearned sort … not knowing the course of the times and true descent of the Church, it pitied me, that part of diligence so long to have been unsupplied in this my country Church of England.”26 During Edward VI’s reign, Bale guided Foxe in the composition of his first martyrology, loaning him valuable manuscripts including his Fasciculi zizaniorum, one of the major sources for Foxe’s works. As discussed in the first chapter, John Bale had provided an apocalyptic interpretation of English reform, and Foxe followed suit. He produced a point-for-point comparison of the events of English history with a narrative of apocalypse, specifically reading recent Marian persecutions in light of the biblical Revelation. Foxe also compared the ten persecutions of the early Church and the persecutions inflicted on the English Church under Mary I.27 In addition to placing English history within the framework of John’s Apocalypse, Acts and Monuments also positioned contemporary English martyrs alongside the martyrs of the early church by comparing their resistance to the corruption of the Roman Church. By describing martyrdom in the reign of Mary as part of a universal Christian story, Foxe was able to link the English Church with the early Church, and in this way, he provided the English Church with a past that reached back to Christ himself. Based on the idea

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For more on Jewel’s debate with Harding, see Gary Jenkins, John Jewel and the English National Church: The Dilemmas of an Erastian Reformer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 73–82; Peter Milward, “The Jewel-Harding Controversy” Albion 6, no. 4 (Winter 1974), 328–329. Acts and Monuments (1570), Preface, 2. For more on the relationship between Bale and Foxe and their works, see Thomas Freeman, “John Bale’s Book of Martyrs? The Account of King John in Acts and Monuments,” Reformation 3 (1988): 175–223.

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that contemporary English Protestant martyrs are direct descendants of early Christian martyrs, he made connections to martyrs of both the Apostolic Church and the medieval English Church, e.g., Alban and King Oswald, the latter of whom would become an important figure in the English Christian origin narrative.28 Foxe also creatively used events from the early English Church to show continuity with contemporary Protestant theology. For example, he used the Anglo-Saxon version of an Easter sermon in which Aelfric, the tenthcentury abbot, opposes transubstantiation to argue that English Christianity had always been superior to liturgy of the Roman Church.29 So much has been written about John Foxe and his role in assessing and narrating the Christian martyrs that I will not expand too much on it here.30 These examples are meant to show that Foxe both followed and expanded upon the work of Bale in giving English history a role in a universal, biblical, apocalyptic narrative. Furthermore, I want to emphasize that Foxe’s work was not merely a response to English conservatives claiming the rights to the English past. Rather, he believed that this particular English past was capable of informing universal theological truths, if only it could come to light: “Truth hath lacked witness, time wanted light, new things were reputed for old, and old for new, error embraced for verity, superstition for religion.”31 In other words, the more historical documents were discovered, precisely because they were read through these confessional, contextually-embedded lenses, the more they shaped contemporary English Christianity, and the more they shaped ideas of what being English and Christian should look like. Bale and Foxe joined the local history of the English Church to a universal narrative of the Christian past and to scripture itself.32 Jewel (and his Catholic interlocutors) also began to situate examples of the early English Church

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Acts and Monuments, Book 1, 111–112; Book 12, 134, 144–145. Acts and Monuments, Book 2, 144, cf. King, Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs,” 121. For instance, John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997); John Foxe and His World, eds. Christopher Highley and John King (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Marsha Robinson, Writing the Reformation: Actes and Monuments and the Jacobean History Play (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Thomas Freeman and Elizabeth Evenden, “John Foxe, John Day and the Printing of the ‘Book of Martyrs,’” in Lives in Print: Biography and the Book Trade from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century, eds. Robert Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote, (London: Oak Knoll Press, 2002), 23–54. John Foxe, The Gospels of the Fower Evangelistes (London, 1571), sig. Aii; quoted in Felicity Heal, “Appropriating History,” 114. For more on the place of Bale and Foxe in Tudor apocalyptic thought, see Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition, 32–68; and Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse (Appleford: Sutton Courtenay, 1978), 54–90.

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within a heavenly narrative for purposes that went beyond the legal and jurisdictional.33 While one of the main debates surrounding the origins of Christianity from 1530–1558 centered political arguments over legal debates about England’s state and ecclesiastical authority, Foxe, Jewel, and others began participating in a slightly different conversation – one with more implications for shaping national and confessional identities. This shift highlights the fluid and contingent nature of origin narratives and reflects the changing circumstances: Henrician lawyers had already laid the groundwork (which Edward’s lawyers and court preachers built upon) for any “royal authority” arguments. Despite having this jurisdictional problem solved (at least in theory), the early Elizabethan conversation about the origins of Christianity continued. Even the most “godly” historians saw the value in relating the early Anglo-Saxon centuries to the larger story of Christianity and to the Bible, if not for the purpose of determining correct doctrine, then for framing the English past in light of universal, theological “truths.” This battle over the early English Church not only continued but also expanded in the second half of the sixteenth century, as debates over church history moved beyond the quest for a Protestant English Church before Luther to discussions about the “place” of England in both the history of humankind and in the story of salvation. Historian Andrew Escobedo observes a sort of temporal isolation in the efforts of Tudor writers to connect the emerging English “nation” to its origins, detecting a “sense that the past was incommensurate with and possibly lost to the present.”34 But historians of the sixteenth century were indeed able to reconcile a “lost” origin narrative with their present in lots of different ways and with lots of different strategies. Catholic historians had precedent on their side but, at the same time, they faced a present that challenged their very Englishness. Thus, a construction of spatial identities played out in this debate over the past. This negotiation, of course, did not stop at the turn of the century but continued to be worked out in other ways.35 In the

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For Jewel’s main Catholic interlocutor see, for instance, Thomas Harding, A confutation of a booke intituled An apologie of the Church of England (Antwerp, 1565); and Harding, A Confutation of Maister Juelles Challenge (Louvain, 1566), especially 39r, where Harding contrasts unity of the medieval English Church and the Roman Catholic Church with the splintering and disunity of contemporary Protestantism. See also Harding, A rejoindre to M. Jewels replie (Antwerp, 1566). Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 3. For an analysis of this identity crisis in the seventeenth century, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, especially 281–300. Milton concludes that the back and forth between the doctrinal, political, and physical separation between the two churches did not necessarily

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sixteenth century, though, it was the dialectic between competing versions of history that continued to redefine what it meant to be English (or British) and Christian. The settings for these narratives were not simply England and Rome (as it had been with Edward Foxe and Henry’s legal agents), nor Palestine (as it had been for reformers on the Continent discussing the Apostolic Church). Rather, Elizabethan historians were working to connect space and time by bringing together the story of England and that of the supernatural. In this sense, their success depended on their ability to merge the two.

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Nicholas Harpsfield’s Archipelagic Narrative

When Elizabeth inherited a Catholic nation in 1559, she informed her new Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker that the ecclesiastical structure of “the Church of England would still retain her episcopacy, but not as from Pope Gregory, who sent over Augustine, the monk,” as recorded in Bede.36 Beyond ecclesiological precedent, other challenges faced her regime. On one side, Catholic conspiracies resulted in aggressive legislation against Catholics by parliament, on the other, the “hotter sort of Protestants” stirred up trouble by pressing for further reforms. In the latter half of the 1580s, English Catholics suffered a blow with the defeat of the Armada and the deaths of Mary Stuart and Henri III. At the same time, the post-Tridentine Church saw an increasingly confident papacy with tighter control over local and national Churches along with the sluggish growth of Protestantism on the Continent. Though only a few decades had passed, Elizabethan historians were writing in a very different world from their Henrician counterparts. This shift is reflected in the spatial discourse in Catholic histories that span this period: Nicholas Harpsfield, writing at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign in the 1560s, describes a very different setting for this narrative than Robert Persons, writing from the Continent almost four decades later. Rather than portraying pre-Augustine Christianity among the Britons as somehow antithetical to the faith that came after (in order to counter the embrace by some Protestants of a pre-Augustine “British” Christianity), Harpsfield situated ancient Britain in the context of a united, universal Church, and his description of the following centuries

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settle any identity crisis – indeed, it eventually lead to the Civil War. During and after the war English confessional identity continued to be worked out while embedded in new controversies. J. Strype, The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1821) I, 139; quoted in Cunningham, “A Little World without the World,” 202.

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highlights the continuity of the faith on the island. By telling conversion stories county by county, Harpsfield’s translocal narrative actually foregrounds a broader Christendom rather than a purely national perspective. The meaning of “Britain” in the early modern period cannot be taken for granted, as the nature of the terms “Britain” and “British” were contingent upon who was using them and why.37 Scholars like Jane Dawson and Arthur Williamson have shown that the idea of Britain as a unified cultural entity was used by Protestants after the reign of Henry VIII, painting Britain as a Protestant monarchy vis-à-vis a holistic Catholic Europe.38 This construction of “Britain” is clearly evident in devotional and liturgical materials. For example, the first edition of the Geneva Bible was addressed to “all the brethren of England, Scotland, Ireland, etc.” Foxe’s Acts and Monuments included all the Scottish martyrs and was read throughout Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.39 As we will see in the fourth chapter, the collections of “English” hagiographies and martyrologies celebrate Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Celtic converter-saints alongside one another, just as they had before the break with Rome.40 But a “British” spatial identity was especially important in many Protestant reworkings of the Christian foundation narrative, as these historians began to invoke the ancient Britons as their confessional ancestors.41 John Curran lays out in detail the Protestant commitment to the independence of early British

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For a survey of the shifting conceptualizations of Britain from the twelfth to the early seventeenth centuries, see Alan MacColl, “The Meaning of ‘Britain’ in Medieval and Early Modern England,” The Journal of British Studies 45, no. 02 (April 2006): 248–69. Jane Dawson, “Anglo-Scottish Protestant Culture and Integration in Sixteenth-Century Britain,” in Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State, 1485–1725, eds. Steven G Ellis and Sarah Barber (London: Longman, 1995), 87–114; Arthur Williamson, “Patterns of British Identity: Britain and its Rivals in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The New British History: Founding a Modern State, 1603–1715, ed. Glenn Burgess (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 138–172. In Alan MacColl’s “The Construction of England as a Protestant ‘British’ Nation in the Sixteenth Century,” Renaissance Studies 18 (2004): 582–608, he explores an influential sixteenth-century conception according to which “British” meant exclusively English and Protestant. See also Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation, 80–84. For more examples, see Dawson, “Anglo-Scottish Protestant Culture,” 91–95. John Wilson, The English Martyrologe, in The English Experience, Its Record in Early Printed Books Published in Facsimile, no. 254 (Amsterdam: Da Capo Press, 1970); Roscarrock, Nicholas Roscarrock’s Lives of the Saints: Cornwall and Devon, ed., Nicholas Orme, Devon and Cornwall Record Society N.S 35 (Exeter: Devon and Cornwall Record Society, 1992); C. Horstmann, The Lives of Women Saints of Our Contrie of England: Also Some Other Liues of Holie Women Written by Some of the Auncient Fathers c. 1610–1615, (London: EETS, 1886). For the Protestant uses of Joseph of Arimathea, see Cunningham, “A Young Man’s Brow and an Old Man’s Beard,” 251–259; Felicity Heal, “Appropriating History,” 109–132; and Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation, 85–87.

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Christians in Roman Invasions. In order to subvert the Augustine of Canterbury/Gregory the Great narrative, some of the more “godly” historians drew heavily on a literary tradition associated with Geoffrey of Monmouth, particularly the legend of Joseph of Arimathea bringing Christianity to the “Britons,” i.e., the natives of the island before the Anglo-Saxon invasion. As Curran succinctly puts it: The nation’s own story told of its origin from the same roots as Rome (Brutus), its defeat and sack of Rome (Belinus and Brennus), its defiance and nearly successful repulse of Roman invasion (Cassivellaunus versus Julius Caesar), its proud maintenance in the first century A.D. of national dignity even amidst Roman conquest (Guiderius and Arviragus), its triumphes over Rome (Arthur) and its final destruction as a fortress of pure Christianity by barbarians empowered and inspired by Rome.42 Glorification of Britain, then, was a big part of the Joseph legend’s antiRoman character. The Galfridian tradition was useful in authorizing the English Church’s independence from Rome, since the Gospel came from the Apostles themselves, not a Roman pope. However, these Protestant authors also had to deal with the criticism of using “legendary” medieval sources. While most historians across the confessional spectrum still relied largely on Bede, some writers still drew upon the Galfridian legend well into the 1560s and 1570s.43 Because of its anti-Roman potential, scholars including Matthew Parker and William Fulke used the Galfridian narrative despite its complications, as their historical revision was made possible through a specific spatial construction that conceived of “Britishness” in direct opposition to the “other” – the AngloSaxon. As we saw with Bale, and later with Foxe and Jewel, the geopolitical frame of historical narrative played a fundamental role in shaping confessional identities. But the rhetorical construction of England versus Britain in narratives of the past did not always fall along confessional lines. “Britain” could be a useful imaginative construct for Elizabethan Catholics just as it was for many Protestants. Catholics also tried to show how their traditions transcended national borders, linguistic boundaries, and ethnicity (i.e., Anglo, British/Welsh, Celtic,

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John Curran, Roman Invasions: The British History, Protestant Anti-Romanism, and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530–1660 (Cranbury: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 18. See, for example, Matthew Sutcliffe, The Subversion of Robert Parsons … a Treatise of Three Conversions (London, 1606), 9.

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Pict). In this way, historians were able to make local pride mesh with transnational Catholicism. Regarding Elizabethan Catholic historians, Peter Holmes has suggested that many (especially those in exile) did not want to appear to be meddling in “the affairs and politic government of the English realm.”44 While it is true that many historians ranging from conservative to godly did choose to focus on the Apostolic Church and the writings of the early “Church Fathers” instead of national history, I suspect this was rooted in the specific conversations in which they were embroiled rather than a conscious choice to not appear “political” (not to mention that narratives of the early church were quite political, too). Catholics like Nicholas Harpsfield, Thomas Stapleton, and Robert Persons were very much interested in the specific history of English/British Christianity and the spread of the Anglo-Saxon Church, and their conception of space was central in their treatment of the historical process of Christianization. Like their Protestant counterparts, Catholic historians were bringing a universal significance to contextualize their particular history, and some, like Nicholas Harpsfield, also prioritized Britain over England in constructing space in the origin narrative. In direct response to the Henrician and Edwardian historians who had been working to establish a new and anti-Roman past for the “national” Church, Harpsfield downplays the national in favor of the universal Catholic Church.45 Harpsfield, a secular priest trained in canon law at Oxford, had fled to the Continent for four years during Edward. He returned to England to become the Archdeacon of Canterbury under Mary and served as right- hand man to Archbishop Reginald Pole. He began getting into trouble at Canterbury in 1559 when he (along with six others) absented himself from voting for Matthew Parker as Archbishop. He wrote his Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica while incarcerated for refusing to swear the oath of supremacy after Elizabeth

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Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 13–14. For more information on early modern depictions of the Anglo-Saxon Church in particular, see, Allen Frantzen, “Bede and Bawdy Bale,” in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, eds. Allen Frantzen and John Niles (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 17–39; Benedict Scott Robinson, “John Foxe and the Anglo-Saxons,” in John Foxe and his World, eds. Christopher Highley and John King (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 54–72; Felicity Heal, “Appropriating History,” 109–132. For attitudes toward the AngloSaxon Church in the seventeenth century, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 286–287, where Milton explains how Richard Field ultimately attempted to vindicate the Roman Church throughout the entire pre-Reformation period in order to demonstrate the continuity of the True Church.

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initiated her religious settlement in 1559.46 By 1562, Harpsfield was not allowed to receive any visitors, so it is unclear what texts he had access to after that. As a historian who greatly influenced the discussion of the Christian past in England, Harpsfield has been neglected in discussions of Christian origin stories at both the national and international levels. His Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica became one of the foundations of English Catholic interpretations of the Reformation, and though he is occasionally mentioned by those who study early modern English historiography, he never receives full treatment.47 Harpsfield was the author of influential polemical works such as the Dialogi Sex, a massive text aimed at rebutting the claims made in both the Magdeburg Centuries and Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. The demand among intellectuals in Europe for Dialogi Sex was so strong that a second edition appeared within seven years of the first. While Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica was not quite as popular as the dialogues to a Continental audience, the manuscript circulated widely in England as well as the English Colleges at Douai and Rome and in the Vatican.48 It was eventually published in Latin in 1622, long after Harpsfield’s death in 1575.49 Even before it appeared in print, Harpsfield’s history had a significant influence on Robert Persons and Richard Verstegan. In fact, Verstegan instructed Persons to draw on “St. Bede and Dr. Harpsfield” for the first volume of Persons’s history covering the Anglo-Saxon period.50 Thomas Stapleton also relied primarily on Historia for his Counterblast to Protestant Robert Horne.51

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Nicholas Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, ed. Richard Gibbons (Douai, 1622). For instance, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica had a huge influence on the well-known seventeenth-century church historian Thomas Fuller, who produced a Protestant account of the early English Church; see Fuller, Church-History of Britain, 459, 496 and citations throughout. Fuller had set out to answer the interpretation of events given by English Roman Catholic historians, especially Nicholas Harpsfield. R. W. Chambers, “Life and Works of Nicholas Harpsfield,” in N. Harpsfield, The Life and Death of Sr Thomas Moore, Knight, ed. E. V. Hitchcock, EETS, (1932), clxxv–ccxiv. Even though the book was never translated into English, it circulated widely in manuscripts (I personally consulted the copies in the BL, including Arundel MS 72 & 73 and BL MS Stowe 105. All quotes from this work come from the printed edition of Richard Gibbons (Douai, 1622) unless otherwise noted. Verstegan, The Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan (c.1550–1640), ed. A.G. Petti, CRS, 52 (London: CRS, 1959), 134. In addition to Stapleton’s translation of Bede and Harpsfield’s Historia, Verstegan’s prospectus included Nicholas Sander’s Schismatis Anglicani (1585), which was a history of the Reformation. For more on Sander’s work, see Christopher Highley, “‘A Pestilent and Seditious Book’: Nicholas Sander’s Schismatis Anglicani and Catholic Histories of the Reformation,” in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino: Huntington Library, 2006). Thomas Stapleton, A Counterblast to M. Hornes Vayne Blaste (London, 1567).

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Harpsfield’s Historia lays out the arrival of Christianity diocese by diocese, emphasizing Apostolic succession as well as the spread of monasticism. He describes the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons by Augustine of Canterbury, but he goes beyond this narrative to describe the introduction and spread of Christianity in each of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. In his own preface to the reader, Harpsfield explains that he is publishing his work because there is no other synthetic, comprehensive tracing of the history of Christianity in England: “I have undertaken such a great work in almost Herculean audacity, seeing that I have nobody from any nation as a predecessor.”52 Harpsfield’s work is meant to be comprehensive, as he surveys every county and breaks its history down piece by piece. In this way Harpsfield showed many of the qualities of a local antiquarian: his focus on individual dioceses resembles county histories, as he draws not only on Bede but also on local archives and private manuscript collections.53 If analyzed in light of historiographical arguments about the idea of history in early modern England like Daniel Woolf’s, we could read Harpsfield’s work (in the middle of the sixteenth century) as an early example of bringing together (1) the antiquarian focus on region, (2) what has been called “ecclesiastical” history, and (3) with what has been called “political” history, with a focus on kings, battles, etc.54 But it is not clear to what extent Harpsfield would have viewed these as discrete genres in the first place – the kings and battles were inextricable from the movement and development of Christian traditions and ecclesiastical institutions. The diverse regions and ethnicities he details are inextricable from the idea of a Britain united by a Catholic identity. In terms of structure, Harpsfield’s chapters are broken down by century, and within each century the subchapters are broken down by region. He emphasizes the regional framework in service to a broader “archipelagic” goal, recounting how soon after Christ’s time “Britain received messengers and heralds of its redemption and the fruit of salvation.”55 By focusing on the unfolding of Christianity region by region, he is able to detail the contributions of

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Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Sex Prima Saecula,” Caput I, 3: “ego quasi Herculea quadam audacia tantum opus, in quo nullum alicuius nationis hominem praeuntem habeo.” For a complete list of his sources, see Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Sequitur Nomenclatura Auctorum Quibus Usi Sumus in hoc Opere.” Daniel Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). Woolf argues antiquarianism and political history were not combined until well into the seventeenth century, particularly in works like that of John Selden. Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Sex Prima Saecula,” Caput I, 1: “quae redemptionis suae nuncios preconesque, fructumque salutarem, non ita multo post Christum passum, primum privatim, mox publice accepit.”

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Irish missionaries, Scottish monks, and Roman agents in the Christianization of the island. In this way, Harpsfield downplays national borders and ethnic differences in order to emphasize an all-encompassing confessional identity meant to display the past unity of the Catholic Church and his hope that it could be unified again. In doing so, he also sacralizes the territory, detailing the spread of salvation to the people. We can see the seeds of claims to chosenness and sacred land that will emerge more explicity in other works. Though the title of his manuscript is Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, Harpsfield clearly uses “English” in a much broader way. In his preface, he explained that he initially wanted “to add the ecclesiastical histories of the Scots and the Irish, since they too are part of our Britain and they are subjects of the English Realm,” but that he was deterred by the “lack of suitable sources.”56 Despite the lack of Scottish sources, he made an effort to include the Irish, Britons, Angles, and Picts in his narrative of the arrival of Christianity. For example, in his coverage of Northumbria, Harpsfield highlights the role of the Irish monk and missionary, St. Aidan, crediting him with bringing Christianity to the region. He explains how Aidan built a cathedral on Lindisfarne and proceeded to travel the land, preaching to both the Anglo-Saxon nobility and to the marginalized.57 Even in his retelling of the story of Augustine preaching the Gospel to King Ethelbert, he makes sure to explain that Ethelbert’s wife Bertha, daughter of the King of the Franks, was already a Christian and had been a great influence on her husband. She had brought with her a Christian priest to administer the divine sacraments to her and her family. This Frankish priest then, was also involved in the conversion of the Saxons, as Harpsfield notes how he was quite “engaged in sacred works at Canterbury.”58 Harpsfield, then, is not invested in championing the Anglo-Saxons over the Britons or any other group in order to draw boundaries or police purity. Instead, he depicts the whole of Europe as united by a singular Christian faith, as we can see from his interest in and coverage of the isle from long before the Anglo-Saxon arrival. In Harpsfield’s history, in fact, Augustine does not come from Rome to convert the Saxon king until well into chapter four. The preceding chapters cover the history of the Britons’ earlier Christian conversions, and

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Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Praefatio,” vi: “Volvissemus libenter Scotorum & Hibernorum Ecclesiasticam historiam, cum illi sint & Britanniae nostrae portio, & regni etiam Anglici clientes isti, ut eiusdem regni portionem atque accessionem adiungere: sed idoneorum librorum penuria nos ab hoc proposito & labore absterruit.” Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Septimum Saeculum,” Caput XXXV, 105–106. Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Septimum Saeculum,” Caput IV, 55: “Sacris autem operabatur Cantuariae.”

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he speaks of those centuries fondly. He even identifies himself as “Briton” in chapter one in order to emphasize the whole island: “I say, we Britons, separated from the rest of the world (as the poet says) were seen with kind eyes by merciful God.”59 He then briefly tells of how Joseph of Arimathea first brought Christianity to the island, which showed that Britain received the fruit of salvation not long after Christ’s death. Citing Isidore and others, Harpsfield, like the Protestants, is eager to show that Britain received the faith from the Apostles and their disciples. Unlike the reformers, he highlights that Joseph established a church and shrine to Mary in Glastonbury, and he admits that after this initial arrival of Christianity there is no evidence as to what happened. He does mention that the place where Joseph and his crew had arrived became sacred, eliciting such great piety and devotion “both of Britons and of Angles, both of subjects and of Princes.”60 He then moves on to the Lucius narrative, highlighting aspects of the conversion not noted by reformers. Harpsfield explains that Lucius was the first leader to profess openly, but that he converted because of a Roman edict against druids: “our own Lucius happily broke this ice, having removed that ancient superstition of the Druids, who were especially popular.” Harpsfield also explains that Lucius had seen the virtuous living of Christians and had taken the initiative to contact the pope, making Britain “the first of all Roman provinces to move to the religion of Christ, unless perhaps Ethiopia came first, which however is not counted among the Roman provinces.”61 He does not use this story, as Protestant writers do, to prove Britain’s Apostolic (as opposed to Roman) Christian origins, but to frame Britain’s conversion alongside that of the rest of the world: “And for me the incredible dissemination and communication of Christian law within the space of a few years through

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Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Sex Prima Saecula,” Caput I, 2: “Et inter alias, nos quoque, nos inquam, toto divisos orbe Britannos, (ut Poeta ille ait,) misericors Deus benignis oculis aspexit.” The “poet” here is Virgil, Eclogue 1.67. Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica,“Sex Prima Saecula,” Caput I, 3: “tam Britannorum quam Anglorum, tam privatorum quam Principum postea.” Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Sex Prima Saecula,” Caput III, 5–6: Hanc glaciem primus feliciter perfregit Lucius noster, sublata veteri Druidarum, qui maxime celebres erant, superstitione … Illud vero inter omnes constat, Lucium ut diximus palam Christianam fidem professum, crediturque Britannia prima omnium Romanarum provinciarum ad Christi Religionem admota, nisi forte Aethiopia praevenerit, quae tamen inter Romanas provincias non recensetur.” Interestingly enough, he goes on to praise Lucius for not collecting “trophies” of other people, and for not expanding or conquering free people and making them “unfree.”

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almost the entire world clearly shows the divinity of Christ.”62 Rather than (as some conservative/Catholics did) highlight the missteps of pre-Augustine Christians, Harpsfield situated ancient Britain in the context of a united, universal Church. After covering the rest of the first six centuries, Harpsfield laments that Christianity had “been dismantled” by the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons. At this point, Harpsfield portrays the Anglo-Saxons, not the Britons, as the barbarians, forcing upon Britain “their domination, their name, and (what is worse) their impious gods.”63 But after 140 years, he explains, God in his divine mercy prompted Pope Gregory the Great to embrace the English people once and for all. He then launches into the third conversion story, featuring Augustine of Canterbury. He explains how Augustine performed miracles “in order to entice and acquire the rough people of the Angles for God.”64 It is at this point that Harpsfield scolds the British Christians for their failure to spread the gospel among the Angles.65 Up until this point Harpsfield has been successful in his attempts to show the continuity of Christianity since Joseph and has avoided engaging in pitting British Christianity against that of the Anglo-Saxons. However, because his history is in part a response to Bale, Foxe, and the Magdeburg Centuriators, Harpsfield has to tackle a very contentious affair in the history of the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons: the Bangor monk episode. Harpsfield does not describe it at length in his Historia, but he does spend one brief paragraph explaining that Augustine had called a meeting with the British Christians to discuss their different beliefs and practices, and, in order to authorize his message, Augustine performs a miracle that the British monks could not: restoring sight to a blind man. After the British monks refused to accept “true Christianity,” Augustine prophesied that they would die at the hands of the English for their obstinacy. At this point, Harpsfield is careful to spell out that Alfred, King of

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Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Sex Prima Saecula,” Caput I, 1: “Et mihi certe, cum & illa quae dixi, multaque alia, tum admirabilis ista Christianae legis, paucorum annorum cursu per totum fere orbem disseminatio & divulgatio, Christi divinitatem manifeste astruit. Nam ut ne egrediamur illud ipsum saeculum, quo Christus passus est, Christiana doctrina, sexaginta octo plus minus annorum spacio, totum fere orbem pervagata est.” Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Septimum Saeculum,” Caput VI, 58: “Anglia olim Britannia dicta, per Anglos, Saxones, Germaniae populum … ipsorum Imperium, nomen, & (quod deterius est) impiam deorum religionem suscipere coacta est.” Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Septimum Saeculum,” Caput VI, 58: “ad alliciendum Deoque acquirendum rudem Anglorum populum.” Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Septimum Saeculum,” Caput VI, 59.

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the Northumbrians, an “enemy even of Christ,” did indeed kill 1,200 British monks of Bangor, and that this occurred long after the death of Augustine.66 As we saw in chapter 1, Bale and the Magdeburg Centuriators on the Continent had long framed Augustine’s prophecy of the massacre of the British monks as a diabolical miracle – proof that Augustine was the forerunner of the Antichrist. Harpsfield’s brevity and caution in recounting this episode further attests to his construction of a unified “Britain.” He does not portray the Anglo-Saxon King Alfred as righteous, but instead emphasizes that this massacre was an abomination to Christ. He also defends Augustine, explaining that predicting the massacre did not implicate him in it, and that he was long dead by the time it actually happened. He goes on in the next chapter to explain how Lawrence and Mellitus, Augustine’s successors, went on to spread Christianity throughout the isle. In direct contrast to his Protestant counterparts, Harpsfield portrays the Roman missionaries and the Roman Catholic faith they established in England as the True Church, but he is also cautious not to demonize the British Christians, going easier on them than even Bede had. Thus, while Harpsfield does not endorse the Briton tradition over the Roman, he does his best to include pre-Anglo-Saxon British Christianity in his narrative in order to paint a picture of a unified Christendom.67 Harpsfield was born and raised in London, went to Oxford, and rose in the ranks of the clergy under Mary. He was not Welsh or Irish, and neither was his family – so it seems he had no personal reasons for avoiding an overt promotion of the Anglo-Saxons. Bede’s history, one of his main sources for this part of his work, is certainly Anglo-centric, yet Harpsfield chooses to include the Joseph story as well as that of St. Patrick, St. Aidan, and many other nonAnglo figures that Bede did not. On the other hand, Harpsfield’s account certainly does not endorse the Galfridian/Joseph/Briton tradition over and against the Roman/Augustine/Anglo-Saxon tradition, and his history covers the counties of England alone. The choices Harpsfield makes for his narrative are thus dependent on the circumstances in which it was written and published. Harpsfield is writing in response to Henrician and Edwardian evangelicals who were invested in England’s jurisdictional separation, in England’s

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Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Septimum Saeculum,” Caput VI, 59: “Nec defuit praedictioni eventus: Alfridus Northumbrorum Rex, Britannorum atque adeo Christi hostis, bello Britannos lacessens, ex Monachis Bannachorensibus (quorum feruntur in eadem fuisse societate supra duo millia) mille & ducentos occidit.” Alan MacColl does describe one English Catholic attempt to appropriate the Galfridian tradition in his article, “Richard White and the Legendary History of Britain,” Humanistica Lovaniensia 51 (2002), 245–257.

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status as an “empire,” and the monarch’s royal supremacy. They were working to establish and develop a separate Church of England with its own distinct history. In contrast, Harpsfield downplays “national” borders and ethnic origins in order to emphasize an all-encompassing confessional identity – one that predates the recent “schism.” He sums up this view succinctly in the fifth dialogue of Dialogi Sex: This is all I have to say briefly about the first faith of the Britons, to which Bale and the Apologists earnestly take us back. Thus, just as the faith of the Britons was no different than that of the Angles, so too have we English drawn no other faith from Augustine than that which had been common to the whole world. In this matter we English should trust a great man such as Gregory, the first author of our very own salvation, more than Bale and the Apologists.68 In other words, Harpsfield wants to emphasize that history shows how the Catholic faith was to be shared by virtually everyone – ancient Britons, AngloSaxons, Irish, Europeans, etc. – until the Protestants broke that unity. Like Foxe, Harpsfield does indeed emphasize transnational and archipelagic connections, but he does so in a different way. Rather than map England onto the biblical Revelation, Harpsfield’s broad conception of the “English Realm” as an inclusive space reflects what he wants Catholic identity to be: not associated with a particular earthly place, but one that includes everyone in the body of Christ. Indeed, it is his focus on the local (i.e., the individual regions as the setting for his narrative) that leads to these more “universal” conclusions; by investigating the spread of Christianity in each locality, he sees with fresh eyes the footprints of Britons, Celts, and Picts alongside Anglo-Saxons. As we have seen, though many Protestant historians also make the move toward a larger “British” setting for the origin narrative, rather than showing the universal nature and truth of Catholicism they draw on the history of the Britons for a specifically Anti-Roman purpose. Instead of highlighting the idea of England as a chosen nation, Harpsfield emphasizes a universal Catholicism.

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Harpsfield, Dialogi Sex, Dialogue Five, chapter 19, 505: “Haec paucis de prima Britanorum fide, ad quam tantopere Balaeus ac Apologetici nos revocant. Ut itaque non fuit alia Britanorum, quam Anglorum fides, ita nec aliam ab Augustino nos Angli, quam quae fuerat communis totius orbis, fidem hausimus. Qua in re nos Anglos Gregorio tanto viro, & primo salutis nostre auctori magis, quam Baleo aut Apologeticis credere par est.” (Emphasis mine).

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It was this “all-encompassing” quality of the Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica that led to its publication in print in 1622. Though this was long after Harpsfield had died in prison, the Jesuit editor Richard Gibbons explains that he had been in possession of the manuscript for “some twenty-five years” and knew several others who had copies, so he figured that someone would publish it. But after he realized that “it lay hidden for a long time, and that I myself and others who were avidly expecting it saw our hopes frustrated,” he decided to publish it.69 In order to appeal to the Scottish King James, Gibbons also added a preface and a dedication to King James emphasizing the more encompassing British identity over an “English” one. In trying to appeal to a king who, at this point, seemed to be leaning towards the Catholics with talk of the Spanish Match and refusal to enforce anti-Catholic laws, Gibbons chose Harpsfield’s history because it could strengthen James’s idea of the relationship between Britain and Catholicism. The Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica is a massive work that covers the first century through the fifteenth, but in his short two-page preface Gibbons highlights Roman, British, and Anglo-Saxon characters from the foundations of Christianity in England, including the Roman missionaries Augustine, Mellitus, and Justus and well as famous monk Cuthbert. He implores James to read about “the great stars of Britain,” beginning with the Briton Lucius and Arthur, who (according to legend) led the defense of Britain against Saxon invaders. He specifically advertises key figures in the spread of the Gregorian mission, King Ethelbert and King Oswald – the only Kings he mentions.70 Harpsfield’s history, Gibbons believes, will appeal to James precisely because of its construction of a broader spatial identity. Harpsfield’s narrative, using the term England as a sort of synecdoche for Britain, presents a map; but of course, maps are not territory, and the “visual lie” that Harpsfield tells is that Catholics throughout the archipelago (and the world) had once been united, in lockstep, and will inevitably be again after the monarchy returns to Catholicism. Obviously, there are polemical aspects of Harpsfield’s history. He is, after all, writing in direct response to the recent Protestant revision of national history: “new sects” have contaminated the his-

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Gibbons, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Candido Lectori,” i: “Cum hanc historiam ante annos plus minus viginti quinque nactus fuissem, ac certo scirem eiusdem exemplar non penes me usum, sed etiam apud alios extare, quorum studio & diligentia sperabam fore, ut in lucem aliquando proferretur, viderem tamen iam diu latere, ac me ipsum & alios, qui auide eam spe et ab amus nostra spe frustrari.” Gibbons, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Dedication,” i–iii.

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tory, “of no other people as much as of ours”71 He spends time in the preface pointing out the inconsistencies in these Protestant retellings: sometimes they condemn the whole first 1000 years, sometimes they make “hidden saints” out of heretics like Wycliffe, and sometimes they claim that the Protestant Church in England had existed from the beginning. The English are as divided and polarized as any people has ever been, Harpsfield believes, but by structuring his narrative to highlight both the local histories and their eventual cross-cultural collaboration, he imagines a harmonious, unified past in which divisions are healed and obstacles are overcome. Harpsfield’s work was not only in the service of responding to Protestant revisionist narratives: he noted that he will not be “combating” their arguments on every page, as he does not want his history to become a refutation or an apology. Like the common use of an encompassing “Britain,” there are other ways in which he shared a similar view of history with Protestants like Bale and Foxe. Indeed, if we reframe our analysis we can see that, for each of these historians from across the confessional divide, theological commitment inspired their historical work; underneath the polemical battles laid the question of the very possibility of finding divine truth in human history. Harpsfield believed, like Foxe, that the truth of history will speak for itself: “from the bare and simple method of this history, without some more elaborate refutation, it will be easy for the reader to see those who have followed a contrary way of faith and life.”72 This theme of history speaking for itself is not uncommon; for many Continental Catholic historians, their firm belief in Catholic theology gave them a distinctive epistemological certainty regarding the possibility of understanding human documents 73 Reginald Pole, on the other hand, expressed a real skepticism regarding the interpretation of text, both historical and even scriptural. On the Protestant side, this confidence in human documents was found in some but not others. As we saw in chapter one, from his earliest writings it is clear that John Bale had always recognized that any understanding of the True Church could be enhanced by activating its history. Bale’s passion for seeking out English sources in order to “preserve [God’s] True Church” hinged

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Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Praefatio,” v: “ita & Ecclesiasticam cum primis historiam, sed, ni fallor, nullus aeque Gentis atque nostrae, foede depravarint atque contaminarint.” Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Praefaio,” vi: “sed quod ex nuda & simplici ipsius historiae ratione, sine accuratiore aliqua refutatione, facile Lectori constare poterit, contrariam prorsus fidei atque vitae rationem sequutos.” Stefania Tutino makes this argument for Continental Catholic historians, especially Cesare Baronio, in Shadows of Doubt, 74–112.

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on his belief that this truth could indeed be found in human documents.74 He believed that it was scripture itself that would guide us in a true interpretation of human history.75 As we saw above, Foxe believed that the guiding hand of providence would help him assemble the human past into a divinely inspired story, much like Baronio’s “mosaic” metaphor. Harpsfield, on the other hand, employed a slightly different use of theology to justify the truth of history, explaining that the stories of the saints repeat and reveal the Gospel, reflecting the biblical depiction of God working through human events. For this reason, Harpsfield believed that it was crucial to assemble a true account of the lives of the saints who have come before: “I considered it useful and necessary … that the true and perpetual history of our church might be transmitted by writing, through which it might be clearly visible what kind of living our fathers followed.”76 Even Gibbons, Harpsfield’s editor, expressed this view in his later preface to the reader, explaining that Harpsfield’s history was not written to “combat the cockroaches,” but so the truth “might come to light.”77 In this way, the origin narrative becomes even more central – and documents become increasingly more foundational – not only in finding precedent in the past, but also in constructing supernatural authorization for the correct church. Moreover, like Bale and Foxe, Harpsfield lamented the loss of the monastic libraries and sought to preserve history for history’s sake; he, too, wanted to uncover “new” history by combing the archives and digging out the oldest sources. He described each region in order to preserve the practices of the peoples there, just as classical authors “describe with elaborate and meticulous diligence many once-famous towns of which only ruins are now extant.”78 In addition to using primary source material, Harpsfield cited his secondary sources: “As for the reliability of this history … we sprinkle the authors in the margins which we use in our account, and we have been so meticulous that we follow this method even in the most minute details.” Harpsfield also

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Bale, Vocacyon, 24r. Bale, Image, 253. Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Praefatio,” v: “Utile ergo & oppido quam necessarium existimavi, ut vera & perpetua nostrae Ecclesiae historia scriptis proderetur, per quam liquido constaret quam vivendi rationem Patres nostri sequuti sint.” Gibbons, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Candido Lectori,” i: “Qui cum non eo animo tantum laborem, ad multorum utilit atem et profectum, tanta industria, sedulitate, ac veritate susceperit, ut cum blattis ac tineis decertaret, sed in lucem aliquando & conspectum hominum veniret.” Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Praefatio,” vi: “multa olim clarissima oppida, quorum iam nihil nisi ruinae extant … exacta & exquisita diligentia discribunt.”

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explained his criteria for selecting secondary authors: first, he gave precedence to those “who wrote either in the same or nearby times.” With this requirement, Harpsfield criticizes the histories of those Protestants drawing on “legendary” sources as less rigourous. Second, he personally vetted sources to make sure they relied on “trusted and well-established testimony.”79 Alongside (rather than in opposition to) their belief in a cosmic narrative, both Catholic and Protestant historians saw a great significance in human history and took seriously their responsibility to find spiritualized authorization in human documents. Their belief in the ability of temporal history to reveal theological truths came from the certainty offered by their passionate confessional commitments. Likewise, their passionate spirituality was meant to be bolstered by the lives of the saints who had gone before them. In this respect, Harpsfield explained even more explicitly than Bale, Foxe, or even Jewel, how his work is at once both historical and devotional. He claimed that, after the Bible, history is “far more beneficial … than the reading of any other books” for any Christian trying to live a holy life. Knowing, perhaps, that the “godly” would disagree with this statement, he then lamented that “today the souls of many people are colder and more detached” from history, which he thought was “a great damage to piety.”80 Gaining historical knowledge, he hoped, would move his audience to action: his “abundant collection” of the lives and holy deeds of the saints was intended to help “shake off the sloth” of his fellow Brits and stir them to “more ardently” follow the example of their saintly predeces-

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Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Praefaio,” vii: “Quod vero ad fidem historiae nostrae spectat, ut nostrum ea in re fidem magis liberaremus, aspergimus in margine auctores, quos in singulis narrationibus sequimur, idque tam anxie, ut & in minutoribus eandem etiam rationem teneamus, Quorum momenclaturam huic praefationi subdemus. Et quo ad id quidem fieri potuit, nihil laudamus nisi ex certo & nominato auctore eos maxime sequuti qui idem aut proximis quisbusque temporibus scripsere. Quod si aliquando & eos, quorum nomen ignoratur, citamus, id sit parcius, in iis praesertim quae hodie controuertuntur, nisi forte uno aut altero, cuius non tam audita, quam oculata rerum gestarum fide, licet modestie causa nomen suum supprimant, secure nituntur. Sed nec ubi certus auctor, offertur, promiscue sine delectu sumimus; nullius, certe, si fieri posset, nisi explorato atque bene excusso testimonio usuri.” Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Praefatio,” iv: “Nemo credo inficias iverit, historiae ecclesiasticae lectionem homini Christiano, sacris maxime initiato, post sacras illas & divinas literas, aliorum quoruncunque librorum lectione, ad humanam vitam recte & sancte constituendam, longe esse fructuosiorem … vel quod magis praeponderat, multorum hodie animos frigidiores, & ab huius modi lectione, magna pietatis iactura, esse alieniores.”

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sors.81 In other words, because theology (or ideology, more broadly) provided a guide for interpreting history, history could guide piety.

4

Space and Ethnicity: Anglo-centrism in Stapleton and Persons

Thomas Stapleton and Robert Persons, living in exile on the Continent, framed their origin narratives differently than both Harpsfield and the variety of Protestants in England. While those who stayed at home had used Britain as an imaginative construct, either mapping it onto the biblical Revelation or onto conceptions of a universal body of Christ, it seems that exile had intensified the national identity of Stapleton and (especially) Persons. They often expressed their English loyalty by celebrating the Roman Catholic history of Anglo-Saxons over the contributions of Welsh/British, Irish, and Scottish Christians. Unlike Harpsfield, who chose to emphasize the transnational and universal past and present of the Catholic Church, Stapleton and Persons did their best to portray Roman Catholicism as fundamental to what it means to be English.82 Thomas Stapleton became a prominent Catholic voice in the conversation surrounding the origins of Christianity in England by producing the first English translation of Bede’s history. Stapleton and his family had fled to Louvain, where he published his translation of the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum in 1565. In the same year, he published a companion work titled A Fortresse of the Faith in which he attempted to establish the antiquity of Roman Catholicism in contrast to the novelty of Protestantism by using the works of the Church Fathers, in particular Bede.83 He refers to his Fortresse in his preface to Bede’s history and directs his readers to consult the introduction and chapter 1 in conjunction with Bede. 81

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Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Praefatio,” v: “Ut igitur hanc nostratium praesertim, & meam cum primis nimiam in hac parte cessationem excuterem; nosque & alios ad acriorem piorum operum, & Patrum aemulationem exacuerem, sancta vivendi illorum instituta in hanc historiam ubertim conieci, per quae caelos illi promeriti sunt.” This Anglo-Saxon-centered narrative is also echoed in the Antwerp-based printer of Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (Antwerp, 1605). See also Paul Arblaster, Antwerp & the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004); and Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation, especially chapter 4. Venerable Bede, The History of the Church of Englande, Compiled by Venerable Bede, Englishman, Translated out of Latin in to English by Thomas Stapleton student in divinity (Antwerp: 1565). Hereafter Bede’s History. Thomas Stapleton, A Fortresse of the Faith First Planted among Us Englishmen (Antwerp, 1565). Hereafter Fortresse.

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Virtually everyone recognized Bede as the most credible ancient English historian; a new Latin edition of Bede’s work came out of Protestant Basel in 1563, and three years later the Catholic community in Louvain printed a Latin edition of their own.84 For Stapleton, Bede’s work contained the history and identity of the True Church. In Fortresse Stapleton uses Bede’s history to construct an idea of the past in which the Roman Catholic Church in England had continued without interruption from the end of the sixth century until the Protestant schism under Henry VIII. He asks his Protestant readers, “What can move you to reject this history of the Venerable Bede, to depart from the faith first planted among us Englishmen and so many hundred years continued, from the faith, I say, of all Christendom beside?”85 Just as Thomas More had argued decades before, Stapleton emphasizes that the Church community had to be “clear, evident, visible and known” in order to have continuity with the early Church, and he uses scripture to prove this point.86 Drawing on the Psalms, the prophet Isaiah, and the Gospels for evidence, Stapleton concludes that to deny the historical continuity is to “defeat the mystery of Christ’s incarnation.”87 Like Thomas More before him, Stapleton argues that “hidden” saints could not have existed within a corrupt communion. Stapleton’s edition of Bede’s history and the Fortresse pamphlet circulated widely both in England (secretly) and abroad, quickly becoming the standard Catholic authority on the medieval past. On the other hand, even many Protestants had accepted Bede as a reliable historian and drew on his history for their own arguments. For example, Foxe draws heavily on Bede’s history in his description of the English tradition and believes him to be “a man of worthy and venerable memory.”88 A few Protestants, however, are harsher toward Bede. For example, Stapleton’s interlocutor William Fulke not only attacks Augustine, but also criticizes Bede himself as ignorant and gullible, expressing many reservations about him as a monk and an enthusiast for papal authority.89 Similarly, the antiquarian William Lambarde notes Bede’s Saxon bias.90 The most used alternative to Bede, as discussed above, was the 84 85 86 87 88 89

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Bede, Opera Omnia, 8 vols, (Basel, 1563); Incipit liber primus ecclesiastice historie gentis Anglorum (Louvain, 1566). Stapleton, Fortresse, 3r. Stapleton, Fortresse, “Table of Contents,” 163r. Stapleton, Fortresse, 11v-18r, 20r-23v, 34r-37v, quote on 162v. Acts and Monuments, Book 2, 150. William Fulke, Stapleton’s Fortress Overthrown. A Rejoinder to Martiall’s Reply. A Discovery of the Dangerous Rock of the Popish Church Commended by Sanders, 1580, ed. Richard Gibbins, PS (Cambridge, 1848), 13. William Lambarde, Perambulation of Kent (London, 1576), 89.

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pre-Augustinian narratives from the Galfridian tradition. Like Harpsfield, who had joked that even Bale and the Magdeburg Centuriators were “true darlings” compared to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Stapleton derided Protestants for relying on a “vain fabler” like Geoffrey who perpetuated absurd legends about Arthur and Merlin.91 Christopher Highley has detailed how other Catholic historians continued to ridicule the use of Geoffrey’s legendary history in favor of the “approved” Bede – “approved” being Stapleton’s favorite description.92 As argued above, these confessional debates actually led to more careful examinations of the documentary record and critical views of some sources; this more rigorous examination exposed the lack of documentation for much of what had traditionally been believed to be authentic history. Bede’s History was also influential in shaping the discourse surrounding spatial identity. While Harpsfield used the idea of a multi-national and multiethnic (i.e., British, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic) Britain as an imaginative construct, Stapleton’s edition of Bede is decidedly Anglo-centric. In Catholics Writing the Nation, Christopher Highley lays out in detail the Anglo-centrism in Stapleton’s work. For example, in his preface and commentary, Stapleton intensifies the Anglo-centrism already present in Bede’s history. He refers to Bede’s work as a “history of the church of England containing in it beside the historical narration of the coming in of us Englishmen into this land.” Stapleton then lists the saints who were instrumental in spreading Christianity: in addition to the earliest Roman missionaries (i.e., Augustine, Paulinus, and Mellitus) he lists only English, not British, saints. He makes sure to mention the figures associated with the controversial Synod of Whitby, the seventh-century Northumbrian council that ruled in favor of Roman customs over those of British Christianity. He highlights Wilfrid, representing the Roman position and famous for arguing for the Roman method for dating Easter, as well as Cuthbert and John of Beverly, who were also members of the Whitby community. He also directly honors England in contrast to other countries, celebrating that “our dear country of England hath been more enriched with places erected to God’s honor, and to the free maintenance of good learning, then any one country in all Christendom beside.”93 Stapleton, moreover, incorporates a nationalist dimension in his dedication to Queen Elizabeth, as he explains that she will learn how the faith was “planted first among Englishmen by holy

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Harpsfield, Dialogi Sex, Dialogue 5, Book 19, 497: “Unicas delicias.” Stapleton, A counterblast to M Hornes vayne blaste against M. Fekenham (Louvain, 1567), 314r. For more examples see Hamilton, “Catholic Uses of Anglo-Saxon Precedents,” 537–555. Stapleton, A counterblast, 314r; see Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation, 87. Stapleton, “Preface,” Bede’s History, 6r–v, 3r–v.

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S. Augustine our Apostle,” and throughout the text he emphasizes that Bede is English, “a country man of ours.”94 Unlike Harpsfield, Stapleton did not use “England” and “country” as a metonym for the entire archipelago. An analysis of Stapleton’s translation demonstrates that he does not wish to draw the multiple countries into one “British” identity. For example, before he begins Bede’s history, Stapleton lists the changes made by the “Protestant faith” from the “primitive faith of England,” and his third point describes how Augustine and the Roman missionaries worked to bring the “old Britons” into unity with the rest of Christ’s Church.95 In Bede’s text the Britons and the Irish show up often, but they are always discussed in relation to the Anglo-Saxons, sometimes as collaborators and sometimes as adversaries. Thus, for Bede in the eighth century and for Stapleton in the sixteenth, the English are the main characters and these other “peoples” were supporting actors at best, enemies at worst.96 Furthermore, Highley also highlights how the Britons remain recalcitrant throughout Stapleton’s book; for example, they were already somewhat Christian when the Germanic tribes migrate, but they do not preach to them and later “swerve” from the correct customs of Roman Catholic Christianity. For example, Bede says (in Stapleton’s translation), “the goodness of God did not so forsake his people whom he foreknew to be saved. But provided for the said nation of the English much more worthy preachers by whom they might be brought unto the faith.”97 Thus the English received “worthy” missionaries from Rome, and their nation was finally converted, no thanks to the Britons. Stapleton explains that the “old Britons” were thus “driven to the straits, which they yet keep.”98 They became the Welsh people, as Highley puts it, “suffering a divinely imposed exile in the narrow confines of Wales.”99 Stapleton’s setting of the Christian origin narrative differs from that of his evangelical interlocutors as well as that of other Catholic historians at the time. Harpsfield, for example, is attempting a completely synthetic and comprehensive history, bringing together as many medieval sources as he can find. Stapleton’s work is a translation of Bede, giving it a different tone and 94 95 96

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Stapleton, “Dedication,” Bede’s History, *3r. Stapleton, “Differences,” Bede’s History, no. 3. For more on Bede’s construction of Englishness, see Patrick Wormwald, “Bede, the Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum” in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and AngloSaxon Society, ed. Patrick Wormwald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 99–129. Stapleton, Bede’s History, 29r–v; quoted in Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation, 90. Stapleton, A returne of untruths upon M Jewelles Replie (Antwerp, 1566), 19v. Highely, Catholics Writing the Nation, 90. See also Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism, 110.

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overall aim. These different methodologies contribute to their different spatial discourses, which in turn contributes to the different ways of negotiating national and religious identity. Harpsfield ends up vacillating between individual counties and the entire archipelago as the setting for his narrative in order to achieve a transnational frame. Stapleton, on the other hand, is reproducing and commenting on Bede’s narrative alone, which is decidedly Anglo-centric in its orientation. Stapleton, unlike Harpsfield, not only refused to take advantage of any opportunities in his commentary or in his translation to create a collective archipelagic identity, but also drew even sharper national and ethnic lines. His narrative is firmly set in the “country” of England, and the Anglo-Saxon/English people are the clear heirs of the English Christian tradition, received directly from Rome. By emphasizing Rome and its relationship with England, Stapleton, like Pole, erases the distinction between Christians and Romans, so as to simultaneously highlight the continuity between ancient Christians and contemporary Catholics as well as the rupture and novelty represented by Protestantism. Finally, one of the most written about Catholics to discuss the problem of English Christian origins is Jesuit Robert Persons. Persons’s presence in the Roman Curia gave him a particular perspective on the place of England within the larger Catholic world. He is writing at the height of the tensions regarding the loyalty of Catholics to the monarchy as well as navigating intraconfessional tensions between Catholic clerics and laymen. His work also lays out the foundation of English Christianity in direct response to Foxe’s martyrology, arguing that the Protestant Church was “never planted in England … nor ever was received, nor ever had essence or being under the name of Christian religion from Christ’s time to ours.”100 As we saw with Harpsfield and Stapleton, Persons crafted his text in order to challenge the Protestant colonization of the English past (and present). By retelling the story of Augustine and emphasizing how the founder-martyrs had confirmed their true Christianity through miracles, Persons was able to highlight the unbroken continuity of the Catholic faith and argue that the religion practiced by the Britons was false.101 Additionally, by highlighting the international mission of early English saints, he was able to give a universal significance to local heroes. His Treatise of Three Conversions of England from Paganisme to Christian Religion, printed in 1603, was his attempt to settle the debate once and for all by combining 100 101

Robert Persons, A Treatise of Three Conversions of England from Paganisme to Christian Religion, 3 vols (St Omers, 1603–1604),“Dedication,” 4r. The use of miracles as confirmation of the True Church will be discussed further in chapter 3.

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the Joseph legend, the Lucius account, and the Augustine narrative into one work, arguing that each time the Good News had ultimately come from the Roman Catholic Church. Although each of these three conversion stories had been recounted and/or discussed in other histories, Persons’s text is focused exclusively on the foundations of Christianity in England. He does not provide a sequential account, but rather divides the work into three parts: the first two identify the Church militant as the visible Roman Catholic institution (as opposed to the invisible Church traced by Foxe and the Protestants).102 The third part focuses on the “Church triumphant,” reassuring Catholics that they are part of the true and visible Church on earth as well as the Church of eternity. In his account of Joseph of Arimathea, Persons does something unique with respect to Stapleton and Harpsfield: he emphasizes that ultimately St. Peter, the first Bishop of Rome, was the sender of all the Apostles out into the world to share the message of Christ. Peter sent out a group with Philip the Apostle and his disciples, among whom Joseph was their chief, to Roman Britain. Some of the people were converted, but the Gospel did not spread throughout the whole island. A century later, the British King Lucius was so awed by the miracles of some Christians he encountered that he wrote to Pope Eleutherius that he desired conversion and requested the presence of missionaries. But, as Persons’s narrative goes, by the seventh century most Britons had fallen back into paganism or had otherwise corrupted the pure Catholicism that they had received. The entrance of the Germanic tribes with their pagan religion had also dismantled the faith on the island. The third and final conversion comes from Pope Gregory through his missionary to the English, Augustine. Persons not only emphasizes, as did Stapleton, that the faith that came from Pope Gregory via Augustine was the one that stuck, he also directly counters the “British Christianity” lineage Protestants had constructed by pointing out that, no matter what way you look at it, the Gospel came from Rome each time. In Three Conversions Persons draws heavily on Thomas Stapleton’s English translation of Bede’s history as well as the Fortresse pamphlet. Like Stapleton, Persons continues to highlight the Anglo-centrism in Bede and continues to criticize Protestant dependence on Geoffrey’s anti-Roman narrative, calling them “brutish rather than British.”103 Persons also echoes Bede’s Anglo-centric view of the arrival of Christianity in which Anglo-Saxons are the chosen ones 102

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For more on Persons’s work vis-à-vis Foxe, see Victor Houliston, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580–1610 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 96–108. Persons, Three Conversions, I, 304.

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and the Britons are recalcitrant. In addition to his polemical portrayal of the ancient Britons, Persons goes even further in promoting English identity over others. Bede’s medieval history (and Stapleton’s translation) recognizes the Irish for spreading Christianity to the Saxons and commends Ireland for being a fertile place and “great friends to the English nation.”104 All in all, Bede had painted a picture of the Irish as a deeply religious people. But as Colin Kidd has shown, Persons makes a special effort to celebrate Anglo-Saxon Catholicity over Celtic Christianity.105 For example, at the Synod of Whitby, the Irish clergy renounced their practices and became absorbed into Roman Christendom, thus Ireland’s own religious traditions were rejected. Medieval Irish historians recognized that this episode was damaging to their image and, when Bede’s history was translated into Middle Irish, they omitted references to this chapter.106 Persons, on the other hand, highlighted the Easter “heresy” to authorize an Anglo-Saxon Catholicity over and against Irish traditions.107 In addition to drawing sharp boundaries with the Britons as well as the Irish, Persons also emphasizes ethnic differences in his treatment of Scotland and the succession.108 Highley details how Persons collaborated with William Allen on A conference about the next succession to the crowne of Ingland to argue for the Infanta Isabella of Spain over James to be Elizabeth’s successor.109 Of course their hope was that Catholicism would be restored in England, and their arguments rested on the animosity between England and Scotland. James, some argued, was born in Scotland and thus could not be the rightful ruler of England. Persons et alia could not argue that point at the same time that they advocated for the Infanta, but they did highlight that a young, unmarried woman would not impose sweeping cultural changes and could, in theory, leave things be. The problem with James’s candidacy, in their view, was “the aversion and natural alienation of the Scots from the English, and their ancient inclination to join with the French and Irish against us.”110 If James

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Stapleton, Bede’s History, 145r. See Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism, 109–110; Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation, chapter 5. See Proinseas Ni Chathain, “Bede’s Ecclesiasastical History in Irish,” Peritia 3 (1984): 115–130. See also Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation, 120. Persons, Three conversions, i, 49, 52. Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation, 103–109. For an analysis that places Allen’s A conference within a wider European context in order to emphasize both the political and Apostolic nature of Persons’s argument, see Stefania Tutino, “The Political Thought of Robert Persons’s Conference in Continental Context,” The Historical Journal, vol. 52, no 1 (March, 2009), 43–62. A conference about the next succession to the crown of England (Antwerp, 1594), 2:224; 2:118.

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had the crown the Scots would take over and the reign of the English over their own would end, “as we read that William the Conqueror did his Normans … to the incredible calamity of the English nation.”111 Of course, after James took the throne Persons was forced to rethink his approach, though he always remained critical of an Anglo-Scottish union. In addition to his treatment of other “Brits” in Three Conversions, Persons writes about the contemporary conflicts between British exiles abroad. In his letters and memoirs, he describes the conflict between the English and Welsh students at the English College in Rome. The English students accused the leadership of showing favoritism to the Welsh students, who were more content to stay abroad rather than return to England as missionaries. Persons concludes his lengthy description of this conflict as a vindication of “Englishmen’s natures.” He describes one of the Welsh superiors as “an Englishman, but sprung from that part of England which had once been the refuge of the ancient Britons when they were conquered by the English, and was called Wales … between these Welshmen and true Englishmen dissensions easily arise from memory of their ancient rivalry, they being of the stock of different peoples.”112 His description of these events reveals his underlying preoccupation with national and ethnic identities. Persons thus continuously emphasizes ethnic differences, highlighting the faithfulness of the Anglo-Saxons over and against the shortcomings of their Celtic and Briton counterparts. He also draws strong national boundaries between contemporary England, Scotland, and Wales. Eschewing both a transnational and a universal/cosmic setting, he reinforces national and ethnic difference by championing England itself. Persons, writing at the end of Elizabeth’s reign and the beginning of James’s, had clear political reasons for prioritizing England over Britain, mostly that he was not happy about the accession of King James over the Infanta. However, his construction of England as space is also inextricable from his confessional concerns: in a time when he was negotiating his Englishness and Catholicity, he found it more helpful to use historical lineage to demonstrate that, not only was England rightfully Catholic, but it was also the disseminator Catholicism in the archipelago. In other words, England had the most Catholic roots of all nations.

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A conference, 2:120, quoted in Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation, 101. Persons, The Memoirs of Father Robert Persons (1600), ed. JH Pollen, CRS 2/4 (London, 1908), 89 (emphasis mine).

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Conclusions

Articulating how England became holy and set apart, each of these historians participated in a process of territorialization through the stories of foundersaints that functioned to create attachments to the ancestors. Furthermore, Catholic exiles manufactured an idea of homeland that, ultimately, served to create the concept of sanctified territory. The territory, however conceived, became a powerful cultural resource for the formation of a national identity. Embracing a spatial perspective not only highlights Christian identities visa-vis British, Roman, universal, and local ones, but also sheds light on how founding figures were used to anchor them. Origin narratives are not static and fixed, and even the same story can be used very differently depending on purpose and audience. English Catholics were negotiating increasingly conflicting loyalties during the reign of Elizabeth, and there were different ways of dealing with this disjuncture. The variety of ways one could be both Catholic and English in this context play out in each of these versions of the Christian origin narrative. As we see with Harpsfield, some early modern Catholics drew on an idea of a multicultural archipelago to counter the ways in which national, ethnic, and religious discourses were coalescing in emerging Protestant narratives. Harpsfield, paradoxically, uses a regional approach and a focus on local founder-saints to create some attachment to a translocal nation. Given his circumstances – writing at home in England, in prison, and earlier in Elizabeth’s reign – his strategy was to universalize Catholicism in the face of evangelicals arguing that God chose England due to its hidden reformed past. Stapleton and Persons did not stay in England, and they ultimately found it helpful to draw a much sharper line regarding space, which in turn shaped their constructions of both confessional and national identity. Catholics living abroad saw Catholicism as a defining element of being English. Living on the Continent intensified their Englishness (or at least their desire to articulate it) and, at the same time, they felt that Protestantism was corrupting the Englishness of the people at home. In order to highlight their English loyalty, they sometimes denigrated the Welsh/Britons, the Irish, the Scots, etc. In other words, instead of highlighting the universal nature and truth of Catholicism in these particular works, it was pertinent for them to focus on the ways in which England and Catholicism were inseparable, and to render any conception of one without the other utterly unthinkable. This produced an expression of love of country in opposition to other nations. Indeed, retelling stories of the arrival of Christianity in England was a critical factor in the shaping national identities, and the articulation of the spatial settings for these stories necessarily centered ethnicity.

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The English Church’s divorce from Rome incited a variety of questions about history and identity. Some of these were old issues put into a new, sixteenth-century context (e.g., working human history into a divine cosmic scheme) and some were new questions altogether (e.g., how do we negotiate English identity after Rome?). Although both conservative and godly writers conceived of a universal Church, in writing an account of change over time they also had to define their spatial terms. However, in contrast to conventional understandings of “Catholic” versus “Protestant” origin narratives, confessional groupings did not define the ways in which space was constructed. Rather, a variety of factors regarding the particular author’s situation and circumstances were more decisive than confessional and doctrinal concerns in framing space. If we were to categorize these histories using the British versus the English setting, the results would not fall neatly into a Catholic-versusProtestant framework. Space, then, is just as important as time in narratives of origin, and in this case the interdependence of religious and spatial identities constituted a strategy that utilized the overlapping constructions of ethnic, national, geographical, and religious difference. In recent decades, historians have become interested in reading early modern “sacred” materials (church histories, theological tracts, sermons, hagiographies) to think about the development of cultural identities, especially national ones.113 They point out how the projects of Protestants and Catholics (i.e., “religious” actors) were used for specific political purposes, making their work ideological rather than the historical. However, as these first two chapters show, the deployment of historical narratives for political and cultural purposes did not begin with John Jewel’s Challenge Sermon of 1560, and the medieval chronicles were not neutral sources but themselves composed within real social realities. History, in other words, was already political, long before the particular confessional debates of the sixteenth century. The Tudors were not the first to discover how to strategically mobilize the past for purposes in the present. Modern scholars of this period sometimes portray their objects of study (from Foxe to Persons) as “religious” subjects who, due to their ideological commitments, found themselves doing “political” work. By labeling our sources “sacred history,” we not only construct boundaries between social actors we see as religious versus political, but we construct the very definition of religion itself as a set of interior beliefs. As scholars from religious studies have shown, the ability to see something as religious (a modern 113

See, for example, the chapters of Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World, eds. Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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category) is indeed a product of the modern state.114 Hidden in our arguments, then, are powerful theoretical assumptions about categories and definitions and very modern ideas of religion. In many ways, what we are doing is not so much highlighting the ways in which they used “sacred” things for “political” purposes, but rather highlighting the fragility of the categories themselves. Furthermore, this early modern example highlights how these categories do not even fit neatly in our own contemporary situation, especially as we watch nations in the twenty-first century engage in similar questions about what it means when a universal “religious” identity is inextricably linked with ideas of national exceptionalism. How are narratives of a great, unified past employed during a time that feels more polarized than ever? How do we imagine history as “speaking for itself” even when deployed in the midst of ideological battles? These first two chapters demonstrate the extent to which confessional, national, local, and ethnic identity have long been tangled together in conceptions of the past.

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See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (United Kingdom: Stanford University Press, 2003). For a nice overview of this concept, see William Arnal’s and Russell McCutcheon’s essays in The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of “Religion” (United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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Chapter 3

Authorizing Origins: Martyrology, Hagiography, and the Varieties of Supernatural Authorization in Christian Foundation Narratives Just as early modern historians were remapping the space in which their origin stories unfolded, so were they redrawing the boundaries between natural and supernatural. This chapter focuses on the changing conception of miracles in early modern constructions of the English Christian foundation narrative as an example of the variety of ways supernatural ideas authorize versions of the past for discrete audiences. Furthermore, it explores the implications of the sacralizing narratives laid out in the first two chapters, focusing on the construction of a community entrusted with a sacred mission: to defend the sacred realm and convert heretics in the face of constant persecution. The subject of martyrdom in both Catholic and Protestant communities has been examined in significant scholarly research; drawing on that research, I want to consider here not their differences, but rather the common function of narratives of persecution across the confessional spectrum: both Protestant and Catholic conceptions of martyrdom, though different, functioned as a crucial cultural source of national sentiment in England. Because the arrival of Christianity in England involved saints, martyrs, and miracles, supernatural involvement in human affairs was (re)articulated in several different ways. Though the validity and purpose of miracles had been under scrutiny since at least the fifteenth century (long predating Henry VIII’s break with Rome), they remained a central theological flashpoint throughout the early modern period and beyond. Especially after John Jewel’s “Challenge Sermon” of 1560, miracles became a key issue in the Protestant challenge to the Catholic past in England.1 Current historiography usually emphasizes the early modern Catholic belief in miracles as validating signs from God, mobilized to prove the veracity of the Roman Church. From this perspective, this type of divine confirmation was sorely lacking in the version of the past being constructed by the reformers. Scholarship on Protestant historiography, on the other hand, demonstrates the reformers’ claim that the “signs and wonders” littering the pages of medieval history were proof of superstition and centuries 1 John Jewel, “A Sermon Preached at Paul’s Cross,” The Works of John Jewel, ed. J. Ayre, Vol. 1, PS (Cambridge, 1845–50), 1–24.

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of corruption.2 However, looking beyond this confessional binary reveals more than a simple rejection of saints and miracles. There were a variety of possible responses to the miraculous, from a distrust of God’s immanence to a persistence of the notion that miracles still abound, and they all play out in the discourses on Christian origins.3 The arrival of Christianity in England was not only used to legitimize political power and imagine a nation – it also reconsidered the role of the supernatural in human history and what it meant to believe in it. Founder-saints were able to connect space (i.e., England, Britain, Europe, Heaven) and time (i.e., the present with recent and ancient history as well as divine timelessness) through the traditional conventions of miraculous endurance. Across the confessional spectrum, these founding heroes were used to tackle historical precedent, contemporary belief, and divine authorization. While there is indeed a continuity-versus-change conversation to be had regarding miracles in the historiography of early modern England, my interest here is in the social function of the supernatural in origin narratives. If our interest is how appeals to the divine authorize particular versions of the past, I argue that the central function of these uses of the supernatural along the immanent-to-transcendent spectrum is similar. Therefore, my analysis in this chapter shifts from questions about early modern belief in the veracity of miracles to how both Catholic and Protestants used claims of supernatural intervention. I focus on the context in which these claims were situated and the consequences of various frames of divine intervention in England’s Christian conversion story. In the end, whether God was thought to control human events through the miraculous bodies of saints or through the providential guidance of exemplars and martyrs, the supernaturalized claims functioned to produce an enchanted and “blessed nation” that will triumph over persecution. As Bruce Lincoln writes, “religious claims are the means by which certain objects, places, speakers, and speech-acts are invested with an authority, the source of which lies outside the human. That is, these claims create 2 See Philip M. Soergel, Miracles and the Protestant Imagination: The Evangelical Wonder Book in Reformation Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape; Helen Parish, Monks, Miracles and Magic: Reformation Representations of the Medieval Church (New York: Routledge, 2005); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). See also Alexandra Walsham, “The Reformation and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed,” The Historical Journal 51, no. 2 (2008): 497–528. 3 For a broad look at the ways in which the supernatural was reimagined and reappropriated when cut from their medieval roots, see Peter Marshall, Invisible Worlds: Death, Religion And The Supernatural In England, 1500–1700 (London: SPCK, 2017).

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the appearance that their authorization comes from a realm beyond history, society, and politics.”4 When stories of origins or roots appear to derive from divine forces, they construct tradition as something universal that stands outside of social reality. Contemporary scholarship’s rightful demonstration of the Catholic retention of miracles and supernatural immanence has perhaps inadvertently overemphasized Catholics as more “religious” and thus less modern than their Protestant counterparts. This move could obscure how both early modern Protestants and many people still today mobilize supernatural (or, more broadly, transcendent) ideas to legitimate particular pasts for use in the present.5 This chapter seeks to illustrate the benefits of analyzing the abundance of what we might call “devotional material” in printed histories. The story of the arrival of Christianity in England was told through the lives of saints, images, shrines, relics, and even place names. These elements were especially useful to those attempting to solidify or renew their historical links with the martyrs of the past. While the next chapter takes up material culture, place names, and the landscape, this chapter situates the hagiographical material in the works of historians like Thomas Stapleton and Nicholas Harpsfield alongside other hagiographical accounts in order to emphasize the tenuousness and fluidity of these boundaries. In what follows I consider the ways Protestants still saw human events as being shaped by God and displayed in moments of miraculous intervention, as well as how saintly miracles were reconstructed and reinterpreted in Roman Catholic histories. Miracles could still function as both confirming and cautionary signs from God, but were understood in different terms, acquired different purposes, and fulfilled different needs depending on context. Scholars like Alexandra Walsham have shown that Protestants tried to disparage a “magical” Roman Catholic past while leaving space for divine intervention, whereas Catholics attempted to negotiate between orthodoxy and popular traditions.6 But in many ways, the intra- and interconfessional debates over the miracles of founder-saints redefined the relationship between human 4 Bruce Lincoln, Authority: Construction and Corrosion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 112, emphasis original. 5 Again, I cite the “Dobbs v Jackson Decision, Annotated,” The New York Times, June 24, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/24/us/politics/supreme-court -dobbs-jackson-analysis-roe-wade.html. This is but one contemporary example of the invocation of history to construct “deeply rooted tradition” can make something seem given and universal. 6 See Walsham, “Miracles and the Counter-Reformation” The Historical Journal 46, no. 4 (2003): 779–815; and Reformation of the Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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and supernatural insofar as it questioned how God’s activity in human affairs worked. How would God confirm who the real founding figures were? How would we distinguish between true martyrs and “the devil’s martyrs”? Scholars had argued over how to distinguish real from fake miracles long before the challenges of reformers or the arrival of modern “secular rationality.” Certainly, some traditions were viewed as more fanciful than others, by both reformers and conservatives, and there was plenty of judgment, skepticism, and disbelief about miracles and magic in medieval Europe. Indeed, scholars like Michael Bailey have examined concepts like “superstition” in the Middle Ages, highlighting how the medieval church had always been concerned about certain saintly (and other) traditions. From the late fourteenth century, theologians wrote nonstop about this topic, as the host of tracts and treatises de superstitionibus attest.7 Thus, different early modern historians and hagiographers worked out belief in saints and miracles in different ways. What remained across the confessional spectrum was the theme of persecution; indeed, persecution became a more reliable way to find God’s authorizing hand through the continuity between ancient martyrs and their present situation. And it was the dominance of this theme that would, in later centuries, grow into fully fledged articulations of national destiny through individual persecution and sacrifice. Focusing primarily on the works of radical Protestant William Fulke and Catholic historians Nicholas Harpsfield and Thomas Stapleton, the first part of the chapter shows how writers, from Catholic to reformed, were trying to explain the origin and purpose of miracles performed by martyrs and to define their role in the founding of English Christianity. While some scholars of Catholic reform, most famously John Bossy, emphasize a major rupture between medieval and Tridentine Catholicism, others, like Christopher Haigh, argue for continuity.8 Euan Cameron has highlighted how post-Reformation Catholicism did not totally deny miracles and the power of relics and images,

7 See, for example, Michael D. Bailey, Fearful Spirits, Reasoned Follies: The Boundaries of Superstition in Late Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013) and “A Late Medieval Crisis of Superstition?” Speculum 84, no. 3 (2009): 633–661. 8 John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society Under the Tudors (Clarendon Press, 1993). Beginning with John Bossy, scholars of the Catholic Reformation, not only in England but also on the Continent, have portrayed the movement as one focused on correcting popular superstition and advocating a more interior religiosity. On the other hand, beginning with Christopher Haigh and Eamon Duffy, scholars have tried to show the continuity between late medieval and post-Reformation Catholicism, focusing especially on the persistence of medieval beliefs and practices among the laity.

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but it did seek to get some of what they considered more far-fetched traditions under control.9 More recently, scholars like Alexandra Walsham have started moving beyond this debate that pits medieval superstition against a postReformation abandonment of tradition, recognizing the tensions as well as the convergence between Tridentine reform and medieval Catholic thought.10 Saints and martyrs were (and still are) a central part of many Catholic communities, and celebrating God’s providential workings through accounts of saintly miracles appeared in historical narratives long after the reformations. Examining narratives of the past in the works of Thomas Stapleton, Robert Persons, and the murals at the English College in Rome, the second half of this chapter focuses on Catholic intraconfessional debates about historical miracles in England’s Christian origin story. While early modern Catholics highlighted the miracles and supernatural activity of founder-saints in order to legitimize their role in the English mission, the miraculous also helped manufacture a sense of the universality of the Catholic Church. Finally, most of the recent work on early modern English conceptions of martyrdom and miracles has dealt with Tudor martyrs as opposed to reworkings of early medieval martyr stories.11 No doubt, contemporary martyrs were the popular figures of the day, but medieval saints remained popular as well, and they provided something that a contemporary martyr could not: a claim to the past. While this book focuses on the uses of founder-saints and martyrs, the contest over England’s miraculous history must be situated within the

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Euan Cameron, “For Reasoned Faith or Embattled Creed? Religion for the People in Early Modern Europe,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 8 (1998): 165–87. See Alexandra Walsham, “Miracles and the Counter-Reformation,” The Historical Journal 46, no. 4 (2003), 779–815; “Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation,” Historical Research 78 (2005): 288–310; and Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999). See also Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). For example, see David Anderson, Martyrs and Players in Early Modern England: Tragedy, Religion and Violence on Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014); Anne Dillon, Michelangelo and the English Martyrs (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012) and The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Alice Dailey, The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012); Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Gregory, Salvation at Stake; Susannah Brietz Monta, Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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debates surrounding contemporary martyrdom and the concomitant shifts that occurred in the vitae genre during the early modern period. In other words, what can the imagination of contemporary Tudor martyrs tell us about the imagination of England’s Christian converters, and how did it change the way the past was imagined and deployed? The final part of this chapter examines the uses of early English Christian martyrs in light of recent scholarship on the role of Tudor martyrdom, and it argues that the founders of English Christianity possessed a unique ability to represent a specific, historical person as well as an archetypal sufferer for Christ. Section four provides a case study that demonstrates the claims made in this chapter, shedding light on how ongoing rearticulations of England’s past heroes – though their depictions were conflicting and fluid – functioned to manufacture a sense of pride and strong national sentiments. Furthermore, these histories also shaped the shifting conceptions of the role of the supernatural in human affairs.

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An Unbelievable Origin Narrative

Many English reformers not only wanted to erase the historical connection to the Roman Catholic past, but also to sever the links to a “dark age of corruption” in which “lying signs and miracles” were commonly performed.12 Even in recent studies, English Protestant histories are characterized as downplaying supernatural activity while Catholic histories are seen to reaffirm it.13 This reading presupposes that leading Protestant apologists viewed scripture as the sole medium through which God communicates to the godly, as well as the only reliable way to argue for and validate doctrine and ecclesiology, while Catholics believed that supernatural activity was still a valid and valued way for the divine to speak. But a closer examination of English Protestant attitudes toward the miraculous in these stories reveals some complexities. First, rather than a denial of supernatural intervention, many reformers challenged the origins of the miracle, claiming that it emerged from the devil/Antichrist

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William Fulke, Stapleton’s Fortress Overthrown. A Rejoinder to Martiall’s Reply. A Discovery of the Dangerous Rock of the Popish Church Commended by Sanders, ed. Richard Gibbons (Cambridge, 1848), 5. Hereafter Fortress Overthrown. Fulke’s reply to Stapleton was originally published in London in 1580. See, for example, Parish, Monks, Miracles, and Magic, especially chapter 2; Cunningham, “A Little World without the World,” 205–212; Oates, “Elizabethan Histories of English Christian Origins,” 165–185; Heal, “Appropriating History: Catholic and Protestant Polemics and the National Past,” Huntington Library Quarterly 68 (2005): 109–132.

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rather than from God. Secondly, some Protestants denied that the miracles could authorize doctrine or liturgy or the correct church, but they did not necessarily eschew them altogether. As we saw with Bale and Foxe, for every attempt to repudiate certain hagiographical traditions, there were new legends in its place. God, after all, was still thought to work through certain objects or people for healing and other wonders. Furthermore, the positions the reformers took in the later decades of the sixteenth century drew on many medieval patterns as they worked to establish a distinctly English church. Thus, not all traditional elements were discarded – some were re-fashioned for new purposes.14 The idea that either a “reformed” culture immediately emerged or that the retainment of saints represented the survival of traditional beliefs sets up a false choice that oversimplifies the complexity of saints, signs and wonders. Belief in miracles and supernatural activity (whether saintly or demonic) persisted as both reformers and conservatives were attempting to work out the role of saintly miracles amidst these battles over the English Christian origin story. The attitudes of England’s historians toward miracles are better understood when placed against the backdrop of Continental developments. Recent studies have noted the popularity of martyrdom literature on the Continent, including descriptions and depictions of torture and suffering.15 In the Low Countries as well as France and Spain, Jesuits and seminary priests were reviving and reworking miracles to re-Catholicize formerly Protestant regions and to reinvigorate loyal Catholic ones.16 Willem Frijhoff, in describing the promotion of miracles in the minority Catholic community in Holland, puts it this way: “the miracle, by punishing sacrilege, defined and legitimized the group of real believers as such. Then in an attempt at reorganization, the accent was 14 15

16

See Alexandra Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, especially chapter 4. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, 1; Frijhoff, Embodied Belief, especially chapters 5 and 6. See also Robert Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Helen Parish and William G. Naphy, eds., Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); William A. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Sarah T. Nalle, God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500–1620 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). In addition to monographs, surveys of the Catholic reformation also highlight the negotiation and creative compromise that Catholic missionaries and reformers took regarding miracles rather than the previous emphasis on a rupture between medieval and Tridentine attitudes: see Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), especially chapter 5.

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put on the mediating saint, who united the community … and who identified the outlines of the socio-pastoral strategy.”17 Similarly, Alexandra Walsham has shown how priests sent back to England after 1574 harnessed ideas of supernatural intervention in their attempts to evangelize as well as defend their beliefs and practices against Protestant challenges.18 In fact, William Allen opened the English College at Douai in order to produce priests who would serve in England as soon as Catholicism was restored. In 1574, after he became convinced that Catholicism at home could not long survive without priests, Allen began to surreptitiously send his graduates to England, even though the government’s hostility had intensified.19 This is the context in which William Fulke published Fortress Overthrown, his 1579 response to Thomas Stapleton’s Fortresse of the Faith. As we saw in chapter two, Stapleton published his English translation of Bede’s ecclesiastical history in 1565. In the same year he published a treatise titled A Fortresse of the Faith, in which he attempted to establish the antiquity of Roman Catholicism in contrast to the novelty of Protestantism by using the works of the Church Fathers, in particular Bede. In both Fortresse of the Faith and his preface to Bede’s History, Stapleton highlighted and defended miracles, saints, signs, and visions. Even though we can see some elements of Tridentine tightening regarding aspects that could be labeled “superstitious,” Stapleton reaffirmed the miracles in Bede’s story. By the time Fulke published his response fourteen years later, the impact of the first waves of missionary priests from the Continent was just becoming visible – between 1574 and Elizabeth’s death, 600 priests had come in.20 By 1577 Elizabeth’s bishops were concerned by the steady influx of these seminary priests, and in 1581 a statute was passed making it treasonous to be reconciled to Rome and considerably raising the recusancy fine. Fulke was attempting to dismantle Stapleton’s fortress under the influence of this Catholic missionary effort as well as the fear it stirred up in many reformers, not to mention Elizabeth’s regime. A well-known theological controversialist and Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, Fulke spent time exposing what he saw as the errors of Roman Catholic doctrine and defending the Church of England against attacks

17 18 19

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Frijhoff, Embodied Belief, 136. Walsham, “Miracles and the Counter-Reformation.” See also Walsham’s Reformation of the Landscape, chapter 2. For more on this aspect of the missionary enterprise and the college in Douai, see Marvin R. O’Connell, Thomas Stapleton and the Counter Reformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964). See Haigh, English Reformations, 12.

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from English Catholics. Furthermore, part of Stapleton’s intention in writing Fortresse of the Faith was to respond to John Jewel, the heir of Thomas Cranmer who would later mentor William Fulke. Fulke saw it as his task to continue defending the faith from the papists in a similar style and method to that of Jewel. Fulke’s response to Stapleton exhaustively rebuts every charge, point by point. At the beginning of his piece, Fulke included a list of thirty-four “popish books, either answered or to be answered, which have been written in the English tongue from beyond the seas.”21 He ended up publishing answers to twenty-one of them. Fulke’s comprehensive response to Stapleton presents a variety of strategies for dealing with the recorded miracles in Bede’s Augustine narrative. First, he argues that the miracles recorded in Bede’s history were fake, and that the Saxons were dim-witted for believing in them in the first place. Even Bede, of whom Fulke generally speaks positively, is guilty of buying into the “false fables told him” and the “miracles feigned” in front of him. One prominent theme throughout this very long treatise is “the credulity of the former age,” i.e., the gullibility of the medieval English people.22 Second, and contradictory to his first objection, Fulke argues that supernatural activity was indeed present in the founding of the church by Augustine, but that the miraculous deeds were from the devil as opposed to “the Almighty.” Indeed, at the heart of his attack on Augustine, Fulke exclaims that Augustine came with “lying signs and miracles,” supernatural deeds which proved that he was a “forerunner of the antichrist.” Fulke therefore does appear to refer to them as real “wonders,” but they were performed by the devil. Finally, Fulke briefly argues that it is the Catholic historians, like Stapleton, who are creating the miracle stories, or embellishing the works of the ancient saints, “feigning false miracles upon [Augustine].”23 These three objections are examples of the variety of Protestant responses to medieval miracle traditions. While Fulke sometimes denies that the miracles ever took place, his emphasis at other times is on the demonic origin of the miracles. Far from ceasing to buy into the miraculous elements of human history, Fulke argues that the wonders emanate from a different supernatural source. Even more pertinent to the historical debate than the authenticity of the miracles was the purpose (or lack thereof) they served. Regardless of whether the miracles came from demonic forces, whether they were faked by the false

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Fulke, Fortress Overthrown, 1–2. Fulke, Fortress Overthrown, 13. Fulke, Fortress Overthrown, 5, 35.

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saints performing them, or whether they were blown out of proportion by the saint’s contemporary biographers, Fulke believes that they are not, or are no longer, a vehicle of divine communication. He explicitly rejects the use of miracles to legitimize the founding of the English Church, explaining that while Protestants believe in some miracles and visions, they would never “have [their] doctrine … credited one jot more for any such miracle.” In another passage, Fulke argues that miracles were dangerous because they may be used in place of scripture: “If [miraculous proof] were good, there would be small or no use of Scriptures at all.”24 Not only are miracles not required, but they are not even the best way to know you are on the right track: “The plain demonstration of the truth (which is to be found in the holy scriptures) is to be preferred before the consent of nations, authority of miracles, succession of Bishops, universality … and whatsoever be taught beside.”25 Like the Henrician evangelicals (and the reformers who came after) who argued that temporal history cannot justify spiritual belief and practice, Fulke argues that neither could the supernatural events recorded therein. However, although he explicitly rejected anything outside scripture as communication from God, Fulke later argued that spiritual vocation and exemplary lifestyle were signs from God of worthy leadership. He outlines the virtue and piety of continental reformers, explaining that Luther and others, “having an extraordinary calling from God to teach and reform the Church, need not to confirm their calling by miracles.”26 While he does mention the ways contemporary heroes of reform movements are proven authentic by their spiritual activity, he is careful to differentiate between “divine revelation” and “miracle.” For example, in responding to Stapleton’s examples of Protestants with signs and visions, Fulke denies that radical reformer Thomas Muntzer ever received visions, explaining how he, instead, merely experienced “spiritual revelation.”27 Watching Fulke parse out the specific role and definition of revelation, sign, and miracle provides an example of how these historical debates redefined the relationship between human and supernatural while retaining the power of supernatural authorization. The story of the foundations of Christianity in England necessarily questioned the ways in which God’s intervention into human affairs worked, but the divine hand discerned in the English past functioned to produce and maintain an English national identity and a special place over and against that of other nations. 24 25 26 27

Fulke, Fortress Overthrown, 77. 55. Fulke, Fortress Overthrown, 56. Fulke, Fortress Overthrown, 73–74. Fulke, Fortress Overthrown, 5.

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Fulke, like his medieval and early modern predecessors, generally acknowledged Bede as a reliable historian qua chronicler, but he thought Bede unwittingly bought into the ruse of the Roman Church by believing the signs and miracles of those early English saints, and he marked Augustine as the entrance of the antichrist into England. Stapleton, for his part, argues against those who take issue with the miraculous nature of Bede’s story yet remain reluctant to relinquish all claims to Bede’s narrative. Stapleton’s view on belief in miracles is similar to that of C.S. Lewis, who famously argued that if one accepts the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth must be a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord – cherry-picking which parts to buy into is not allowed.28 In the same way, Stapleton argues that, if you accept Bede’s history as reliable, Augustine and the founders of the English church were either devious fakers or pious saints, their miracles witnessing the Truth: “Such therefore as will think the miracles of this history here reported either incredible, unprofitable and such as might have been left out, truly either they must deny the author, or envy at God’s honor.”29 Situating the controversy between Stapleton and Fulke in an international context sheds light on why the miraculous became a sticking point in the interpretation of Bede’s history of the early English church. While, as we saw in chapters one and two, there were many possible responses to Bede’s Augustine narrative, most historians from across the confessional spectrum respected Bede as a historian and accepted at least some parts of his version of the English past. Stapleton’s translation of Bede, then, was among his least controversial works. William Fulke was one of the reformers to take issue with it, and because he uses a variety of responses to the miracles in Bede’s narrative, his answer serves as a microcosm of the variety of Protestant attitudes toward supernatural activity, saintly miracles, and their role in legitimizing the foundation of an English Church. As the example of Fulke shows, there was indeed an iconoclastic impulse that underpinned some Protestant readings of the founding of the English church, and the “hotter sort of Protestants,” especially, were highly suspicious of any divine communication outside of scripture. Indeed, reformers had remade the martyr from a miracle-working figure into a humble believer who demonstrated resilience of faith in the face of persecution.30 However, a closer 28 29 30

C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), pages 100–101. Thomas Stapleton, “Preface,” The History of the Church of Englande, Compiled by Venerable Bede, Englishman (1565), 6r. Hereafter Bede’s History. See Alice Dailey, The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012).

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look at the origin narrative in a few Protestant martyrologies reveals a more complex relationship and reluctance to completely let go of the medieval miracle tradition. For example, John Bale, one of the originators of the reformer’s historical strategy, dismissed traditional Catholic martyrs as false saints and heretics and instead constructed true and “authentic” martyrs by modeling their lives on Eusebius’s early Christian martyrs. Like the early Greco-Roman martyrs who actively embraced suffering and martyrdom by directly challenging state authority, Bale emphasized the exemplary nature of martyrs and their strength in the face of persecution.31 In contrast to the vitae of early martyrs, the medieval martyr story, as Alice Dailey has shown, was a representation of Jesus’ crucifixion: an innocent figure unjustly executed, who achieved transcendence through death. Miracles often occurred posthumously in relation to or association with their body or place of martyrdom.32 Bale rejected all those who had witnessed the Church founded by Augustine by claiming that they were representatives of the Antichrist who carried out his work using miracles to deceive.33 But even given this revisionism, Bale could not help but slip back to the medieval construction of the martyr as a reenactment of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. For example, in describing the death of contemporary Protestant martyr Anne Askew, Bale describes thunder and lightning at the moment of her death, and “these same tokens showed at Christ’s death confessed him to be the son of God” – a supernatural sign confirming her sanctity and authenticity.34 She was also presented as the apocalyptic “Woman Clothed in the Sun” in the woodcut frontispiece to Bale’s 1546 edition of her examination.35 Foxe, even more than Bale, included miraculous elements and stories of visions in his tales of proto-Protestant and Protestant martyrs. In fact, in his preface to Bede’s history Stapleton noted every page on which Foxe had described a miracle in his book of martyrs.36 Stapleton made several comparisons between the miracle stories of Bede and those of Protestants like Foxe and Bale, including visions, crosses appearing on bodies, and incorruptible 31 32 33 34 35

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See chapter one. Dailey, The English Martyr, chapter 1. John Bale, Askew (1546), “Preface,” 4. He claimed these stories were “much fuller of miracles than ever were Christ’s, as himself told us they should be so. Matthew 24.” Bale, Askew (1547), 69v. See also Dillon’s discussion of John Bale on Anne Askew in The Construction of Martyrdom, 29–32. Bale, Askew (1546). Margaret Aston and Elizabeth Ingram, “The Iconography of the Acts and Monuments,” in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), 67–142. Stapleton, “Preface,” Bede’s History, 9r.

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body parts of martyrs. For example, Stapleton offered as an example the story of Elizabeth Lawson, who was miraculously cured of her “falling sickness” the moment she was imprisoned during the reign of Mary Tudor. Or of Zwingli, whose heart remained undamaged after the rest of his body burned up.37 Nicholas Harpsfield, writing from prison at the same time as Stapleton, also challenged Foxe for using miraculous elements in his history in the face of the Protestant critique of miracles. Making a similar argument as William Fulke, Harpsfield accused Foxe of using these stories to deceive his more “simple” readers.38 In Harpsfield’s view, Foxe was putting “the Saints out of heaven in to Hell” in a disingenuous attempt to make a bunch of sectarians and heretics look like a unified heroic ancestry for a new, invented church.39 The center of both Harpsfield’s and Stapleton’s challenge to Foxe was that he continued to use the model of the miracle-working medieval saint while a frequent Protestant retort was that miracles were the signs of the Antichrist. In these cases, the same narrative features were presented and understood as either a confirmation of divine approval or as evidence of the corruption in the Church. Either way, the miraculous elements of history were upheld across the confessional divide in the sixteenth century – at least in some cases. Whether signs of God or proof of the devil at work, both uses of divine intervention functioned to authorize particular versions of the past and, ultimately, to manufacture national sentiment by constructing a line of English heroes specially chosen by God. Throughout his preface to Bede’s History, Stapleton criticizes reformers for hypocritically denying the miracles of certain ecclesiastical ancestors while believing others, especially those told by reformers like Bale and Foxe. After all, he writes, they are writing after the schism and thus “notoriously bent to one side.” Bede, however, is impartial and “without suspicion,” having no polemical reason to create false miracles: why deny the story of St. Oswald and his holy cross only to believe in, say, “[Hugh] Latimer’s heart blood when he suffered in Oxford?” Stapleton criticizes Foxe’s more improbable details and, like Harpsfield, accused him of trying to fool credulous people: “are there not also in that dunghill heaped a number of miserable miracles to set with the

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Stapleton, “Preface,” Bede’s History, 9r. Harpsfield, Dialogi Sex, Dialogue Five, chapter 25, 727–737; Patrick Collinson, “Truth, Lies, and Fiction in Sixteenth Century Hagiography,” in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric and Fiction, 1500–1800, ed. Donald Kelly and David Harris Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 37–68. Harpsfield, Dialogi Sex, Dialogue Six, chapter 38, 956–959; Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom, 67.

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glory of their stinking Martyrs?” Stapleton’s critique centered on the irony of Foxe’s use of miracles at a time when reformers were condemning the Catholic Church for their notion of the miraculous.40 What this debate shows, however, is that both conservatives and reformers were still including miracles in their histories, and both were suspicious of their employment. Even Fulke himself argued in his response to Stapleton that it is “popish slander” to deny that Protestants believe in miraculous events (though he denies the specific miracle stories of the early English founder-saints that Stapleton mentions in Fortress). In Reformation of the Landscape, Alexandra Walsham shows that the Protestant discourses of providence and science reveal a continued belief in prodigious or admonitory “miraculous” events, and she also provides many examples of countercurrents within Protestant culture that fostered a resacralization of the landscape.41 As we saw in chapter two, many reformers were more than willing to believe the magic-filled history of King Arthur. Tales of Giants, the wizard Merlin, Excalibur, and miraculous battlefield victories were taken seriously, and even championed, by many Protestant historians throughout the sixteenth century.42 Harpsfield noticed this irony and derided the miracles recorded in the Arthurian legends while defending those of the saints, pointing out that the “prodigious lies about Arthur” pleased Bale and Magdeburg Centuriators, who nevertheless believed that “those admirable and true histories of the Saints deserved nothing other than to be bashed.”43 Similarly, Howard Dobin shows in Merlin’s Disciples that political prophecy, astrology, and magic, though relegated to the margins, still played a significant role in the historical, literary, and theological imagination of the sixteenth century, especially in Elizabethan politics.44 Even among the most godly of English Protestants, the boundary between nature and supernature was still being worked out, and belief in prophecy, signs, wonders and magic still played significant roles in conversations about history as well as

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Stapleton, “Preface,” Bede’s History, 9r. Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 233–326. For example see John Curran, Roman Invasions: The British History, Protestant AntiRomanism, and the Historical Imagination in England, 1530–1660 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002); Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008); Felicity Heal, “Appropriating History,” Huntington Library Quarterly 68, no. 1–2 (2005): 109–132; Cunningham, “A Little World without the World.” See also Howard Dobin, Merlin’s Disciples: Prophecy, Poetry, and Power in Renaissance England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). Harpsfield, Dialogi Sex, Dialogue 5, Book 19, 498: “apud quos admirandae sed verae Sanctorum historiae nihil aliud quam fustuarium meruerunt.” Dobin, Merlin’s Disciples (Stanford, 1990).

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contemporary politics. The central issue, then, was not the possibility of divine intervention, but rather what it authorized. In the battle for control of the English past, both Catholics and Protestants reworked medieval history through the lives of specifically selected foundersaints and martyrs. As we saw with John Bale, medieval “heretics” from the monks of Bangor to John Wycliffe now made up a heroic ancestry for English reformers. Similarly, heroes like Augustine of Canterbury, Alban, Boniface, and virgins like Winefride and Ursula became important figures in the Catholic imagination of England. But it was the constant retelling and reworking of the stories of all of these figures, even in polemical portrayals, that contributed to the production of a strong national identity. For post-Reformation Catholic historians who stayed at home, renewing historical links with local martyrs became a priority. While Protestant historians worked to denigrate aspects of particular narratives of the medieval past, Catholics like Harpsfield were rehabilitating those founding figures and emphasizing the connections to present circumstances. The medieval martyr story, as discussed above, featured a righteous and blameless figure – proven so by miracles and/or visions – who dies yet transcends this death either by somehow surpassing bodily limits either during or after martyrdom. In his Historia Ecclesiastica Anglicana, Harpsfield describes at length the miracle performed by the earliest English martyr, Alban, who upon being led to his death by the soldiers of a pagan king, caused a spring to gush forth so that the soldiers would not die of thirst. A fiery column appeared from his tomb that night, confirming that the miracle had come from God through Alban.45 Harpsfield dedicates his entire ninth chapter to recounting the miracles that occurred after Alban’s death at his “sacred monument” and in the presence of his relics. He tells of a man named Hugo, who with a foul mouth had derided Alban and his proclaimed holiness, so for the rest of his life he produced excrement not from its “normal place” but through his blasphemous mouth. Harpsfield includes another story of a paralyzed woman who was healed in the temple of the martyr, and he explains how the dust found on the floor helped cure illness, blindness, deafness. Even “many who were entirely dead were called back to life by God through the martyr’s intercession.”46 This legend, complete with posthumous miracles, both reflects and renews the medieval Catholic tradition of miracles and wonders.

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Harpsfield, Historia Ecclesiastica Anglicana, “Sex Prima Saecula,” Caput VIII, 13. Harpsfield, Historia Ecclesiastica Anglicana, “Sex Prima Saecula,” Caput IX, 14: “multi omnino mortui ad vitam a Deo, Martyris patrocinio revocati sunt.”

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Just as in the lives of these early martyrs, Harpsfield continued to record these types of miracles even after the entrance of Augustine. In his discussion of the spread of English Christianity, Harpsfield devotes a chapter to King Oswald who, with the help of Aiden, a bishop from Scotland, continued to convert the people of Northumbria to Christianity. After being killed on the battlefield in the middle of prayer at the hands of the Mercians, the site of Oswald’s martyrdom became a place of miraculous healing. In the place where he was killed, people and animals often made remedies against sickness “out of the dirt taken from there.” Harpsfield reports that a girl was afflicted with paralysis and was carried there on a wagon, but after she had spent the night there, she returned home by foot, cured.47 Oswald’s body parts remained incorruptible: his hand, recovered from the battlefield, never dried up. In another case, a priest took a chip taken from the stake that impaled Oswald’s head, dipped it in water, and offered a drink to a man on his deathbed; that man “shook off both death and his illness,” and “changed his life, which previously he had spent licentiously.” The recovered man “lived blamelessly forever afterwards, attributing the salvation of both body and soul to God and then the blessed martyr.”48 Interestingly, Harpsfield notes that salvation needs to be attributed first to God, and then to the martyr – this could be an indication that he was receptive to the Protestant critique of Catholic saints taking God’s place. At the same time, these types of stories contain the hallmarks of the medieval martyr tradition that Harpsfield purposefully rehearses and emphasizes in his history, communicating to his audience that there is no need to censor the English past, which instead can and should be celebrated. Even though Catholics had the visible history of the medieval Church on their side, they nevertheless reworked and emphasized the signs and wonders of saints to bolster the significance of the early English Church, showing its implications not only for the history of England but also for the history of the universal Catholic Church. For example, the legend of Saint Boniface was included in the histories of Nicholas Harpsfield and Robert Persons as well as hagiographies and martyrologies by Nicholas Roscarrock and John Wilson. Boniface, the eighth-century missionary who spread Christianity in southwest England and throughout the Frankish empire, was reframed by early modern Catholic historians and hagiographers to highlight the international reach of

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Harpsfield, Historia Ecclesiastica Anglicana, “Septimum Saeculum,” Caput XXVI, 91: “ex pulvere ibidem desumpto.” Harpsfield, Historia Ecclesiastica Anglicana, “Septimum Saeculum,” Caput XXVI, 91: “morbum mortemque ille depulit; & emendata vita, quam licentiose prius duxerat, inculpatissime postea vixit, corporis animaeque salutem post Deum beato Martyri tribuens.”

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his missionary activities. Detailed accounts include his life after England, in which Boniface went abroad to spread the gospel in Frisia and, later, Hesse, where his most famous miracle occurred. With divine assistance he felled “Jupiter’s oak,” sacred to the pagans, whose gods were unable to save it. Many were converted as a result of this wonder, and he used the lumber to build a chapel dedicated to St. Peter.49 Catholic historians recount how he later went on to help reform the Church in France before eventually moving back to Frisia, where he underwent martyrdom at the hands of pagans. Early modern reformers, by contrast, heavily criticized Boniface: John Bale, for instance, accused him of oppressing innocent Christians who were “observing a sincere doctrine.”50 In rehabilitating this medieval converter-saint and martyr in the face of Protestant challengers, early modern Catholic historians found a useful example for a sixteenth-century context: Boniface represents the spread of Christianity among Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century as well as England’s role in the Christianization of Europe in the eighth century. For them, Boniface’s recorded miraculous deeds confirm divine approval of the Roman Catholic Church, and he helped to unify the European Catholic Church. In this way, miracle stories like that of Boniface were useful in building a historical foundation for sixteenth-century Catholics (appearing in histories and hagiographies alike, both at home and abroad), and connecting the English Church to the Continent and to broader conceptions of Christendom. Not all of the miracles had to be performed by the saint, sometimes signs and visions were given to the saint. For example, after detailing the miracle Boniface performs on the oak tree, Harpsfield notes that after Boniface had harshly reproached certain men “proving to be pseudo-Christians” in Thuringia, “the Archangel Michael presented himself to his sight and greatly comforted [Boniface].” In addition to having his spirit comforted, Boniface received some comfort for his body, for despite the “absolute lack of food

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Early modern vitae include Nicholas Harpsfield, Historia Ecclesiastica Anglicana, “Octavum Saeculum,” Caput III and Dialogi Sex contra Summi Pontificatus, monasticae vitae, sanctorum, sacrarum imaginum oppugnatores, et pseudomartyres (Antwerp, 1566), Dialogue Five, chapter 19; Robert Persons, Three Conversions, II, 44; Nicholas Roscarrock, Lives of the Saints, CUL MS Add. 3041, 386v; John Wilson, The English Martyrologe, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970),148; Giovanni Battista de Cavalleriis in Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea (Rome, n.d. 1584); Christopher Brower, Fuldensium antiquitatum libri III (Antwerp, 1612); Cesare Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici: accessit Baronii supplementum chronologicum ad Christi annum 1665. Vol II. (Variquet, 1666), 719, 753. Most of these early modern lives drawing on the early medieval Vita Bonifatii auctore Willibaldi. Harpsfield, Dialogi Sex, Dialogue Five, chapter 19, 690.

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a bird unexpectedly brought down to him a fish.”51 This part of Boniface’s story was particularly useful for Catholic historians, as it countered the Protestant attack painting Boniface as a persecutor of innocent believers at the behest of the corrupt pope. In this version, the miracles and the apparition of Michael confirm the righteousness of Boniface’s actions as well as the veracity of the Catholic Church, condemning non-Catholic “pseudo-Christians” in the process. Because of Boniface’s role in English as well as European Catholic history, Harpsfield takes advantage of the ways in which Boniface’s miracles and signs provide a strong link in the historic chain as well as a link between the English Church and the universal Catholic tradition. Harpsfield defends belief in the miraculous throughout his works. In his Dialogues, Harpsfield explicitly argues against those who deny the miracles of Augustine and those who brought Christianity to England. He responds to an imaginary interlocutor who is wary of being either ignorant or gullible by believing in the miracles of Augustine. Harpsfield explains that, while reading history with a critical eye is good practice, it is foolish to doubt authentic signs from God: When you read your authorities, you should certainly approach them with caution from the start, which you do not need in matters of faith or in histories of approved fathers that have never yet been contradicted. This circumspection is necessary for the former, but preposterous and dangerous for the latter. It seems to me that you are experiencing what happens to those who misuse their money and buy harmful and useless things instead of healthy and necessary things; since you have put all your faith into the most inane authorities, you do not have enough of it left for the true narrative of the highest and most respected deeds.52 Similarly, Stapleton’s preface to Bede’s history is almost entirely dedicated to the usefulness and celebration of the miraculous in the founding of the Eng51

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Harpsfield, Historia Ecclesiastica Anglicana, “Octavum Saeculum,” Caput III, 119: “Michael Archangelus se illi visendum praebuit, valdeque hominem consolatus est. Quo etiam loci in summa cibi inopia, avis quaedam pisci illi insperato detulit.” Harpsfield, Dialogi Sex, Dialogue 5, chapter 18, 493–94: “In doctoribus certe tuis legendis illa cautio cum primis tenenda est, non in rebus fidei aut patrum probatorum historiis nunquam hactenus controversis. Illic enim necessaria, hic praepostera est ista omnis provisio. Quare quemadmodum qui pecunia sua ad res noxias & minus utiles parandas abutuntur, ea fere ad res salutares & necessarias indigent; ita certe tibi accidisse video; ut cum fidem tuam totam vanissimis doctoribus adstrinxeris, in optimis & spectatissimis caussis, verae narrationis apud te fides infirmetur.”

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lish Church. Stapleton argued that all Church historians including Eusebius, Theodoret, and Evagrius “intermingle miracles in the lives of holy men and lights of Christ’s church,” so why should the English chronicler Bede be any different?53 The English, too, should celebrate “the holy men” and “virgins” with their signs and wonders, for “the same grace of god which wrought in the other, hath also wrought in these holy men, all such things as they did.”54 The “manifold miracles and particular lives of holy men” were not only expected, but necessary in any historical account of the church.55 Indeed, the continuation of miracles since the establishment of the church was a divine sign that England’s faithfulness had not been “traded up in superstitions” despite the recent schism, as some had managed to retain “true and right Christianity no less than the first six hundred years, and immediate succession of the Apostles.”56 Thus, the use of miraculous hagiography in history writing continued throughout the sixteenth century and beyond. Shortly after Elizabeth’s death, the publication of John Wilson’s English Martyrologe incorporated references to miraculous events that linked the ancient and medieval saints of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland with their natural surroundings.57 Even in the construction of the contemporary martyr, English Catholic martyrologists continued to employ the supernatural and miraculous.58 While there were adjustments to the genre (which will be taken up in the rest of this chapter), sixteenth-century accounts of the arrival of Christianity in England not only continued to use hagiographies to construct a lineage for their tradition, but also to invoke the divine to legitimize their version of these human histories. Stories of martyrs mark and honor the community commemorating them, and the miraculous nature of the stories of the saints had been a crucial part

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Stapleton, “Preface,” Bede’s History, 5v. Stapleton, “Preface,” Bede’s History, 7r. Stapleton, “Preface,” Bede’s History, 6r. Stapleton, “Dedication,” Bede’s History, *3v. John Wilson, The English martyrologe conteyning a summary of the lives of the glorious and renowned saintes of the three kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland (St Omer, 1608). Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 193. Wilson’s martyrology will be addressed more fully in chapter 4. For example, John Genings, The life and death of Mr Edmund Geninges Priest (St Omer, 1614). See Dailey, The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution, chapter 4; though Dailey does not explore this point in her chapter, she does show that in the Geninges story the English Catholic martyrologists were using miracles in ways that they did not with previous martyrs like Margaret Clitherow.

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of devotional communities since the early days of the Christianity. While the miraculous had not been eliminated from England’s Christian origin story, it did undergo reconsideration and refashioning across the confessional spectrum. Indeed, many reformers argued that the age of miracles was over by the time Augustine brought Roman Catholicism to England. The Henrician Bishop John Hooper argued early on that Christ’s divine authority was established by his miracles, so there was no need for further miracles in the divine ordering of things.59 Thus, when Bale began constructing a lineage for the reformers, he made sure to note that their martyr status was marked by “their fulfilling of the Gospel criterion that Christ looketh for none other miracle, but only that they persevere faithful to the end.”60 While necessary in the first phase of Christian history, reformers argued, miracles had no place in the contemporary church.61 During the second half of the sixteenth century, when the Catholic reform movement dispatched by Allen and Stapleton was in full swing, this viewpoint became more entrenched among England’s leading apologists, as it was closely linked with the Church of England’s critique of Catholic attempts to confirm contentious doctrines and to convert its members through the appeal of miracles. Despite its utility in combating the Catholic historical narrative, however, some Protestant assertions that miracles had ceased either with Christ, at the end of the Apostolic Age, or during the first few centuries of Christianity was never a very firm or reliable doctrine because it lacked scriptural support, textual clarity from the early Church Fathers, and consensus among reformers. Even the “godly” might have trouble claiming that all miracles performed during the Middle Ages were either fictitious or demonic. There was, however, one passage in Bede’s history that reformers loved to use in challenging the validity of Augustine’s miracles specifically. In a letter purportedly written to Augustine in 601, Gregory the Great “exhorts Augustine not to incur the danger of being elated” by his miracles.62 Many Protestants, including Bale and the Magdeburg Centuriators, used this bit of Bede’s text to argue that even the pope recognized that Augustine was performing false miracles to deceive the English people. Harpsfield addresses this explicitly in

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John Hooper, Confession of Faith (London, 1550), 62. Bale, Askew (1546), “Preface,” 5. However, as we saw above, Bale did not always escape the traditional trope of the medieval martyr, and his successor John Foxe certainly did not, giving ammunition to Harpsfield, Stapleton, and later Persons. Alister E. McGrath, Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 59–60. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, eds. Judith McClure and Roger Collins, Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Book I, chapter 31, 58.

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his Dialogues, walking his audience through a close reading of the full chapter of Bede’s text: Listen truthfully as to whether those miracles of Augustine cause any suspicion in Gregory’s eyes: ‘I know, dearest brother, that the Almighty God through your love has shown great miracles to his elected people’ … [Gregory] also commended [Augustine’s miracles] in a letter to Eulogius, Patriarch of Alexandria, in which he showed that the English people, who until that time had remained faithless and worshiped wood and stones, were initiated in Christ thanks to Augustine and his miracles.63 Harpsfield goes on to chastise those Protestants who try to twist this chapter to fit their narrative, which he thought was not only disingenuous and heretical, but bad scholarship: “nothing is more insincere, corrupt, and polluted than your Magdeburgians. Perhaps those slanders against Augustine, which they use to worship Bale just like that other idol Baal, will surpass the others in atrocity and arrogance.”64 Harpsfield mentions Augustine’s miracles again, only briefly, in his Historia Ecclesiastica, explaining that the incredible works and miracles performed by Augustine were helping to convert the Angles, and so Augustine began “circulating such stories that they did not seem inferior even to the wonderful actions of the Apostles.” As a precaution, Pope Gregory “prudently warned him not to be too elated in his soul but rather to behave humbly,” since the miracles, after all, were being manifested “not for his sake but rather in order to convert and bring the rough people of the Angles to God.”65

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Harpsfield, Dialogi Sex, Dialogue 5, chapter 18, 494: “Audi vero an ista Augustini miracula suspicione aliqua apud Gregorium laborent. Scio, inquit, frater carissime quia omnipotens Deus per dilectionem tuam in gentem, qua eligi voluit, magna miracula ostendit. Ac ad finem epistolae exclamat, ad horum miraculorum & divinae erga Anglos bonitatis magnitudinem: Gloria in excelsis Deo, & in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis. De quibus Alexandriam usque ad Patriarcham Eulogium litteras misit: in quibus ostendit gentem Anglorum, quae ad ea tempora in cultu lignorum & lapidum perfida remanserat, per Augustinum & socios Christo initiatam.” Harpsfield, Dialogi Sex, Dialogue 5, chapter 18, 494: “Magdeburgensibus tuis nihil esse insincerius, corruptius, inquinatius; nescio tamen an non istae contra Augustinum calumniae, in quibus Balaeum, tanquam alterum idolum Baal, colunt, reliquas atrocitate atque impudentia sint superaturae.” Harpsfield, Historia Ecclesiastica Anglicana, “Septimum Saeculum,” Caput VI, 58: “Quare Gregorius prudenter admonuit ne animo esset elatior, sed submissius se gereret, quod huiusmodi signa, non ipsius gratia, sed ad alliciendum Deoque acquirendum rudem Anglorum populum, admirabiliter repraesentarentur.”

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Thus, dealing with Protestant challenges prompted Catholics to reconsider the miracles of the saints and martyrs and, even though they ended up reinforcing the miraculous elements, to put together a more systematic statement on the purpose of those miracles. Indeed, we can see Harpsfield reconsidering the usefulness of miracles in his critique of Foxe. In accusing Foxe of inventing miracles for his own martyrs in order to legitimize an innovated history, Harpsfield recognizes the difficulty in knowing where miracles come from and if they are genuine.66 Indeed, Foxe himself could not provide an explanation for why some miracles were acceptable and others were not. In explaining why he had dismissed the traditional miracles of Augustine and the early English martyrs, Foxe basically says that he relies on his gut, explaining that they “seem more legend-like than truth-like.”67 This makes miracles a less useful or reliable means to prove legitimacy, even for those who use and defend them. Responding to reformers like Bale, Jewel, and especially Foxe was just a part, rather than the primary intention, of the Catholic rethinking of saintly miracles. Late medieval Christianity contained many aspects of ceremonialism that were criticized both before, during, and after the Council of Trent. Humanists in the fifteenth century had cleaned up local traditions and saints’ lives and dealt with folk and “pagan” elements. The martyrs constructed in the texts of the Henrician and Edwardian periods already reflect a move toward a humanist “man of virtue.” Indeed, the lack of authorizing miracles in the vitae is a notable shift.68 While, as we saw above, many magical aspects of traditional hagiography remained, especially when discussing early Christian and medieval saints, many studies have rightly shown how contemporary Protestant and Catholic martyrs were constructed more as humanist exempla of heroic behavior rather than the miracle-working medieval saint.69 For example, in an extensive analysis of The Life and Death of Sr. Thomas More (1566), Anne Dillon shows how Harpsfield thoughtfully constructed More in continuity with the medieval saintly tradition, but also as a humanist man of virtue intended specifically as an exemplar for the laity. She argues that this conspic-

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Harpsfield, Dialogi Sex, Dialogue 5, chapter 25, 532–535. A&M, Book 1, 111. John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Gregory, Salvation at Stake, chapter 2. Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History, 117–134; Dailey, The English Martyr, chapter 1; Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom, chapter 1; Gregory, Salvation at Stake, chapter 5.

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uous and purposeful lack of miracles in his vita signals the changing nature of the Catholic martyr.70 This shift to depicting the saint as a more salutary example influenced how early modern Catholic martyrologists framed the lives of medieval saints as well. For example, in his long preface to the reader before his Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, Harpsfield explains that his main purpose in writing was to inspire lazy Catholics to do good deeds and live better lives, and he assumes that the Protestant focus on scripture alone has influenced both reformed and conservatives to slack on their Christian living. Since “they depend more upon words than on deeds,” it is not surprising that they could consider it more useful “to cultivate one’s tongue than one’s heart.”71 Because of this, he explains, his history made up of saints and their holy ways of living is not only necessary, but vital because it will “sharpen us [Catholics] and others towards a more keen emulation of pious works … let us live our lives more exactly and meticulously than we do today.”72 While he includes many miracles of saints both preand post-seventh century, as noted above, Harpsfield is careful to always foreground their “illustrious piety” in a more emphatic way than Bede had. Even in his section on Augustine, Harpsfield dedicates more time to emphasizing Augustine’s exemplary lifestyle – living an Apostolic life “content with only what was necessary to survive,” focusing on vigils, fasts, and prayers – rather than describing his miracles.73 So while his history, in some ways, follows the medieval martyr formula, he adds details that make medieval figures look like the humanist exemplar. Even though shifts in hagiographic writing had been occurring already (and had always occurred over time), sixteenth-century Catholicism included

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Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom, 36–52. Harpsfield, Historia Ecclesiastica Anglicana, “Praefatio,” v: “Iam quae maturiore & constantiore iudicio, & non nisi ex probatis beneque excussis testimoniis (quorum, sit Superis gratia, magna est copia) perscripta sunt, ab eorum tamen lectione multi nimis aversos, atque abhorrentes animos, nescio satis qua ex causa, habent: nonnulli certe non ex alia magis, quam quod plus a verbis quam a rebus pendeant, & antiquius ducant linguam, quam pectus formare & excolere.” Harpsfield, Historia Ecclesiastica Anglicana, “Praefatio,” iv: “Neque hic nobis perniciose blandiamur, ut existimemus aliter nobis caelestis regni aditum patere posse, quam si non tam exacte exquisiteque per omnia, ut illi; exactius tamen forte multo atque exquisitius; quam hodie apud nos sit, apud quos omnis fere severioris vitae cura iacet, vitam traducamus.” Harpsfield, Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica, “Septimum Saeculum,” Caput VI, 58: “Ingressus civitatem Apostolorum plane vitam aemulatus est; vigiliis, ieiuniis, orationibus totus intendere, assidue Evangelii praedicationi vacare, necessariis ad vitam contentus, cetera flocci facere.”

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attempts to get control of the more fanciful beliefs and practices of the laity.74 The lack of canonization and the decline of famous shrines in the middle decades of the sixteenth century can be read as evidence of this caution. The tension between these traditional devotions and post-Tridentine caution translated into tensions between periphery and center, or between local practice and centralized authority.75 A further expression of the attempt to rid medieval vitae of fanciful aspects was the Acta Sanctorum project of the seventeenth century, which sought authoritative testimony for their historical biographies.76 While the Council of Trent upheld devotion to saints, including the celebration of their miracles and veneration of relics, saints were to be seen as “salutary examples” so that the faithful “may fashion their own lives and conduct in imitation of the saints and be moved to adore and love God and cultivate piety.”77 In other words, Church leadership shifted focus toward exemplary virtue. The Congregation of Sacred Rites and Ceremonies was created in 1588 to supervise the process of canonization, an attempt to regulate local traditions. On the other hand, Euan Cameron and Alexandra Walsham have shown that this anxiety over miracles was happening alongside “a lively reassertion of the Church of Rome as a repository of numinous power.”78 Walsham notes how the cults that developed around figures like Ignatius Loyola and Philip Neri were encouraged by the papal and episcopal hierarchy even before their beatification, and Cardinal Robert Bellarmine even declared that visible signs and wonders were necessary proof of the True Church and confirmation of any mission it launched.79 Lucy Wooding emphasizes the timing

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See Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History; Ditchfield’s analysis of religious culture on the Italian peninsula details how parish priests went about “cleaning up” their local hagiographies. See also his broader “Thinking with Saints: Sanctity and Society in the Early Modern World,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 3 (2009): 552–584 in which he describes the deployment of historical research in the justification of local, regional, and national cults in the faceoff the regularization of liturgy after Trent. See Peter Burke, “How to Become a Counter-Reformation Saint,” in Kaspar von Greyerz, ed., Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (London: German Historical Institute, 1984), 45–55. R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially chapter 13. See Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History, chapter 4. The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, ed. and trans. H.J. Schreoder (Illinois, 1978), 216. See also the endorsement of these practices in the Jesuit “Rules for thinking with the Church,” in The Catholic Reformation: Savonarola to Ignatius Loyola, ed. John C. Olin (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992). Walsham, “Miracles and the Counter-Reformation,” 786. Robert Bellarmine, Disputationes … de Controversiis Christianae Fidei (Ingolstadt, 1590–1593), bk 4, ch. 14, n. 11 (cols. 1347–54).

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of these sentiments as well, arguing that an initial reactionary restraint gave way to a vigorous re-embracing of local traditions and miraculous narratives.80 Indeed, missionary priests encouraged some of these practices associated with saints and miracles, using the power of healings and visions in order to revive and maintain Catholic communities.81 While the tension between the fear of superstition and the reaffirmation of the miraculous was not new, it meant that post-Reformation Catholic writers had to walk a thin line regarding saints and wonders and their role in historical narrative. This Tridentine tightrope can be seen in Stapleton’s history, as he makes sure to correct some of the more obvious “follies” in the popular version of Bede’s vita. After his dedication and preface, just before the translation begins, Stapleton includes a short biography of Bede himself, praising Bede as both saint and scholar but editing out certain “legendary” elements of his life. According to one tale, for example, Bede’s grave included an epitaph written by an angel; in another, a blind Bede, thinking he was in church, preached to a pile of stones that, so moved by the sermon, cried out, “Amen, venerable Bede.” Both stories are discounted as fanciful by Stapleton, who says that any man who believes such nonsense is “deceived.”82 Persons, writing a few decades later than Harpsfield and Stapleton, was even stricter regarding the use and validity of miracles in the lives of martyrs. In a discussion regarding the account of the execution of Everard Haunse in 1581, Persons argues against including any miracles, especially the story of Haunse’s heart being thrown into the fire and leaping back out: “whether it were natural or miraculous, no great matter for we need no miracles to try Martyrs.”83 While Stapleton’s treatment of miracles, and especially of Bede as saint, demonstrates this balance in the historical work of scholars, the case study of Winefride’s Well below will demonstrate the ways in which this negotiation played out in missionary efforts and devotional material. Saints and martyrs, then, were still useful and effective tools in the construction of a historical lineage across the confessional divide, but a rethinking 80 81 82 83

Lucy Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 114–120. See Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism; Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History; Walsham, “Miracles and the Counter-Reformation.” Stapleton, “The Life of S. Bede,” Bede’s History, 10v-11r. Robert Persons, The copie of a double letter sent by an Englishe gentilmen from beyond the seas, to his friend in London, containing the true advises of the cause, and maer of the death, of one Richard Atkins, executed by fire in Rome, the second of August 1581 (Rheims, 1581), quotation at 5; quoted in P.J. Holmes, “Robert Persons and ‘The Copie of a Double Letter,’ 1581,” Recusant History 15 (1980–1981): 145–147.

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of the validity and necessity of supernatural signs and wonders led Catholic authors to treat miracle stories more cautiously and sometimes, in the case of contemporary martyrs, to avoid them altogether. But older saints, removed by time and lacking a host of contemporary detractors (comparatively), did not necessarily receive the same treatment as contemporary martyrs, making the early founder-saints useful rhetorical tools in constructions of a sacred, perhaps even specially chosen, English past.

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Reframing Miracles: from Conversion to Confirmation

The intra- and inter-confessional debates surrounding the miracle stories of martyrs confirmed the usefulness of the past in establishing strong national sentiments. The overall effect of criticisms toward a hagiography filled with signs and wonders did not necessarily undermine miracles, but instead made them a prominent part of the discussion surrounding the founding of the English church. Although addressed by Thomas More and Nicholas Harpsfield, the critiques of English reformer John Jewel prompted Stapleton to spend his entire preface to Bede’s history composing a clear position for postReformation Catholics regarding the purpose, usefulness, and validity of miracles. In his 1529 Dialogue Concerning Heresies, Thomas More defended miracles in the face of reformers by rehearsing the argument of Augustine of Hippo that miracles were a witness to the truth. In De Civitate Dei, Augustine had taught that, in the early days of Christianity, God performed miracles through the saints in order to prove that the message they stood for was true: in a time when pagans were converting to the new faith, people needed signs of certainty. Miracles, More explained, were signs from God confirming true martyrs and thus guiding believers to correct belief and practice, and these were sorely lacking in the history of the reformers.84 More also warned, just as Bale, Fulke, Harpsfield, and Persons did, that the false martyr would perform miracles through the power of the Antichrist (based on Matthew 24:24), and thus it had become more difficult to rely on miracles as evidence or proof. Miracles were not as useful for marking a true martyr or a true church because they might be “of the devil’s martyrs.”85 Nevertheless, More’s employment of 84

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Thomas More, “A Dialogue Concerning Heresies,” The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 6, eds. T. Lawlor, G. Marc’hadour and R. Marius (New Haven, 1981), Part I, 421–2, quote on 421. More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, 423.

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Augustine of Hippo not only allows him to defend historical miracles, but also to argue that they necessarily had to be performed by the saints of the past in order to serve their purpose of validation. God had used miracles, signs, and wonders to confirm the planting of a new church, but since Europe was already converted, they should not be relied on any longer as proof or validation.86 By the reign of Elizabeth, new martyrs had been created under four different Tudor monarchs with four different religious settlements. In 1565, after almost four decades of the ongoing pseudomartyr debate, Stapleton once again paraphrases the argument of Augustine of Hippo in his defense of this kind of supernatural intervention. But this time the context prompts Stapleton to elucidate the role of saintly miracles even further. Like More, he emphasizes that miracles were signs given by God to aid in the process of conversion, and, in this respect, the conversion of the English people was no exception: At the planting of a faith, miracles are wrought of God by the hands of his faithful for more evidence thereof. Good life, in such as newly receiving the faith, is more fervent. Visions and working of miracles accompany those as live in such fervent goodness and perfection. Nay rather it is no small argument for the confirmation of our Catholic faith, planted among us Englishmen, that at the planting thereof such miracles were wrought.87 But in addition to legitimizing the faith and proving its veracity, miracles also had the added benefit of being extremely impressive: it was the sheer and “mighty power of miracles” through which God “draweth the unbelievers to the knowledge of him.”88 Stapleton draws on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians as well as the works of Theodoret and Ambrose to support this point, explaining that faith was to be above reason.89 Furthermore, Stapleton argues, miracles-as-conversion-tools are especially necessary in places where there are not very many Christians – which was the case in early medieval England –

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For more on the ability to discern and its implications concerning the relationship between authority and religious experience, see Jan Machielsen, “Heretical Saints and Textual Discernment: The Polemical Origins of the Acta Sanctorum” in Angels of Light? Sanctity and the Discernment of Spirits in the Early Modern Period, eds., Clare Copeland and Johannes Machielsen (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 103–142. Stapleton, “Preface,” Bede’s History, 4v. Stapleton, Fortresse, 5r. Stapleton, “Preface,” Bede’s History, 8v.

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“because faith leaneth upon authority and authority is strong in a multitude.” Though Christianity had reached the island before, and though there were a few practicing Christians around (King Ethelbert’s wife, Bertha, for instance), the Anglo-Saxons had not been converted, and therefore the miracles were quite necessary in order for just a few missionaries to draw “whole countries to the faith.”90 Unique among the historians considered in this chapter, Stapleton explicitly recognizes the dependence of “belief” on community, acknowledging the social foundation of meaning and its authorization. In addition to conversion, Stapleton argues that miracles served to confirm the righteousness of the English church from the time of Augustine to the present day, despite the “pretended faith” of the Protestants who had recently come upon it. The continued performance of miracles proved that the faith that had spanned centuries “could not possibly be a corrupted faith” but instead was the “true and right Christianity.”91 Stapleton explains that miraculous events can bestow authority upon certain doctrines, providing divine confirmation of certain beliefs and practices, which is crucial in the early days of a church. This aspect of proof-by-miracle is especially important in the founding of English Christianity because of the controversy surrounding the relationship between Roman and British Christianity. In his own preface, Stapleton describes the episode in which Augustine of Canterbury called the Britons to a conference in order to work out their differences of doctrine and tradition. He recounts how they each attempted to perform a miracle to confirm their version of Christianity, but while the British bishops failed, Augustine restored sight to a blind man, proving that Catholicism was the true faith. As we saw in the previous chapters, many Protestants asserted that they were the heirs of these British Christians, tracing their lineage to a time before Roman Catholicism invaded and corrupted true Christianity with its saints and superstitions. In describing this episode, Stapleton uses this claim to his advantage: “let Protestants follow their forefathers, old cursed heretics, let them scoff at the miracles done” in proof of the truth, just like the Arian Christians had done.92 Harpsfield makes a similar move in his Dialogues, where he explains to his interlocutor that contemporary Protestants are “not able to bear

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Stapleton, Fortresse, 3r. He takes this opportunity to take another jab at the Britons in favor of the “English” by reminding readers that the Saxons had not been converted because the Britons did not even try to share the gospel, and even if they had they were practicing the wrong version of Christianity anyway. Stapleton, “Dedication,” Bede’s History, 3v. Stapleton, “Preface,” Bede’s History, 8v; Stapleton also highlights the story in his translation of Bede on page 49v.

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the light of miracles” because they confirm Catholic belief and practice.93 In other words, miracles serve as divine means to communicate God’s truth to his followers, and by denying them Bale and the Centuriators are indeed in line with the errant quasi-Christians they claim as benefactors. Finally, Stapleton uses this discussion on miracles to shed light on the nature of the English mission. Like most of his reformed as well as conservative contemporaries, Stapleton was convinced that historical miracles were necessary in a way that contemporary miracles no longer were; not only could they now be used by Protestants to deceive, but there was no longer a need to confirm doctrine or convert people to the faith, as this had already been done centuries beforehand. Catholics abroad argued that England was still a Catholic country under a heretical regime, thus their missionary enterprise was not meant to convert heretics, but rather to offer support to Catholics and reconcile “schismatics.”94 English people needed to “return to the faith” which had already existed, not be converted to a new one.95 Therefore, one no longer needed a miracle to have a martyr, and thus it was the dearth rather than excess of miracles that validated contemporary martyrs. Harpsfield had made a similar point in his earlier Life of More, but from the perspective of a Marian Catholic as opposed to an Elizabethan priest in exile. Once again drawing on Augustine of Hippo, Harpsfield explains in the preface that More’s death is no less considered martyrdom than “those that suffered because they would not deny and refuse the holy faith of Christ.” More died to “preserve the unity of the church” and that is just as commendable as any other type of martyrdom, for “he [More] dyeth for the whole Church.”96 In other words, martyrdom is no longer necessary for conversion or confirmation, but instead serves as a testimony to the unity of the visible Church, which is just as vital. Writing fifty years after Harpsfield, Robert Persons echoes this Catholic understanding of miracles in his Treatise of Three Conversions, where he explains that the miracles performed by those bringing Christianity to England “confirm thereby also the certainty of our faith: seeing so many witnesses one after another.”97 Yet, 93 94

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Harpsfield, Dialogi Sex, Dialoge Five, chapter 19, 504: “non potuisse huiusmodi miraculorum lucem sustinere, quae Catholicos ritus in Baptismo usitatos … plane confirmant.” See Walsham, Church Papists, 27. In her analysis of Persons’s “Reasons for Refusall,” Walsham shows that the main agenda for the missionary priests was to support and inspire Catholics and to win back “schismatics,” by which they meant church papists, or public conformists who still held privately to Catholic beliefs and practices. See also Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 29–34. Stapleton, “Dedication,” Bede’s History, 4r. Harpsfield, Life of More, 214. See Dillon, Construction of Martyrdom, 43–46. Persons, Three Conversions, ii, 59.

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as mentioned earlier, he argues that it is no longer necessary for contemporary martyrs to perform miracles, for conversion and confirmation is no longer their primary function this this context.98 While miracles could be redundant for proving contemporary martyrs and even problematic in polemical debates, they could be effective tools when working with the laity – it depends on the audience. This conception of contemporary miracles is visually represented in the martyr murals of the English College in Rome.99 Commissioned by the Jesuits and begun in 1582, the 34 frescoes with descriptive text were meant to inspire the missionary priests training to go into England. The first 24 pictures describe the history of the Church of England from the foundation of Christianity until the break with Rome, including the three conversions by Joseph of Arimathea, under King Lucius, and from Augustine of Canterbury. They continue with the spread and defense of Christianity in England by Kings Edwin, Oswald, and Oswyn, and include holy women and virgins like Osyth and Winefride. Reemphasizing England’s role in the Christianization of Europe, missionary saints were included in the murals: St. Boniface’s martyrdom is featured along with two minor bishops who had accompanied him, Eobanus and Adelarius, further highlighting the missionary aspect of the English historical tradition. The last ten images depict the contemporary martyrs from the break with Rome until the death of Richard Thirkeld in 1583, when the frescoes were finished. Miraculous events are depicted in the first group, both in text and in image. For example, St. Osyth, a seventh-century virgin, is depicted in the same mural with St. Boniface, holding her head after being decapitated by Danish raiders. The text reads, “St Osyth, virgin and martyr, carries her severed head for a mile.”100 The captions for Kings Edwin, Oswald, and Oswyn – spreaders of Christianity after the conversion of King Ethelbert by Augustine – each mention miracles.101 In her analysis of the murals, Anne Dillon notes that miracles are conspicuously absent in the group of contemporary martyrs, both in the images and in the texts.102 On the other hand, the 98 99 100 101

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Persons, The copie of a double letter, 5. The murals were composed by Niccolò Circignani, and the etchings were printed by Giovanni Battista de Cavalleriis in Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea (Rome, n.d. 1584). Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea, 17: “S. Ositha Virgo, et martyr, caput abscissum per mille passus gestat.” Ecclesiae Anglicanae Trophaea, 11: “S Eduinus Northumbrorum in Anglia primus Rex Christianus, a Penda rege impio in acie occisus miraculis claruit. S Oswaldus eius gentis rex ab eodem in bello necatus multis miraculis, Christi martyr est declaratus.” Dillon notes this distinction between the first and second group of martyrs in The Construction of Martyrdom, 177.

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absence of miracles in depictions of Edmund Campion and other contemporaries could also reflect the difficulties of doing so, given that they were not yet saints (indeed, most were not canonized until 1970). Either way, it was likely easier to imagine one’s persecution and martyrdom (a very real possibility) alongside other contemporary martyrs than it would have been to perform a miracle. Because of challenges from Bale, Foxe, Jewel, and the Magdeburg Centuriators as well as intraconfessional debates both pre- and post-Trent, Catholics like More, Harpsfield, Stapleton, and Persons worked out how miracles were functioning in both the past and the present, and thus where the past fits in to contemporary Catholic narratives. As Ethan Shagan put it, it is precisely these “points of contact,” or sites of social friction, where ideas were able to emerge and be shaped.103 By having to defend them, Stapleton clarified the purpose of saintly miracles not only in the historical context but also in a contemporary one, and the murals reflect this stance. In working this out, Stapleton was able not only to provide a response to Protestant criticism of Catholic history that upheld the miracles, but also to negotiate between Tridentine tightening and continuity with the medieval tradition of signs, wonders, and miracles. On the other hand, looking at Stapleton et alia from another angle can help reframe this view of their work as simply Catholic counterparts to Foxe. In fact, Catholics like Stapleton and some of their Protestant interlocutors shared similar views about the relationship between human history and theology – their confidence in the documents of human history contributed to their certainty in the legitimacy of their respective Churches. Indeed, for many (if not all) of these historians, the idea that historical events could be at odds with God’s will would be unthinkable. It is to this dynamic that I will turn in the next section.

3

Founder-Saints and the Construction of Space and Time

Anne Dillon, focusing mostly on intellectual materials, argues that martyrs had shifted from being depicted as witnesses of a universal Church to more localized figures, placed within the context of their current national politics. Alexandra Walsham, focusing on popular devotion, argues that miracles were not thought to occur as much in particular locations, rather God might still

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Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7.

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choose to be at work for healing or intervention, shifting to a more universal setting.104 For Dillon, the martyrs were virtuous exemplars rooted in time and place, but for Walsham, their universality made them more malleable and thus more personally appealing. These emphases are not mutually exclusive; both ring true depending on the sources and the context. My focus on stories of the Christianization of England places the emphasis not on the local versus the universal, but on the uses of early founder-saints to connect the two. The miracle stories of the saints of history were an essential part of English narratives, connecting their current experiences with those who had fought for the Church from the beginning. The stories of miracles authorized versions of the past – necessary mediums of God’s communication confirming that the Catholic version of the past was accurate and thus their actions in the present justified. At the same time, they were household names, figures whose images and traditions were littered across the British landscape. While studies on early modern martyrdom often focus on the saint as a link between human and divine, these founder-saints provide yet another connection: the present with the past. Founder-saints function as effective tools for ideological construction, packaging historical origins, present beliefs and practices, and divine authorization. Early founder-saints are able to connect space (i.e., England, Britain, Europe, Heaven) and time (i.e., the present with recent and ancient history as well as divine timelessness) through the traditional conventions of miraculous endurance. In this respect, early British and English saints were powerful tools in the cultural toolbox. In addition to reclaiming the historical narrative and creating links with international Catholicism, post-Reformation priests were able to harness the power of the medieval converter-saints in order to inspire lay Catholics in England. As mentioned above, in some ways the contemporary, sixteenth-century martyr grew increasingly particular while, in other ways, early modern saints became less attached to particular spaces and were seen working in the realm of the supernatural. This paradox can also be found in descriptions and lives of the early medieval founder-saints. Because they were so central in contemporary polemics about the English past, the early martyrs were increasingly associated with and intimately connected to sixteenth-century national and international politics. As we have seen, the miracles of Augustine of Canterbury were sometimes marshaled as proof of the True Church vis-à-vis Protestants (especially those Protestants aligning themselves with the ancient

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Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom, especially 16–17, 180, 187, 237–239, 334. Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, especially 327, chapter 5 passim.

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Britons), and the murals at the English college in Rome solidified their placement in the universal/international Catholic historical imagination. Stapleton was able to use the story of Augustine and even Bede himself (as saint, as opposed to scholar) to address the internal needs of the Church by clarifying a post-Tridentine stance on miracles. Similarly, a martyr like King Oswald, a local favorite in the north of England, was portrayed by the murals in the English College at Rome as a saint and missionary who died heroically, just as contemporary missionary priests were expected to do. But in yet another context, as Oswald’s cult was promoted by missionary priests, all English Catholics could be inspired by his virtue, faith, and loyalty in the face of their current persecution. Depending on the frame, these saints could function as local heroes, national legends, universal Catholic martyrs, or personal family intercessors.105 As we will see in the case of Winefride’s Well, these particular founding heroes were used to connect these spaces in ways that the deployment of another past figure could not. Furthermore, Persons was able to highlight yet another aspect of European Catholic history, providing an international frame for the early Anglo-Saxon saints and their role in converting other nations. In Three Conversions, Persons draws on the letters of St Cyprian to argue that the true Church was universal and thus not confined to national boundaries, which is why early English Christians were obligated to “go abroad into other kingdoms, to preach the word, and to seek martyrdom there.” Persons notes that these English saints, fulfilling Christ’s great commission to bring the gospel to all nations, were taken out of English history by Foxe, yet remained pertinent to the history of European Christianity. Persons mentions several lesser-known saints such as St. Ebba, a virgin and abbess who brought Christianity to northeast Scotland in the seventh century, and he spends even more time on Thomas Becket and Boniface, calling them “ancient Martyrs of our Church and Nation, both at home and abroad,” again connecting the national and international.106 He draws special attention to Boniface, as Protestants had denigrated him (like Becket) in their histories, stressing that Boniface, under papal commission, had preached to the Germanic people and helped reform the French church. In other words, Persons capitalizes on this opportunity to raise the AngloSaxons (and not the Britons) as the builders of not only the English Church, but also of European Catholicism. Even on the Continent, Jesuits encouraged

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For more about the role of saintly intercession, see Gregory, Salvation at Stake, chapter 7. Persons, Three Conversions, II, 44. For more on reformation uses of Thomas Becket, see Parish, Monks, Miracles, and Magic, 92–105.

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veneration of the Anglo-Saxon Boniface as part of their revival of founding saints borne out of this determination to review historic links with these holy figures.107 In addition, the murals in the English College of Rome had emphasized this point, highlighting little-known missionary saints like Eobanus and Adelarius alongside Boniface. Early founder-saints were not only useful in connecting space, but also time. Beginning with Bale, but also in Foxe, Harpsfield, and Stapleton, sixteenthcentury writers continued to employ certain aspects of the medieval martyr tradition, presenting their heroes in a specific historical context but also positioning them alongside the martyrs of the early church. Alice Dailey, tracing developments in the genre of martyrdom from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, argues that the early modern villains or persecutors had become more anchored in contemporary politics than their late medieval Golden Legend equivalents, who were more archetypal.108 However, the martyr stories on which I am focusing, placed at center stage in post-Reformation debates over England’s Christian origins, combine what Dailey, Dillon, and Walsham would call the pre-modern archetype with a growing emphasis on specific historic time. While the legend of someone like King Oswald or St. Winefride might have had a universal appeal with their traditional typology (i.e., raging persecutor meets defiant and faithful hero, tortuous death occurs and miracles ensue), the frame and emphasis provided in the prefaces of Harpsfield and Stapleton and, as we will see in the case study of Winefride, the frame provided by the Jesuit missionary priests for a popular audience made it a powerful tool for English Catholics in the present. Dailey shows that those writing about Elizabethan martyrs had a hard time doing this given their political context: How can the traditional narrative of evil tyrants condemning the innocent and faithful be replicated without committing treason? How can Elizabeth’s regime be worked into this narrative? The stories of sixteenthcentury martyrs met this challenge in a number of ways, but, in Dailey’s opinion, few achieved success. In contrast, the vitae of the founders of English Christianity simultaneously act as representations of a specific, historical person and as an archetypal sufferer for Christ, connecting recent and ancient

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See Frijhoff, Embodied Belief, 130; Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 191–192. See Dailey, The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution, 36–42. Looking more at literary sources, especially plays, she argues that an intricate relationship developed between the genre and the shifting historical context in which it was employed, concluding that the genre itself adapted in response to the demands made on it by the events of the Reformation. She goes further, asserting that the events of history during this time are themselves shaped by the pressures of the martyr literary form.

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history through the traditional conventions of miraculous endurance of torturous persecutors. Thus, the figures in these origin narratives provided useful heroes with which to work, filling a need left unaddressed by other medieval saints as well as contemporary martyrs. As Brad Gregory shows in Salvation at Stake, Catholic martyrs, even contemporary ones, will always be set apart from Protestant and Anabaptist martyrs most notably because of their role as saintly intercessors. This is an integral part of the theological nature of saints in Catholic doctrine: saints are venerated precisely because they can serve as intercessors between humans and God. However, Protestants, as we saw in the previous chapters, still connected the human and divine realms (albeit in a different way). By employing typological readings of human history, reformers connected human events to a cosmic scheme using the Bible. It is not that this version of history is any more or less connected to theology. Rather, in this respect, the reformers have a different view of the boundaries and relations between the human and supernatural. In the end, whether the saint of history can be contacted in the present via intercessory prayer, or whether one views human history as controlled by the divine, the authorizing function of miracles and supernatural intervention remains. Particular figures were more or less useful for legitimations of regional, national, and international, and even universal authority; indeed, the authorizing power of the origins tales depended not on some inherent quality of the founder-saint themself, but on the social context and contemporary concerns of the specific audience. While different views on the immanence versus transcendence of the divine impacted the way the historical narrative was crafted and read, it functioned in precisely the same way. Aside from their usefulness in authorizing narratives of the past, these founding figures were not relegated to the pages of histories but were also experienced through ritual and material culture across the confessional divide.

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Case Study: St Winefride

Post-reformation Catholic uses of miracles in the works of Harding, Sander, Allen, Rastell, and others continued to defend not only the miraculous but also the efficacy and legitimacy of relics.109 Indeed, the histories explored above contain hagiographies and used them as source material, revealing the line

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See “The Works of the English Catholic Refugees,” in Antwerp, Dissident Typographical Centre, ed. Gilbert Tournoy (Antwerp: Plantin-Moretus Museum, 1994), 107–155.

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between history and hagiography to be tenuous and fluid. All of the issues taken up in this chapter are on display in the example of the story of St. Winefride: the relational and dynamic nature of stories of the past, the ways in which hagiography narrated the past, the ways miracle stories were being reworked, and the ways these tales helped communities negotiate their own internal tensions. As Alexandra Walsham has shown, Jesuit priests publicized popular local saints like Winefride in order to maintain Catholicism in England as well as to communicate a post-Tridentine tenor that negotiated orthodox piety and local belief and practice.110 The ways in which early modern Catholics dealt with miracles in the lives of early saints reflected the tensions not only between Catholics and Protestants, but also addressed a range of internal needs, including those associated with the celebration of local manifestations of the sacred in an age of Catholic internationalism.111 While Persons and Stapleton were more cautious when it came to historical treatises, missionary priests, in their role as pastors, actively promoted traditional local sites of devotion. Jesuits and other missionary priests were certainly directed to restrain “abuses,” but they also powerfully reaffirmed their use when it came to encouraging and maintaining Catholic communities.112 This method of revival was a strategy in Europe as well, but the English context differs in that there was no state support.113 It was possible, however, to revive these places of devotion even where they were illegal. Being dislocated – kicked out of churches and monasteries – actually promoted the survival of saintly devotion in other pre-existing sacred spaces.114 We see this demonstrated in the continuance of a local British healing well dedicated to a seventh-century local saint, Winefride. Winefride and 110 111

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Alexandra Walsham, “Hollywell and the Welsh Catholic Revival” in Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (United Kingdom: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2015), 177–206. For examples, both in England and on the Continent, of the revival of medieval holy places amidst the complexities of Tridentine internationalism, see Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 189–217. Walsham lists examples of encouragement and approval of pilgrimage and saints’ cults from several sources, including the Council of Trent, Robert Bellarmine, Peter Canisius, and Henry Garnet; see Reformation of the Landscape, 156–8. Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History; Howard Louthan, “Imagining Christian Origins: Catholic Visions of a Holy Past in Central Europe” in Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World, eds. Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield, and Howard Louthan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 145–164; Frijhoff, Embodied Belief, especially chapters 5 and 6. See Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 166–232 for many examples of Jesuits appropriating and using the landscape – hills, trees, etc. – for devotion and revival. Lisa McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience Among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 (London: Routledge, 2004).

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her uncle Beuno were Welsh, or ethnically Celtic. By promoting devotion to a pre-Anglo saint, Catholics could claim continuity with early British Christianity alongside that of Rome. In addition to moderating tensions between Catholics and Protestants and between tradition and Trent, founder-saints like Winefride were also able to connect space and time, reclaiming a historical narrative and creating links with international Catholicism. Saint Winefride was a seventh-century Welsh virgin and abbess who was venerated at a well and shrine at Holywell in North Wales. Winefride’s “martyrdom” occurred when Caradoc, the son of a neighboring prince, cut off her head in a bitter rage after he discovered her desire to become a nun and missionary. According to the legend, as soon as her head hit the ground a fountain sprang up in the very spot where it had fallen. A local monk, Beuno, also a convertersaint/missionary and purportedly Winefride’s uncle, placed her head back on her body and, praying over her, raised her from the dead. Caradoc, cursed by the words of Beuno, died instantly. Winefride was left with only a tiny white scar in a circle around her neck, a reminder of her brief martyrdom and of the ensuing miracles. She went on to live for many years afterward, establishing a monastery at Gwytherin and spreading Christianity in Wales. The remains of her body were translated to the nearby Benedictine abbey of St Peter and Paul in Shrewsbury, while her well became a popular pilgrimage site famous for its healing waters.115 Extremely popular in the Middle Ages, Winefride was widely known outside Britain; she was described as English, to Welsh chagrin, in Cardinal Baronio’s original Roman Martyrology of 1584. Thus, converter-saints like Beuno and Winefride were uniquely connected to local counties and even specific spaces, yet they became useful in imagining a national Christian origin narrative as well as connecting to an international, universal Catholic narrative. Winefride’s Well continued to gain popularity even as theological and liturgical reform movements began to develop. But as late medieval ideas of the

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The earliest known vitae are Robert of Shrewsbury’s twelfth-century The Life and Translation of Saint Winefride and The Anonymous Life of St. Winefride, both are printed in the Acta Sanctorum, Nov. 1., 702–31; and in Two Mediaeval Lives of Saint Winefride, trans. Ronald Pepin and Hugh Feiss, O.S.B. (Toronto: Peregrina, 2000). In 1635 John Falconer translated Robert’s vita in a printed edition entitled The Admirable Life of St. Winefride, Virgin, Martyr, Abbess. Another seventeenth-century version of her life can be found in The Lives of Women Saints of Our Contrie of England, ed. C. Hortsmann (London: EETS, 1886), 88–91. Other versions of her life appear in Thomas Meyrick, Life of St. Wenefred, Virgin, Martyr, and Abbess, Patroness of North Wales and Shrewsbury (Felinfach: Llanerch Publishers, facsimile of 1878 edition reprinted in 1996), and F.M. Taylor, St. Winefride; or Holywell and its Pilgrims, A Sketch (London: Burns and Lambert, 1860).

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sacred and its physical manifestations came under attack, the continuance of the pilgrimage and chapel was seriously threatened. The Cistercian monks of Basingwerk Abbey, who had been the caretakers of the Well since the thirteenth century, were swallowed up by dissolution of the monasteries in 1537. Cromwell’s Injunctions to the Clergy in 1538 ordered that at least four sermons per year be dedicated to warning parishioners against superstitious acts, including pilgrimages, relics, and shrines to saints. Parishioners were also urged to “take down without delay” any images “abused with pilgrimages and offerings.” The site remained a source of conflict for both Tudor and Stuart governments as a vestige of the Catholicism that they sought to suppress. For example, in 1579 Elizabeth instructed the Council of the Marches “to discover all papal activities … and to pay particular attention to the pilgrimages to St. Winefride’s Well” (but it is unclear what action, if any, was actually taken against the well).116 Despite threats from authorities, the miracle accounts and pilgrimage stories present a variety of Protestant and Catholic attitudes toward the miracle narrative and healing practices surrounding the well. Those who collected these accounts were Catholic clerics (mostly Jesuits), but the stories were written by the priests who cared for the well and chapel. Starting in 1556, the accounts span over a century, and the wide range of the pilgrim stories in particular highlights the continuity of the well-cult throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.117 Focusing on the visitation records and early modern vita by the Jesuit John Falconer (1577–1656), this devotion to an early converter-saint shows how the debates described in the first three sections of this chapter played out among English men and women on the ground. As shown in the works of writers like Fulke, Foxe, Harpsfield, and Stapleton above, there are a variety of responses to the miraculous and numinous in the tales of English founder-saints, and this example reveals the same fluidity in the responses of the pilgrims. Falconer, educated at the English College in Rome, was sent back into England as a missionary priest in the early seventeenth century. After his arrest and banishment from England in 1618, he published several lives of saints, including that of Winefride. The repackaging

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PRO Patent Rolls 21. Eliz. Part 7, cited in C. David, St. Winefride’s Well: A History & Guide (Llandyfsul: Gomer Press, 2002). The accounts are found in C. de Smedt, ed., “Documenta de S. Wenefreda,” Analecta Bollandiana 6 (1887), 305–352. When information about Winefride’s Well-cult was collected by the Bollandists in the eighteenth century, they copied these accounts from the Stonyhurst MSS, which is now in the Archives of the Jesuits in Britain in London. See the Latin introduction on pages 305–306.

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of Winefride’s tale by Falconer reveals the tensions between and within confessions discussed above, while demonstrating that the belief in miracles was still vibrant. The need to justify local traditions to Rome gave impetus to the “cleaning up” of local saints’ lives and devotions, and the importance of Cardinal Baronio’s Annales Ecclesiastici provided an example from the central authorities on exactly what this means. Baronio has since been viewed as the father of this sort of post-Reformation historical scholarship. In addition, Carlo Borromeo instructed bishops in his Third Provincial Synod of 1573 to “diligently collect together the names, character and pastoral actions of [their] predecessors.”118 Given Baronio’s example and Borromeo’s charge, local clerics began to collect sources and write their own local histories and local saints’ lives to emphasize liturgical continuity, creating “a historical basis for reformed local religious practice consonant with the exigencies and aspirations of the regularizing Tridentine church.”119 English Jesuit reformer John Falconer can be seen as one of these “local Baronios” in his attempt to repackage the history of the cult, as he provides a positive justification for its customs, identity, and uniqueness. In his edition of Winefride’s life, Falconer attempts to trace the history of Winefride and her cult, “partly by the Ancient and undoubted Monuments of such Monasteries and Churches as this Blessed Virgin is known to have lived in, and partly from the relation of sundry Ancient Priests, for their great learning, sanctity of life, and Religious profession, made Venerable, & worthy of all credit, in their assertions, and depositions unto me.” In addition to this “worthy” oral tradition and the physical evidence, Falconer has an account of Winefride’s life written by Robert, “a learned Monk and Prior of Shrewsbury,” which Falconer claims was itself copied from “an old historical manuscript.” Most notably, though, Falconer claims that Robert’s vita was also “read and worthily commended” by a list of church historians and hagiographers of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries – heading the list of these “approvers” is none other than Baronio himself, followed by respected medieval historians such as John Capgrave. As noted above, for many of these early modern historians, the connection between theological truth and historical truth was a given – one naturally flowed from the other. The fact that Falconer went to great lengths to demonstrate his scholarly approach – using antiquarian sources and only “approved” 118 119

Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis (Milan, 1582), f 46v, quoted in Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History, 7. Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History, 97.

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written documents – does not mean that he is “correct” or “objective;” rather, it means that for Falconer (like the historians discussed above), his commitment to theological truth spurred his more critical documentary method.120 In fact, Falconer declines to list certain recorded miracles because, although they “manifest the sanctity of this place, they have not been by depositions of persons sworn, and by public Instruments authentically approved.”121 Unlike the late medieval tales and traditions that include more fanciful details in the Winefride story, Falconer distances himself from those “superstitious” parts of her legend, claiming that it is ridiculous to think that pilgrims “really believe the redness of the stones to be the Martyrs very blood, and the moss growing therein her hair.” Nevertheless, Falconer does include many examples of miraculous healings, defending their legitimacy by claiming that Winefride’s story is no more unbelievable than the “fabulous Legends” written by Church Fathers like Athanasius, Ambrose, and Jerome. He reminds his readers that these stories are “credibly proposed … avoiding two extremes therein; the one is of believing things overlightly, and the other of believing nothing at all but as fancies.”122 This is an explicit statement of Falconer’s goal: retaining that local flavor allowed by the medieval Church while trying to stay within the confines of Tridentine reform. It also reflects, as Shagan has shown, the changing nature of “belief” in this period; for Falconer, like historians Harpsfield and Stapleton, belief has become a space to assert possession of divine Truth.123 Like Falconer, Catholics across Europe sought to recapture and revitalize the magical elements of the late medieval period – both restoring old shrines and consecrating new spaces – but now with a Tridentine understanding of the ways in which God operates in the material world, and with a different idea of historical truth. It was obvious for post-Tridentine historians that miracles and divine intervention could still be part of the truth of history because they were part of the Truth of God’s divine plan. Indeed, this commitment to the truths/Truth spurred on the research that someone like Falconer put into his reworking of Winefride’s biography. Towards the end of his Preface, Falconer included a reply to the Protestants, who condemned Winefride’s story and “many other Saints lives by holy and ancient Fathers authentically written.” In his preface he also included a sharp reply to the Protestants, who condemned Winefride’s story because of

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Tutino makes this argument regarding the work of Cesare Baronio in Shadows of Doubt, 7–8 and especially chapter 3. John Falconer, Admirable Life of St. Winefride, (St. Omer, 1635), 7–8. Falconer, Admirable Life of St. Winefride, 9. Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief, chapter 2.

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their “corrupt Judgment,” warning Catholics not to be discouraged by Protestant mockery nor by Protestant refusal to believe “in the miraculous passages of S. Wenefride.”124 Falconer had Protestant critiques of late medieval piety in mind, and his subtle adjustments to the medieval vita can be seen, in part, as polemics as well as what Norman Jones calls “cultural adaptation” and efforts to create what he calls a “neutral ground” where both conservatives and reformers could participate.125 But his biography of Winefride must also be viewed in relation to the intraconfessional concerns that prompted Falconer’s new vita: mediating between pre-Trent local variability and post-Trent regularization. Focusing primarily on the works of Protestant Fulke and Catholic Harpsfield, the first part of this chapter showed how both Catholic and reformed writers were trying to explain the origin and purpose of miracles performed by martyrs and define their role in the founding of English Christianity. As Walsham has shown, the literature recording well-practices also demonstrates a conscious post-Tridentine renewal of the Holywell traditions. In these stories, another manifestation of reformed Catholic spirituality can be seen in Jesuits’ emphasis on the well’s spiritual rather than physical benefits. The high medieval vita by Robert of Shrewsbury boasts only of the “healing … to many who are sick,”126 while the accounts of the well collected by the Jesuits emphasize different benefits. For example, one account tells the story of a noble woman unable to conceive a child. After a visit to the well, she conceived, but the child died soon afterward. The woman remained faithful nonetheless, visiting the well again to pray.127 Walsham argues that this and other stories of failed healing attempts illustrate the Jesuits’ shift in focus from physical healing to spiritual fortification.128 The Jesuit documenters also used the well tradition to connect a local British tradition to the larger Catholic community in England and Europe. The accounts highlight notable pilgrims from all over Britain who made the journey to Holywell, and several miracle stories involve pilgrims who have journeyed from London, and others tell of pilgrims from

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126 127 128

Falconer, Admirable Life of St. Wenefride, 12. Norman Jones, The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaption (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 33–34. He defines this as “private treaties of internal toleration that allowed the bonds of love and duty to paper over the chasms” and “private spaces in which conformity and deviance in religion were accepted.” Falconer, Admirable Life of St. Winefride, 45. C. De Smedt, “Documenta De S. Wenefreda,” 323–324. Alexandra Walsham, “Hollywell and the Welsh Catholic Revival” in Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (United Kingdom: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2015), 177–206.

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abroad.129 By circulating reports of nobles, Londoners, and Europeans at the well, the Jesuits connected local saints with the universal Catholic tradition, and they contributed to the reassurance that saints, miracles, and pilgrimages were still valid and valuable. While multiple aspects of early modern understandings of “belief” hastened the need to “clean up” some colorful medieval traditions, it was not as if saint traditions had remained unchanged in the previous centuries. Rather than view “the reformation” as an event that changed the rituals and customs performed at such locations, we can read these early modern tweaks as but one shift in an ongoing march of shifts and changes. No one along the confessional spectrum from radical to conservative had a blank slate to work with, so the existing yet ever-changing spaces played a large role in shaping conversations surrounding the past, the miraculous, and confessional and national identities. The healing wells of local founder-saints remained popular pilgrimage sites, and the tensions surrounding this shrine and its traditions created a social space where a variety of collective memories about the origins and spread of Christianity in England were being formed and reformed. Reading hagiography as history shows us that narrating the past is situated in both time and space, and always already concerned with re-imagining and re-configuring the conditions of its own socio-political situation. The well tradition, then, is both a testament to the resilience of pre-Reformation local stories as well as a testament to the ways in which traditions are created anew in accordance with changing values. It also shows how English men and women on the ground, from across the confessional divide, actually interacted with the material culture surrounding lives of the early British saints that constituted the Christian origin narrative.

5

Conclusions

Despite reworking and reshaping ideas about supernatural activity in human history, the story (across confessions) of the origin and spread of Christianity in England remained one in which saints performed miracles and God intervened to guide, punish, and reward people. Indeed, thinking beyond the binaries (Protestant and Catholic, English and European, medieval tradition and Tridentine reform) and instead placing these negotiations upon a messy and nonlinear spectrum can reveal new ways of looking at early modern discourses

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C. De Smedt, “Documenta De S. Wenefreda,” 313, 323, 333, 336; 339, 341.

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on a miraculous origin narrative. Indeed, the contest over founding figures can be seen, as Ethan Shagan puts it, as “a space in which epistemic controversy is worked out.”130 The idea that the supernatural could act in and speak through the human past was not undone by “the Reformation,” just as it has not been undone by reform movements since – not even “modernity” or “secularism” has completely destroyed this idea.131 Perhaps, in some ways, modern scholarship has overstated the difference between Catholic and Protestant understandings of the past by highlighting miracles and supernatural activity in Catholic narratives. This is not to deny the differences of reformed thinking on both theology and liturgy, nor to downplay the importance of studies that have highlighted the specific ways in which English Catholics retained beliefs and practices in the face of intense legal and social challenges. However, by taking a broader view and considering actors from across the political spectrum, we can see how even Protestant writers (and, again I would add, people today) use ideas of supernatural intervention to authorize certain narratives for use in the present. By looking at this bigger picture, we can see how we still, even in discourses considered secular, marshal arguments that are structurally similar to those of early modern English writers: using transcendent ideas to legitimize foundation stories and deploying narratives of persecution to authorize, authenticate, and normalize. On the other hand, shifts in the nature of divine intervention over time reshaped conversations about the role of the miraculous in both past and present martyrdom. This aspect of the debate over the Christian origin story prompted an ongoing reassessment of where to locate the boundaries between temporal and spiritual and casted doubt on some of the “more fanciful” elements in human history (a subjective and moving target). At the same time, even through a reformed lens supernatural events could play a role in human history and serve to judge human activity. Many historians and hagiographers across the confessional spectrum reinforced the belief that the martyrs and miracles of the early English Church could be read as a source of revelation – a means through which the divine communicated moral and spiritual direction to humanity. Thus, while the (supernaturalized) authorizing function did not depend on a more or less immanent God nor on more or less fantastical miracles, the variety of origin stories and founding figures functioned to produce an idea of England as especially blessed by God.

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Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief, 7. Here I refer to the “secularization thesis,” or the idea (popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) that religion or beliefs about the supernatural were dying.

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The humanist critique of the medieval tradition had shifted the martyr from a magical figure whose head could be sewed back on to a hero who gave their life for the cause. As Harpsfield’s Life of More shows, Catholics indeed built on this more humanist conception in order to construct contemporary martyrs. However, in addition to adding new martyrs, by maintaining a focus on ancient and medieval saints in both polemical debates and missionary efforts, Catholics were able to hold on to some of the supernatural enchantment that was less available in the lives of contemporary martyrs.132 In this way, the saints of the English Christian foundation narrative helped sixteenthcentury Catholics retain a uniquely traditional narrative aspect, especially distinctive after reformed ideas and practices became widespread. Furthermore, the challenges to the idea of martyr miracles forced Catholics like Stapleton and Persons, living abroad, to elucidate official Catholic teaching; in clarifying Catholic teaching, they ended up working out the goal, method, and nature of their missionary enterprise back to the homeland. We see the results of this clarification in the missionary efforts of Jesuit John Falconer, as he both subtly reformed and enthusiastically promoted a local miracle tradition. The life of St. Winefride, in this context, demonstrated how Catholic narratives of the past were preserved in the present. In fact, reframing this question from a Catholic versus Protestant framework to a focus instead on the authorizing function of the supernatural reveals persecution to be an operative ingredient in discourses on origins. In terms of mobilizing images of the past to make sense of the present, it turns out that imagining oneself as persecuted was much easier than imagining, say, one’s head being sewn back on à la Winefride. In other words, placing one’s own persecution in connection with a long line of the persecution (real or imagined) already central to Christian identity became (and remains) more effective than relying on miracles and wonders to create continuity with the past. Rethinking miracles and focusing on persecution in English Christian origin narratives ultimately established a sense of mission that functioned as a crucial cultural source of national sentiment.

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See, for example, the analysis of the martyrdom of Margaret Clitherow in Lake and Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England, 2nd ed (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). However, it is worth noting that twenty years after the Clitherow execution, the English Catholic martyrologists were once again employing the miraculous in the construction of the contemporary martyr, see Dailey’s The English Martyr, ch. 4; John Genings, The life and death of Mr Edmund Geninges Priest (St Omer, 1614). Dailey does not address this shift back to the miraculous nature of the contemporary martyr in her book, and it would be an interesting aspect of Stuart martyrology to explore.

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These converter-saints and founding figures were uniquely connected to local counties and even specific spaces, yet they were used to construct a national narrative of Christian origins and to imagine an international, universal Christian past. As we have seen throughout these chapters, historical martyrs operated simultaneously within a specific historical time and in continuity with the timeless, supernatural scheme. History, for sixteenth-century writers across the confessional spectrum, had to be particular, national, and sometimes international while at the same time possess universal and theological implications. The stories of these early founder-saints were flexible enough to meet those needs.

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Experiencing Origins: Founding Figures in Ritual and Material Culture, or Public History and the Realm of the Everyday In the previous chapter I argued that, regardless of shifting conceptions of divine intervention in human history, the supernatural functioned to authorize versions of the past that contributed to the production of a sense of a divinely chosen nation. Even the most critical reading of God’s intervention in the form of miracles left plenty of room for God to actively punish, reward, and guide the founding figures. However, the past is told differently in different sources; liturgical traditions, shrines, and pilgrimages involve the body, affect, and material culture. If we reframe these devotional activities and spaces as common sites of public history – functioning similarly to historic sites, parks, performances, and parades – we can ask how English Christian origin narratives were imagined by the broader public. How might conceptions of founding figures be shaped by ideas of direct communion with them via the liturgy or prayer? How do pilgrimages to shrines, dips in healing waters, and reenactments on feast days shape memory differently than other ways of narrating the past? How does the realm of the everyday – e.g., the names of towns and churches – construct and maintain collective memory? This chapter focuses on how the arrival of Christianity was manufactured in different ways, as English founder-saints were baked into the liturgy and landscape long before the break with Rome. Many scholars have shown how rituals, pilgrimages, and reenactments can offer an escape from everyday life and serve to sacralize time and space; on the other hand, the fact that the towns, parish churches, and local landmarks bore the names of the founder-saints shows how versions the past were normalized in the realm of the everyday. Each of these elements were useful in constructing a distinctive public culture in which the legacies of the early Middle Ages were now forging a sense of national identity through saintly ancestors, a sacralized physical environment, and narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice. While the previous three chapters have focused on how the foundation narrative of Christianity in England was constructed by historians in the early modern period, the present chapter turns to look at how shrines, place names, the liturgy, and hagiographies told the story of England’s Christian conversion through the lives of local founder-saints. Peter Brown’s explanation of the rise

© Lauren Horn Griffin, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004514362_006Lauren

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of the cult of martyrs in post-Constantinian Europe also captures the role of founding figures in early modern England: “the imaginative Christianization of the mundus is told through their vitae, images, shrines, and bodies – the world of ordinary experience.”1 Understandings of Christianity’s beginnings in England were also shaped by the spaces and places in which they occurred, and these visual and ritual reminders of Christian origins made local figures the dominant ones. As we saw through the example of Winefride’s Well, these spaces were often sites of inter- and intraconfessional conflict, collaboration, and compromise. Some of these sites escaped destruction by Tudor monarchs, while others had to be reclaimed or transformed. Like the previous chapter argues regarding miracles, while a more reformed theology denied the immanence of the supernatural in these physical spaces, it still memorialized places and honored the heroes and martyrs they imagined during the medieval age of persecution. Objects and relics create certain links between the early modern devotee and the medieval person to which they belonged; as Bruce Lincoln puts it, “it is through the repeated evocation of such sentiments via the invocation of select moments from the past that social identities are continually (re-)established and social formations (re)constructed.”2 Thus, the Christian origin narrative represented in material culture and ordinary spaces demonstrates the power of these icons and figures – tools in the cultural toolbox – for constituting national identity. Regardless of their conflicting beliefs and practices, these ritual performances across the confessional spectrum functioned as powerful acts of national identification. On the other hand, lest I overemphasize national sentiment, this chapter also highlights how these same themes functioned to produce a regional pride that was just as powerful, for some, as national identity. When delving into the question of early modern uses of English Christian origins, focusing on widely circulated printed histories puts the focus on appropriations of the past for national discourse at the expense of the local, confessional, and personal. As Daniel Woolf has shown, changes in historical methodology and the spread of print were central to both the development of historical consciousness and, in some ways, the decline of some popular folk traditions.3 On the other hand, many local traditions remained, communicated through the stories of

1 Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity AD 200–1000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 102. 2 Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 23. 3 Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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founder-saints, oral tradition, pilgrimage sites, and the liturgy.4 The spread of Christianity throughout the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the seventh century, as recorded in Bede’s history, resulted in a variety of local saints – British, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon – who were venerated locally and remained useful and meaningful figures both for people on the ground as well as antiquarians and historians. As we have seen from their use in printed history, saints were not only significant to the “superstitious masses,” but also crossed boundaries and played a dynamic part in the historical consciousness of English people across the confessional and socioeconomic spectrum.5 Thus, many felt some attachment to a translocal nation even while retaining their regional loyalties. These sites also demonstrate how regional pride actually contributed to confessional and national identities, which in turn shaped conceptions of international relationships. While regional identity is often framed as competing with an ascendent national identity, they need not be understood in opposition. I hope to show how the strong regional pride felt, especially, by those in the North, contributed to rather than competed with an English national sentiment. Furthermore, some of the central debates in national histories – an archipelagic versus English territory, Celtic versus Roman Christianity, British versus Anglo-Saxon lineage – are not as hotly contested in regional sources. The histories playing out here celebrate the local missionary saints who converted the local people, regardless of their ancient ethnic identity. This regional emphasis actually lends itself to the imagination of the heavenly realm as space, a distinction that caused the political boundaries (e.g., England, Scotland, Wales) to recede into the background, foregrounding heaven as the most contested territory of Christendom. While many from across the confessional divide mourned the loss of images, buildings, and sites of devotion in the sixteenth century, the early martyr tradition also had associations with destruction. The English landscape is littered with reminders of Roman and British saints who built upon pre-

4 See Eamon Duffy, Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Penguin, 1991). For a more recent assessment as it relates to the natural environment, see Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 5 Alison Shell shows how oral tradition and local folklore were not merely known, used, and valued by the “unlettered” but were also received by a much wider audience. See Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 86.

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Christian traditions that already marked the countryside.6 Early missionaries transformed existing pagan sites into the holy spaces of the “true God.” Bede even recorded a letter from Gregory the Great to Mellitus, the Roman missionary, in which Gregory directs the missionaries to avoid destroying pagan sites and temples. Instead, the missionaries should reconsecrate them in order to ease the transition for the people.7 Many of the stories and traditions surrounding founder-saints feature acts of defacement followed by this type of substitution.8 Take, for example, the episode of St. Boniface and the “evangelical tree surgery” described in chapter three.9 Similarly, Alexandra Walsham recounts descriptions of St. Columba transforming a pagan fountain, feared for its toxic waters, into a healing spring by washing in the waters while invoking the name of the Lord.10 Medieval historians have suggested that St. Oswald’s wooden cross, erected upon the battlefield at Heavenfield, was associated with a tradition surrounding a pagan sacred tree.11 Many of these devotional sites, especially in the natural environment, tell the story of the spread of Christianity due to the appropriation of previously pagan sacred sites. Thus even before Christian narratives, whether based on the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible or the apocalypse described in Revelation, were used to depict England as sacred, pre-Christian tradition had sacralized the landscape itself, leaving

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See, for instance, David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), 2–4; Catherine Cubitt, “Sites and Sanctity: Revisiting the Cults of Murdered and Martyred Anglo-Saxon Royal Saints,” Early Medieval Europe 9 (2000): 53–83; J. Rattue, The Living Stream: Holy Wells in Historical Context (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1995); Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, eds., Judith McClure and Roger Collins, Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Book I, chapter 30, 49. Valerie Flint shows how this substitution program was also happening across Europe in The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). See Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 27, 78. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 217. Adomnan’s Life of Columba, ed. Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson (1961), 349–51. See Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 28. See C. Tolley, “Oswald’s Tree,” in Pagans and Christians: The Interplay between Christian Latin and Traditional Germanic Cultures in Early Medieval Europe, eds., T. Hoftra, L. Houwen, and A. MacDonald (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1995), 149–173; and Catherine Cubitt, “Sites and Sanctity: Revisiting the Cults of Murdered and Martyred Anlgo-Saxon Royal Saints,” Early Medieval Europe 9 (2000): 53–83.

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behind a hallowed conception of the natural environment that carried over into medieval Christianities.12 Just as modern scholars have argued over whether to read this appropriation tactic of medieval Christians as destruction, artistry, or negotiation and, as Valerie Flint has put it, “ingeniously constructed syncretism,” medieval clerics had mixed feelings about it as well.13 Christianizing pagan spaces as a conversion tool produced conflict between the medieval laity and the clergy regarding the abuse of supernatural power and concerns about idolatry and superstition. The decrees of ecclesiastical councils, the edicts of kings, and the exhortations of homilists from the High Middle Ages onward reveal a wariness ranging from discomfort to outright disgust at some of the practices carried out at these sites.14 As Alexander Murray notes, what seemed like “necessary compromise” to the converter-saints “had come to look like backsliding” to later medieval and early modern practitioners.15 Indeed, even Thomas Stapleton, in refuting the martyr miracles described by John Foxe, singled out the Oswald’s Cross tradition in his preface, tacitly admitting that it sounds a bit superstitious.16 Anxiety thus surrounded many of these sites even before humanist criticisms, the Protestant challenge, or Tridentine reform motivated a reconsideration of local traditions. On the other hand, scholars like Eamon Duffy have described at great length the visual culture, natural landscape, and vibrant ritual practices that attest to the energy and devotion of late medieval Catholicism.17 Beloved by some and distrusted by others, Anglo-Saxon and Celtic missionary saints represented and reinforced the dominance of the Roman Church while also serving as sites of friction, effectively since their inception. The simultaneous reassurance and vulnerability emanating from these traditions continued into the sixteenth century, as Jesuits, other missionary priests,

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John Howe, “The Conversion of the Physical World: The Creation of a Christian Landscape,” in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, ed. James Muldoon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 63–78. Flint, Rise of Magic, 257; Barbara Yorke, Conversion of Britain: Religion, Politics, and Society in Britain, 600–800 (London: Routledge, 2014), 248–256. See Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 26–48, in which she discusses canons drawn up by Wulfstan, Archbishop of York in 1005, and Cnut in 1020 and Aelfric’s warnings in homilies. Alexander Murray, “Missionaries and Magic in Dark Age Europe,” Past & Present 136 (1992): 186–205. Stapleton, “Preface,” Bede’s History, 9r. See Duffy, Stripping of the Altars; Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), chapter 2.

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local clergy, and the laity attempted to harness the rhetorical and affective power of medieval founder-saints in an early modern world. These founder-saints continue to be remembered in some capacity throughout Britain, even now, because cities, towns, parishes, and landmarks bear their names and images. In the sixteenth century, these material and visual depictions were often supplemented by the celebration of a feast, a trip to a chapel or holy well, and stories about the saint’s exploits. My sources for this chapter include antiquarian works that describe the early modern landscape, breviaries and calendars, and the early modern vitae of local foundersaints, which recount Christian origin narratives throughout Britain. Part of what ignited the antiquarian tradition in Britain was the dissolution of the monasteries and Protestant defacement and destruction of medieval material culture – they wanted to record and collect what they could while it was still standing. Local historians from across the confessional divide expressed nostalgic loss; as Protestant William Dugdale put it, the destruction of monasteries, chantries, and shrines was “the greatest blow to Antiquities that ever England had, by the destruction and spoil of many rare manuscripts and no small number of famous monuments.”18 Protestant antiquarians were often torn between their appreciation for the medieval past and their more reformed theology, which told them that the past was full of silly superstitions. Oliver Harris, Daniel Woolf, and Alison Shell have described how church and abbey ruins inspired a folk and print tradition of reverence for the old faith even among adherents of the new.19 Protestant antiquarians thus negotiated this tension in a few different ways: some expressed reluctance to record certain superstitious customs, yet their explanation of why they were being left out lets us know they were still around, retaining them through this explanation of omission.20 Others recorded local devotions in great detail in order to expose what they saw as the abuses of medieval Catholicism. For example, in his Perambulation of Kent, William Lambarde described local legends about footprints left on a rock by St. Mildreth, explaining that they were faked by “monkish counselors” trying to profit from them; similarly, as we will see, Robert Hegge criticized the miracle traditions surrounding Cuthbert

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William Dugdale, “Preface,” The Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated (London: Thomas Warren, 1656), 147. See Oliver Harris, “‘The Greatest Blow to Antiquities that ever England Had’: The Reformation and The Antiquarian Resistance,” in The Reformation Unsettled: British Literature and the Question of Religious Identity, 1560–1660, ed. Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen and Richard Todd (Belgium: Brepols, 2009), 225–242, quote on 231. See Woolf, Social Circulation of the Past, 187, and Shell, Oral Culture, especially chapter 1. For several examples of this, see Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 478–479.

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while Thomas Fuller mocked much of the Winefride’s Well healing tradition. Catholic antiquarians like William Claxton, on the other hand, recorded these sites with reverence. Thus, regardless of the tone of the portrayal, antiquarians preserved the landmarks, names, monuments, and customs surrounding founder-saints across the countryside. Because this book focuses on the early modern reworkings of the arrival of Christianity in England, I examine sixteenth-century and early seventeenthcentury antiquarian and hagiographic sources. This was near the beginning of the antiquarian tradition in England, which exploded in the seventeenth century. These earlier antiquarians, what Jan Broadway loosely defines as “local historians,” used primary sources and were engaged in the chorographical work of mapping the landscape and describing local monuments.21 They provided descriptions of local shrines, landmarks, and devotions to foundersaints, revealing how this narrative was laid out visually for the people in the landscape and local customs. Scholars such as Alison Shell and Adam Fox have utilized these sources as evidence of oral culture in this period, and have argued that oral traditions illuminate the sixteenth-century struggle over the English past in a way that the purely written records do not.22 Of course, using antiquarian sources to “capture” oral tradition, or anything else, involves methodological issues: these records come from men embedded in a context and motivated by a combination of political, religious, and class differences. Thus, the treatment of the sites dedicated to Oswald and Cuthbert below specifically examine how local historians carefully constructed the images of those two figures, interacting with a complex dynamic of regional, national, confessional, and social identities. The public rituals surrounding founder-saints not only re-narrated and authorized a certain version of the past, but also involved active participation

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Jan Broadway, “No Historie So Meete”: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 4; Broadway uses “local historian” as synonymous with “antiquarian” throughout her work, as she believes that this term, though anachronistic in some ways, best represents them. For more on the emergence of the English antiquarian tradition in the sixteenth century, especially its growth from the methods and practices of continental humanism, see Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Adam Fox and D. R. Woolf, “Introduction,” in The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1850, eds., Adam Fox and D. R. Woolf (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 1–51; Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).

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in the past. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s theory of representation and threefold concept of mimesis, it is in the representation of history at these devotional sites that we can most clearly see history as an experience – the momentary creation of a world of meaning. The active participation of devotees in the narrative through liturgy, theater, pilgrimages, and healings functioned to solidify England as a “blessed nation.” Ritual and liturgy reinforced a sense of connection to the agents of the past, providing a particular kind of experience, a “reading,” that integrates the story into one’s own identity.23 In other words, the actions that imitate the plot of the story – the renarration of their lives in the liturgy, watching their stories acted out on stage, and making pilgrimages to their holy sites – connected the devotee to the historical moment. In this way, the narrative lives of holy figures were doing important historiographical work. Furthermore, reframing what scholars call “devotional” or “ritual” culture as what we now call “public history” not only highlights “sacred” sources as the cultural resources of national identity for even non-elites, but it can also challenge our own contemporary terms to highlight the work they do in imagining ourselves as modern actors. What is the difference between “ritual culture” and, say, a historical reenactment? Contemporary scholarship on the early modern period rightfully highlights differences on the spectrum between “Catholic” and “Protestant” devotions and rituals. Certainly, there were (and are) substantial differences between Catholic and Protestant beliefs and practices, but these differences have been emphasized to the point of obscuring how even the most “disenchanted” memorial or valorization serves as a powerful tool for normalizing a version of the past that is also ideological. Reframing these activities in different terms can reveal how contemporary folks often imagine early modern Catholics as hanging on to medieval enchantment in contrast to modern rational actors (following the less enchanted Protestants) who simply memorialize “history” (read: neutral). In this way, scholarship on the early modern period sometimes preserves an idea of progress and disenchantment even in the language of revisionism.

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Landmarks and the Production of History: the Augustine Story in Public Spaces

The story of Augustine of Canterbury was naturalized through monuments and place names. The main Augustine narrative at the center of national 23

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, chapter 6.

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historical debates was also told through visual and material culture, including the natural environment, shrines in cathedrals and parish churches, and pilgrimages. Because of the social nature of commemoration and the centrality of place in acts of remembering, geographers are becoming increasingly interested in the monuments that mark the landscape. The importance of landmarks in shaping historical narrative stems from the fact that they not only tell certain versions of the past, but also legitimize that version as normative. As such, these sites are analyzed through three conceptual lenses: they can be “read” as texts, reinscribing memory onto space; they can be used as sites of debate over the meaning of history and thus struggles over identity; and they can be analyzed as ritual centers wherein visitor performance actually constitutes and creates meaning.24 The sites of saintly devotion to Augustine of Canterbury, I argue, present contested narratives to pilgrims and devotees. On one hand, throughout the countryside there was a persistence of markers commemorating Augustine’s mission, preserving and legitimizing the traditional story of Augustine as the founder of English Christianity. On the other hand, Matthew Parker, as Elizabeth’s Archbishop of Canterbury, as well as other Protestant historians were busy reframing or even disparaging the Augustine narrative in print, and the previous iconoclasm of the Henrician and Edwardian regimes took a toll on Augustine’s representation in churches and monasteries London. Thus, there was a disjuncture between the historical representations of founder-saints at the center and those on the periphery. From the southwest to the northeast there are markers commemorating the foundation of Christianity by the Gregorian mission. In the southwest county of Dorset, a little river by Cerne Abbey named for Augustine commemorates the place where he broke the pagan idol of Heil, effectively chasing away pagan religion and establishing Christianity among the West Saxons.25 Several other markers in the natural environment, especially trees, were sprinkled across England. There were trees across the West Midlands commemorating his many

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Derek H. Alderman and Owen J. Dwyer, “Memorials and Monuments,” in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Vol. 7, eds. Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (Oxford: Elsevier, 2009), 51–58. William Camden, Britannia; or A Chorographical Description of Great Britain and Ireland, Together with the Adjacent Islands, ed. Edmund Gibson (London, 1722), 46, hereafter Camden, Brittania. While Camden very clearly describes Augustine as the founding father of English Christianity, by the mid-seventeenth century, his editor, Edmund Gibson, argued that the founder of the English Church was actually St. Paul. Camden, Britannia, Lxxxiii; for more on Gibson’s editorship of Camden, see Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 331–357.

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preaching sites, including a huge stump (22 ft. girth) in Hertfordshire. The “Gospel Oak” in Shropshire was said to be the place where Augustine met with the Celtic bishops and miraculously cured the blind man; rival gospel oaks commemorating the same event can be found in Worcestershire and Herefordshire.26 The most famous tree, perhaps, among the many associated with him, was St. Augustine’s Oak on the Isle of Thanet in Kent, where, according to local legend, the first meeting between King Ethelbert and Augustine took place in 597. Though the oak has been removed, a cross remains there today, commemorating the event (the site is called St. Augustine’s Cross, preserved and promoted today by the English Heritage Foundation).27 Not far from this to the southeast is the stream in which England’s first baptism occurred, subsequently known as St Augustine’s Well. There were several other healing wells associated with Augustine, not only in Kent but also throughout the South of England.28 Nearby, there was a cornfield in the Kentish town of Richborough that was dubbed St. Augustine’s Cross by the “common people,” and legend had it that the castle ruins there was once King Ethelbert’s palace, where he first brought St. Augustine. A stone head that sits on one of the walls was known as Queen Bertha’s head, commemorating Ethelbert’s Christian wife and her role in his conversion.29 In addition to the dozens of wells and trees that were still standing in the sixteenth century, antiquarian William Camden records several churches and monasteries scattered in the south of England, some of which had been destroyed.30 The dissolution of the monasteries led to the destruction of many images of Augustine, especially in stained glass windows. Pilgrims still visited the ruins, however: Thomas Colwell, a Kentish Catholic, took his sick wife to the ruins of an old hermitage dedicated to St. Augustine that was famous for its healing powers. Before dying in the Fleet Prison in 1593, he also took his son on a pilgrimage to Canterbury to pray to St. Augustine once again.31 Interces26 27 28 29

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J.H. Wilks, Trees of the British Isles in History and Legend (London: Muller, 1972), 109–114, 244. “English Heritage,” accessed October 1, 2019 http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit /places/st-augustines-cross/. For example, see Camden’s description of the well in Camden, Britannia, 46. Camden, Britannia, 202. Camden believed that the stone head is not actually Bertha but is of Roman origin. This is also recorded in William Lambarde, Perambulation of Kent (London, 1576), 102–104. For more examples of St. Augustine’s marks on the landscape, see Alan Smith, “St Augustine of Canterbury in History and Tradition,” Folklore 89, no. 1 (1978): 23–28. Camden, Britannia, 46, 73–4, 199–200. John Adair, The Pilgrim’s Way: Shrines and Saints in Britain and Ireland (London, Thames and Hudson,1978), 37.

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sory prayer was thus an affectively powerful way in which Catholics imagined and connected with founding figures. Intercessory prayer, as this example of a pilgrimage to Canterbury shows, was also deeply connected to the space the practitioner and the founder-saint share, thus functioning as a powerful act of identification. Augustine was not the only figure in the conversion of the English people. Gregory the Great, King Ethelbert, Queen Bertha, and other Roman missionaries like Paulinus were central to this Gregorian mission conversion story. Accordingly, images of these saints and parish churches bearing their names can be found not only in Kent, but across the island. For example, Gregory and Ethelbert are commemorated in the fifteenth-century stained-glass windows of All Souls College at Oxford. Martyrologist John Wilson notes that Pope Gregory was often called “our apostle,” and was very famous throughout the country – many churches and monuments remained dedicated to his honor. And in addition to his shrine at Canterbury, special veneration to Ethelbert continued at St. Paul’s in London and St. Andrew’s in Rochester.32 There is also a chapel dedicated to the missionary Paulinus in Canterbury Cathedral as well as several parish churches in Kent and York. Paulinus’s body and shrine, though damaged, were still venerated at St. Andrew’s in Rochester even into the sixteenth century.33 Famed poet Michael Drayton even highlights Paulinus’s churches in his magnum opus, Poly-Olbion.34 Images, names, and shrines continued to tell this English Christian foundation narrative in detail well into the seventeenth century and beyond, and its memorialization in public spaces made it more challenging to erase or rework. Of course, antiquarians from across the confessional divide offered their own version of the Augustine narrative. The Catholic antiquary Thomas Habington, in his Survey of Worcestershire, wanted to recollect the glorious exploits of Augustine and the Anglo-Saxon clergy in converting “this wilderness of Paynims into a Paradise which abounded with greater plenty of Lilies of Confessors and Virgins then Roses of Martyrs, for the light of the Faith.”35 Moderate Protestant Camden, faithfully recounting Bede’s Augustine story, praises 32 33 34

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John Wilson, The English Martyrologe, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 52, 67. Wilson, The English Martyrologe, 277. Testamenta Cantiana: East Kent, 15. Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, or, A chorographicall description of all the tracts, rivers, mountaines, forests, and other parts … of Great Britaine (London,1612), 478. Thomas Habington, Survey of Worcestershire, ed. John Amphlett, 2 vols., Worcestershire Historical Society (Oxford, 1895–1899), ii: 323–325. Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 212.

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Augustine as “the Apostle of Englishmen” for having “abolished these monstrous abominations of heathenish impiety, with most happy success planting Christ in their hearts, converted them to the Christian faith.” Camden even thanks Gregory for being “so diligent and careful for the salvation of this English nation.”36 The more radical Protestant William Lambarde, in his Perambulation of Kent, retells Augustine’s conversion story though with a different tone; at the end he reminds readers that it was the Britons who had “embraced the religion of Christ within this island many hundred years before Gregory’s time.”37 Lambarde, however, does not make any attempt to show how this alternative foundation story is reflected in the landscape. Indeed, this would have been difficult, as he was focused on the Anglo-Saxon Kent as opposed to the Celtic West or even the Northeast. Regardless of confessional commitments or how they reworked the Augustine narrative in print, all these local antiquarians record Augustine’s landmarks – whether preserved or damaged – in Kent and beyond, revealing the extent to which the Gregorian mission story permeated England’s geography. The Augustine story was also retold in devotional literature. Vitae of Augustine and Gregory are recorded in early modern English hagiographies as well as the first edition of the Roman Martyrology of 1584 (and all subsequent editions).38 They were celebrated in the liturgy, as we will see below, as they were included in each of the local English uses of the Roman Rite as well as the calendar in the second edition of the Elizabethan Prayer Book.39 The fact that many Catholics were visiting “bare ruined choirs” while other sites remained virtually untouched attests to the variety of experiences of the past for many English people in the sixteenth century. Augustine provides an especially appropriate example, as many of his monuments remained sprinkled throughout the countryside while others were harmed or destroyed. While the removal of certain images reflects the reconsideration of Augustine’s legacy in national historical debates, other aspects of visual and ritual

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Camden, Britannia, cxxxi. Lambarde, Perambulation of Kent, 16. Wilson, The English Martyrologe, 52, 67, 138. According to the CRS, the Roman Martyrology was originally translated and published in English in by Wilson, who oversaw the press that the English Jesuits had set up in their college at St. Omers, see John Pollen, “Catalogues of the Martyrs” in Unpublished Documents Relating to the English Martyrs, ed. John Pollen, CRS 5 (1908), 3. William Keating Clay, ed., Liturgical Services. Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer Set Forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth ed. (Cambridge, 1847), 435–455. This is a printed edition of the 1559 and 1560 Latin editions of the Book of Common Prayer, as well as two separate printings of the litany.

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culture continued to honor and commemorate him as “the Apostle to the English.” This complexity reveals how landmarks and monuments functioned as an archive for local, national, and ecclesiastical history – both inspiring new origin stories and new fabrications of the past. As we saw with Winefride’s Well, different groups across the confessional spectrum (re)interpreted these spaces differently, and they competed to shape the meaning of those spaces where they coexisted. In the specific case of Augustine, the message told by the landscape, parish churches, and Canterbury Cathedral reinforced his role as the founding father of English Christianity. The destruction or defacement of other monuments tell other stories, depending on who you ask: stories of triumph over a “false Church,” evidence of a cruel and tyrannical state, or the rightful taming of fanciful local tradition.

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Authority and Audience: Antiquarian Accounts of the Conversion of the North

After its introduction by Augustine, Roman Christianity gradually spread to the powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria where Paulinus, a member of the mission launched by Pope Gregory, converted King Edwin to Christianity in 627. However, it was King Oswald (of the next generation) who did the most to spread the religion in the North. After Edwin’s death on the battlefield by the united armies of Penda (the Anglo-Saxon pagan ruler of Mercia) and Cadwallon (the British Christian ruler in the West), the region reverted back to paganism. King Oswald famously defeated Cadwallon at the Battle of Heavenfield, uniting the kingdom of Northumbria once again and restoring Christianity to the region. Already a Christian convert himself due to his childhood in Scotland, he invited Aidan, an Irish missionary from Iona, to help convert the people, and he gave the island of Lindisfarne to Aidan as his episcopal see. Tensions between the Roman Christianity brought by Paulinus and the Celtic Christianity spread by Irish and Scottish monks came to a head at the famous Synod of Whitby in 664, where Roman customs won out. Oswald eventually died in battle in Shropshire at the hands of the pagan King Penda. His head is buried at Durham Cathedral in the tomb of St. Cuthbert, the patron saint of Northern England, who is also associated with obedience to the Roman tradition. Because Christianity spread in the North immediately after Ethelbert’s conversion in Kent, many of these local saints received more widespread attention, especially in regard to the Christian foundation narrative. Several published local histories and collections show that the legacy of

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the North was famous enough for broader dissemination, making it unique in that its local traditions were well known outside of the region.40 The local antiquaries who surveyed and recorded the topography of the North in the sixteenth century also constructed a narrative of the arrival of Christianity in their region. Unlike what we saw in the debates raging in the national histories, the issue of Anglo-Saxon versus British spiritual ancestry did not seem to be of much of a concern in this case. As I show in the rest of this chapter, Protestant antiquaries did not seize the opportunity to play up the role of the British King Cadwallon nor to denigrate the Anglo-Saxon Oswald. Rather, the more radical Protestants took issue with the miracles and superstition involved in the contemporary cults of figures like Oswald rather than the saint’s actual role in the historical narrative. In other words, their arguments were more inspired by shifting conceptions of supernatural intervention rather than embedded in a debate about confessional lineage. In fact, I argue that some Protestant antiquarians highlighted Anglo-Saxon victories over British rulers in the service of regional pride, demonstrating (1) the sense of local pride that still existed for urban elites and county gentry as much as “the middling sort,” and (2) that strong regional identities did not necessarily exclude strong national ones. While Jan Broadway argues that these local historians were motivated by societal concerns, linking their interest in history to their obsession with genealogy, Woolf and others categorize them according to confessional affiliations. Patrick Collinson argues for a more pluralistic community that included local historians working together from across the confessional divide.41 Similarly, Oliver Harris downplays the sectarian nature of antiquarianism and argues that they were driven by class, national identity, and “simple fascination with the past” rather than religious agenda.42 In addition to these concerns,

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For example, J.T. Fowler ed., The Rites of Durham no. 107 (Surtees Society, 1903) and T.R. George Allan, ed., The Origin and Succession of the Bishops of Durham (Durham, 1779), both circulated widely in manuscript and were published in multiple editions in the seventeenth century. Broadway,“No History so Meete,” 154. Woolf, Social Circulation, 185–187; Patrick Collinson, “John Stow and Nostalgic Antiquarianism,” in Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720, ed. J.F. Merritt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 27–51. For more on the correlation between Catholicism and Antiquarianism in England, see Richard Cust, “Catholicism, Antiquarianism and Gentry Honour: The Writings of Sir Thomas Shirley,” Midland History 23, no. 1 (1998): 40–70. For a survey of the religious loyalties of sixteenth and seventeenth-century antiquarians see Harris, “The Greatest Blow,” 226–228. Harris, “The Greatest Blow,” 241.

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I argue that another central motivation that should be considered is that of regional affinity and the persistence of local identity in the sixteenth century. In the works by moderate Protestant Robert Hegge and radical Protestant Christopher Watson, we can see how the narrative surrounding founder-saints in a region known for Catholic resistance plays out locally. Oswald became a hugely popular saint in the North of England in the Middle Ages, but his commemorative landmarks existed beyond the North. For example, the church near his healing spring on the Welsh border (where he died during the Battle of Maserfield) was named White Church of Oswestry, or “the town of Oswald.” His bones were scattered across Britain and the Continent, giving him a unique connection with many localities. As the story goes, Oswald’s brother and successor, King Oswiu, had retrieved his head and arms from Penda’s army and had a special church built for his arms at Bamburgh. This village on the east coast became the center of a dynastic cult that continued throughout the Middle Ages and even after the Reformation.43 Originally buried on the battlefield, the rest of his body was quickly translated to Bardney Abbey in Lincolnshire, and then moved again in the tenth century to Gloucester. The priory in which he was buried changed its name to St. Oswald’s. His shrine in Gloucester was a popular local pilgrimage destination even into the sixteenth century. Three bones have apparently remained at Bardney, and monasteries across Britain, from Reading to York, claim to have other bones. Oswald’s head has a messier history. According to Nicholas Harpsfield, Oswiu originally hid it at Lindisfarne, but it was later translated to Durham. Both Harpsfield and local antiquaries report that it remains in Durham in the tomb of St. Cuthbert, the other major saint of the region, with whom Oswald had become associated.44 However, rival head-shrines throughout Europe claim to have this relic, including ones in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany.45 St. Winnoc’s monastery in Flanders also claims to have been given Oswald’s body during the Danish invasions. The sites dedicated to Oswald, then, enjoyed not only domestic but also Continental fame, drawing pilgrims and tourists well into the early modern period. Oswald’s vita appears in virtually all the medieval and early modern English martyrologies as well as the Roman Martyrology. Although he was notably excluded from the Elizabethan Calendar, he was discussed at length in Foxe’s

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Wilson, The English Martyrologe, 165; Camden, Britannia, 853; David Rollason, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 1989), 101–103. Harpsfield, Historia Ecclesiastica Anglicana, “Septimum Saeculum,” Caput XXVI, 91. Richard Bailey, “St Oswald’s Heads,” in Oswald: Northumbrian King to European Saint, ed. C. Stancliffe and E. Cambridge (Stanford, Linc.: Watkins, 1995), 195–209.

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Actes and Monuments, where Foxe praises his bravery as a king, his virtuous life, and his dedication to charity for the poor in addition to crediting him with the conversion of Northumbria and influencing the conversion of the ruler of the West Saxons. Foxe even mentions Oswald’s miraculously uncorrupted hand, though he remains uncertain of its authenticity.46 Alongside his continued popularity in the world of saintly devotion and pilgrimage, Oswald retained importance in the national historical narratives of the sixteenth century, as we saw in previous chapters. The early medieval history of the North was central to competing versions of the national narrative, as the Synod of Whitby was an important episode in the more polemical national histories. Northumbria was also the most powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdom during the spread of Christianity in the seventh century, thus many of the missionaries that converted the rest of the island came from the North. Oswald in particular had the potential to be very useful in early modern confessional debates. On the Protestant side, he was a king who utilized Celtic Christian missionaries, a possible anti-Roman thread, and his death had been portrayed as the martyrdom of Holy Saint Oswald at the hands of a pagan king. On the other hand, he defeated the last British Christian King to hold significant territory outside the West until the rise of the Tudors. Despite this potential, most Protestant antiquarians of the North did not use this particular episode of history to frame their confessional lineage. Celebration of regional heroes, on the other hand, was a central part of their narrative. This can best be seen in the moderate Protestant Robert Hegge’s treatment of St. Oswald.47 While Hegge certainly exposes the corrupting influence of Rome upon the English Church, his other, more pressing goal is to celebrate local heroes and demonstrate the importance of the region in England’s history.48 Hegge credits Oswald with the conversion of the region to Christianity,

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A&M, (London, 1570), Vol 1, Book 2, 175. The version of the Oswald legend in A&M is taken from the life of St Oswald attributed to Byrhtferth of Ramsey, BL, Cotton MS Nero E. i/1 (fos. 3r-23v). Cf. ‘Vita sancti Oswaldi autore anonymo’ in The Historians of the Church of York and its Archbishops, ed. J. Raine, 3 vols., Rolls Series 71 (1879), I, pp. 403–4. BL Sloane MS 1322, Robert Hegge, “The Legend of St Cuthbert with the Antiquities of the Church of Durham.” For the many manuscript and printed editions, see Phlip Pattenden, “Robert Hegge of Durham and his St. Cuthbert.” Transactions of the Architectural and Archaeological Society of Durham and Northumberland, ns v (1980), 107–123. The following quotes from Hegge’s work come from The Legend of St. Cuthbert, ed. J.B. Taylor (Sunderland: Garbutt, 1816), unless otherwise noted. Sarah Scutts makes a similar argument in “‘Truth Never Needed the Protection of Forgery:’ Sainthood and Miracles in Robert Hegge’s ‘History of St. Cuthbert’s Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Dunholme’ (1625),” in Saints and Sanctity, Studies in Church

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noting that he “made conquest of religion as well as men.” Indeed, he writes of Oswald’s military exploits in terms of religious significance, explaining that the purpose of his defeat of the King of Britons Cadwallon was so that “he might conquer likewise his people to Christianity.”49 Cadwallon, as the last powerful Briton ruler, was thereafter remembered as a national hero by the Britons. As we have seen, many Protestants writing national histories at this time claimed to be heirs of the Britons, having received their Christian heritage from them, not from the Anglo-Saxons who had been corrupted by Rome. But Hegge does not paint a sympathetic picture of Cadwallon, emphasizing that Oswald’s victory was “by virtue of the cross” and proved righteous by “illustrious” miracles.50 Thus the defeat of the Britons by Oswald in the name of Christianity is certainly not in service to the Protestant narrative constructed by the likes of Bale and Foxe; for Hegge, this episode was about local patriotism. Indeed, he finishes his Oswald section by commemorating “this great monarch the pious founder of that church to whose womb all the churches of the North owe their birth.”51 Hegge then draws attention to the many places where Oswald’s relics were still venerated, without any judgment of the practice itself. He celebrates Oswald as a converter and martyr, finding in Oswald a perfect example of the region’s glory and antiquity. Regional pride, then, was still important for many, and could be in service to national sentiment. The celebration of St. Oswald’s victories, miracles, and righteousness in local histories is one clear example, but the ways in which these antiquaries deal with the more controversial figure of St. Cuthbert is even more telling. As popular as Oswald was throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, regional identity in Northumbria rested significantly on St. Cuthbert, a seventh-century monk and bishop of Lindisfarne. He became one of the most important medieval English saints due to the many miracles associated with intercessory prayer at his shrine.52 The monks of Lindisfarne

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History 47, eds. Peter D. Clarke and Tony Claydon (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), 270–283. Hegge, The Legend of St. Cuthbert, 3. Hegge, The Legend of St. Cuthbert, 3–4. Hegge, The Legend of St. Cuthbert, 4. For more on the popularity of Cuthbert’s medieval cult, see the works of D. Rollason, especially Symeon of Durham: Historian of Durham and the North (Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 1998), Northumbria, 500–1100: Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 244–249, and Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 1989). See also Christian Liddy, The Bishopric of Durham in the Late Middle Ages: Lordship, Community and the Cult of St Cuthbert (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), and John Crook, English Medieval Shrines (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011).

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removed his purportedly incorrupt body during the Danish invasions of the eleventh century, and it eventually ended up in Durham, where it remains today. This discovery of Cuthbert’s incorrupt body by the monks had given a new impetus to the cult and shrine, which includes the head of Oswald and the remains of Bede. The shrine was dismantled in 1538, but Cuthbert was reburied in the same spot during the reign of Mary, and pilgrims continued to visit the desecrated shrine into the 1570s and 80s.53 Like St. Oswald, Cuthbert was known as a fierce protector of the Northern lands, particularly Durham; the notion of the Haliwerfolc, “the people of the saint” or the community of the Liberty of St. Cuthbert, continued into the sixteenth century.54 When talking of Durham, Camden notes that it is still called “the Land or Patrimony of Saint Cuthbert because of his great fame,” and he devotes several chapters to the history of his cult and description of his shrine.55 There were also countless parish churches dedicated to Cuthbert beyond the North, and his life was included in virtually every medieval and early modern English martyrology. He appears in the 1584 Roman Martyrology, celebrated specifically for “peacefully reconciling the austerities of the Celts and their way of living with Roman customs,” and thus was associated by both Catholics and Protestants with obedience to the Roman tradition.56 Cuthbert, unlike Oswald, became a sticking point in the narratives crafted by the early modern antiquaries of the North, and we can use the way Cuthbert and his cult were treated in these local histories as a litmus test to see where a particular antiquary fell on the confessional spectrum. The Catholic version, for example, celebrates Cuthbert’s miracles, his medieval cult, and the healings that had occurred at his shrine. However, there is a clear emphasis on the regional over the universal aspect of the saint. For example, writing in the 1590s, Catholic antiquary William Claxton’s treatment of Cuthbert reflects the attitude of many conservatives and Catholics in the North who were deeply attached to the figure of Cuthbert.57 Claxton laments how Henry VIII’s agents

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E.A. Horsman. ed., Dobsons Drie Bobbes: A Story of Sixteenth Century Durham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 83; Margaret Harvey, “The Northern Saints After the Reformation in the Writings of Christopher Watson,” Saints and Sanctity, ed. Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), 258–269. Liddy, The Bishopric of Durham, 205; Jean Scammell, “The Origin and Limitations of the Liberty of Durham,” The English Historical Review 81, no. 320 (Jul., 1966): 449–473. Camden, Britannia, 771–774. For more on Cuthbert and regional identity in the North in particular, see Diana Newton, North-East England, 1569–1625: Governance, Culture and Identity (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006). See Newton, North-East England, 1569–1625, 143.

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stripped Durham Cathedral in 1539, especially the shrine to Cuthbert, calling it “one of the most sumptuous monuments in all England,” and praising Cuthbert for his intercession for the people of the North.58 If the Cathedral was the main landmark that defined the region, Cuthbert was their mascot. The Protestant antiquaries Hegge and Watson were both dubious of Cuthbert’s miracles, explaining that the monks had probably lied and deceived people into devotion. Hegge’s Legend of St Cuthbert, written in the early seventeenth century, attracted attention, circulating in manuscript form before it was published in three printed editions.59 Hegge certainly denigrates the “superstition” and stories of miraculous healing that were said to have taken place at the shrine, but although he is skeptical of the cult, he, like the Catholic Claxton, is explicitly grateful for the role of Cuthbert’s celebrity in England’s consciousness.60 He celebrates Cuthbert primarily as a protector of the region as opposed to a universal miracle-worker. Hegge specifically plays up episodes in which Cuthbert had guarded Durham against invasion and attack.61 By highlighting Cuthbert’s provisions for the welfare and security of the North, Hegge attempts to reclaim Cuthbert from the universal Catholic “superstition” of healing and miracle working by emphasizing instead his role as patron and protector, demonstrating the crucial role Cuthbert and his cult still played in the consciousness of the people of the North. The dominant trend among Northern antiquarians was to rework local saintly devotion to fall more in line with Protestant ideas of miracles while retaining regional loyalty, but there is one notable exception. Christopher Watson, a more radical Protestant, not only denigrated Cuthbert’s life and miracles but also his historical association with the Synod of Whitby and the Roman Church. Though he praises the Celtic tradition over the Roman, Watson still disdains Cuthbert’s origins, calling him “an Irish man and bastard borne” who was called in from the monastery in Scotland to bring “that devilish doctrine” to England.62 Though it seems contradictory, Watson then portrays the Celtic Cuthbert as representative of Roman Christianity, citing his obedience 58

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Rites of Durham, 4. Evidence from some of the contents and the handwriting of the earliest dated copy, 1593, suggest that William Claxton was the author and compiler. See also A.I. Doyle, “William Claxton and the Durham Chronicles,” in Books and Collectors 1200–1700. Essays presented to Andrew Watson, eds. James P. Carley and Colin G.C. (London: The British Library, 1997), 335–355, see especially 347–8. For the many manuscript and printed editions, see Pattenden, “Robert Hegge of Durham and his St. Cuthbert,” 107–23. Hegge, Legend of St. Cuthbert, 10. Hegge, Legend of St. Cuthbert, 17–18. BL MS Cotton Vitellius C IX, fol. 68r.

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to Rome after Whitby. Watson spends even more time on the Roman abuses from the legacy of his cult, referring mostly to “idolatry” and Cuthbert’s retributive miracles, which, according to Watson, is not very nice behavior for a saint.63 Thus, while Watson merely denigrates medieval superstition in practice, his real goal is to argue for the independence of the Protestant Church. This method is much more in line with the comprehensive histories of Bale and Foxe than with the regional histories of the North. There are several reasons for this: Watson was associated with Matthew Parker and the historians who collected manuscripts for ecclesiastical history specifically in order to reappropriate the history of English Christianity for the Elizabethan Church. Watson also explicitly notes that he relies on Foxe, Bale, and Jewel for the outline of his narrative.64 His structure, then, was like those writing more comprehensive histories, and his goal was to produce his work in three volumes: pre-Augustine Christianity, Augustine to Whitby, and Whitby to the present. Furthermore, as Margaret Harvey has highlighted, Watson was writing in 1574, in the wake of the 1569 Northern Rebellion, which also contributed to his loyalty to the Crown over his rebellious hometown.65 In this way Watson’s work has more in common with national histories, even though he focused on the history of Northeast England.66 Nevertheless, Watson’s attack on Cuthbert, though drawing on the widely circulated works of Bale, Foxe, and Jewel, shows how some aspects of these larger narratives were indeed playing out locally. In other words, in contrast to the notion that antiquarian work is the collection of miscellaneous facts and local/familial minutiae, Watson’s work shows that many local historians analyzed local figures and events in a wider context. Although an important part of the work of local historians was to celebrate their regional identity, they were not unaware of their region’s role in national narratives. My analysis of these local antiquarians’ work shows that there were a variety of ways to negotiate the complementary narratives of national, confessional, and local allegiances. Ultimately, the different treatments of Cuthbert show there was no one way to deal with him; while many Protestants described these areas as the “dark corners of the land,” viewing them as economically, socially, and religiously backwards in comparison with sophistical urban centers, the complex and multi-faceted

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Vitellius, fol. 84r. See also Margaret Harvey, “The Northern Saints,” 258–269. Vitellius, fol. 66r, 86r, 94r. Harvey, “The Northern Saints,” 269. For an analysis of how the various local phenomena comprised by antiquarian and apocalyptic history contributed to the development of English national consciousness in the sixteenth century, see Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss, 45–80.

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reconstructions across the confessional divide contradicts hasty stereotypes of the Northeast as isolated and unlettered.67 These two saints had the potential to be very useful in early modern polemics. Oswald was a king who utilized Celtic Christian missionaries and killed the last major Briton ruler while Cuthbert was a miracle-working, celibacy-advocating monk, the epitome of medieval Catholic identity. As we saw from his entry in the Roman Martyrology, Cuthbert was known for his adherence to Roman tradition after the Synod of Whitby. In some ways, then, the history of Durham was ill suited for Elizabethan Protestantism. In fact, the role of Durham, and Cuthbert in particular, in the Northern Rebellion in 1569 shows the endurance of Roman Catholic commitment in the North in direct opposition to Elizabeth’s Protestant regime. However, regional affinity for their heroes, as well as the different concerns and context of local historians, made these figures palatable and even beloved by many Protestants. Protestant antiquarians did not pounce on the opportunity to play up Oswald’s Celtic imports over Edwin’s Roman conversion, they instead celebrated Oswald as a local war hero. They did not, as national historians did, claim any confessional lineage from the native Britons over the Anglo-Saxon king-converters; indeed, they highlighted the piety and holiness of Oswald in contrast to paganism. Similarly, Cuthbert’s medieval cult, while called out for its crude medieval superstition, still retained great importance to the community. Reworking Cuthbert to fit in a Protestant world was certainly possible, as Hegge, Camden, and others showed. Thus, regional historians framed the past with very different concerns than more widely circulated histories. Social standing, familial lineage, confessional concerns, and, most potently, regional identity all played a dynamic role in the narratives they constructed. Continuing the investigation of different types of supernatural intervention that was begun in previous chapters, we can also look beyond both regional and national debates (and the relationship between the two) to the ways in which these writers viewed God’s role in history. The celebration of Cuthbert’s cult by the Catholic Claxton and the denigration of it by the Protestant Watson reveal that they both believed their primary evidence spoke to the truth of their respective Churches. The fact that they thought the evidence and documentation regarding the medieval cult could shed light on current confessional debates over doctrine and devotional practice meant that they had confidence in the supernatural guidance of temporal affairs; in other words,

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Christopher Hill, “Puritans and ‘The Dark Corners of the Land,’” Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 3–47.

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human history could (sometimes, at least) be useful in authorizing correct theology. Even the moderate Hegge, whose primary concern was not religion, can be seen to agree. Hegge’s main goal, as I have shown, was regional celebration, but the fact that he had to deal with the confessional issues surrounding Cuthbert’s cult meant that he, too, understood the implication of historical evidence on spiritual matters. This particular theoretical framework for analyzing these sources offers interesting questions for further research on local history/chorography and the fabrication of the past, as well as implications for reading antiquarian works as what some scholars are calling “sacred” history.

3

Territorialization of Memory: Local Founder-Saints throughout England

Regional identity was not only important to people in the North; as we will see throughout the rest of this chapter, the local saints who spread Christianity throughout Britain were historical heroes and present friends to the people of the regions in which they were associated. They were commemorated in the names of towns, the dedications of parish churches, and in the rural chapels of early modern Britain. While some of these sites, especially those from the Northern and Western borders, continued relatively uninterrupted, other sites – due to the changes in both intra- and inter-confessional conversations – developed new layers of meaning. Even without a robust textual or oral tradition, a name was enough to ensure a figure’s presence in collective memory. In fact, the vagueness or ambiguity of the figure could actually make them more useful. The imprecision with which a parish name or sacred stump could tell a story allows participants, observers, or devotees to engineer the narrative to fit their present situation. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that “space is a society of named places.”68 Indeed, names can evoke powerful images and narratives, and in doing so they connect history with geography, or time with space. Place names used for commemorative purposes act as symbolic monuments (in Bourdieu’s sense) that greatly influence public memory, inscribing ideological messages about the past into everyday life, thus presenting a certain version of history as normative.69 The countless towns and parish churches named after the saints who spread the gospel no doubt became players in conceptions of the past for the people 68 69

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 168. R.A. Grounds, “Tallahassee, Osceola, and the Hermeneutics of American Place-Names,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69, no. 2: 287–322, quote on 289.

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who lived there. In fact, sometimes the name was enough to keep the legend alive, even when no textual evidence survived to support it. For example, there is no historical Welsh account of the life of St. Asaph, who spread Christianity in North Wales and established a famous monastery there in the late sixth century, yet he is well represented in place names. The Welsh city of St. Asaph as well as St. Asaph Cathedral are dedicated to him. His story is presented through other landmarks bearing his name, including his ash tree, his well, and his valley. Many other places in Wales bear the “asa” associated with his name. Asaph became significant enough to be venerated beyond Wales, as he is included in the Roman Martyrology and virtually all the early modern English collections.70 Similarly, the town of Stone in Staffordshire, while not bearing the actual name of a saint, refers to the story of the town’s conversion to Christianity. Two early Anglo-Saxon martyrs, Ruffin and Wulfad, were killed by their pagan father for their conversion to Christianity after hearing the Gospel from St. Chad. Since then, large stones marked their graves, hence the name of the town, Stone. This legend not only appears in several martyrologies, but Camden notes that it is recorded in the History of Peterborough.71 In addition to towns, the founder-saints were also commemorated in the dedications of parish churches. Even after successive waves of reformation, many people remained emotionally connected to their parish churches, as they contained the symbols and images of their patron saints and surviving elements of their traditional practice. As Alexandra Walsham has argued, this local connection explains the partial/occasional conformity of conservatives in the earlier decades of reform.72 Late medieval churches were filled with saints’ images in altarpieces, windows, rood screens, statues, and some had their own chapels or altars. All these images would have lamps and candles before them, and, in the case of the more popular saints, masses were said at their altars. In his survey of Cornwall, Camden notes landmarks dedicated to Boniface, including “the primitive Church of the Saxons … anciently called Cridiantun, where there is a shrine to Boniface.”73 A church and shrine to Boniface remain in Crediton to this day. The memory of local female saints in particular lay locally in the parish churches and holy wells dedicated to

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His life is included in both Roscarrock’s manuscript version of Lives of the English Saints, CUL MS Add. 3041, 63v, and in Wilson, The English Martyrologe, 114. Roscarrock, CUL MS Add. 3041, 386v; Wilson, The English Martyrologe, 145; Camden, Britannia, 530–531. See Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press,1993), 16. Camden, Britannia, 30.

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them. St. Ebba, a seventh-century Northumbrian virgin and founder of the monastery there, was still venerated at her healing spring. Camden records that there is “nothing of note” in this area except a village called Ebchester, named after Ebba. Camden goes on to note that Ebba was so popular that “she hath many Churches in the island dedicated unto her, which the common sort usually still call Saint Tabbs.”74 Similarly, the civil parish of St. Osyth in Essex used to have a different name, but, because of the popularity of the Anglo-Saxon princess and virgin martyr, it became St. Osyth’s. Osyth was still venerated there even though her religious house was given to a baron by Henry VIII.75 Camden also explains that Suffolk used to be famous for the ancient Iceni tribe but later became known for St. Etheldreda/Audrey, founder of the famous monastery at Ely in East Anglia. Images of these saints, of course, often accompanied their names in these places. As Eamon Duffy noted, virgin martyrs were one of the most common types of saints to be found on rood screens before the screens were removed in the mid sixteenth century.76 From Urith in Devon, Eadburga in Oxfordshire, Edith in Shropshire, Tibba in Rutlandshire, and Werberg in Staffordshire, there was no shortage of local female foundersaints and martyrs represented in visual culture. Local towns and antiquarian documents were not the only records of local founder-saints. As Alison Chapman argued, early modern writers such as Ben Johnson, William Shakespeare, and Michael Drayton “show an intimate familiarity both with the general category of Catholic sainthood and also with a wide range of specific saints … they use hagiographic illusions with striking precision: these writers all clearly know the different versions of saints’ legends, the exact iconographic traditions associated with various saints, and also the saints’ particular areas of spiritual patronage.”77 Thus, the residents of a particular region were not the only ones invested in the connection with their local saints. Rather, the narrative lives of these figures served as powerful emblems in the larger cultural world of early modern England. Monuments, shrines, and other memorial sites carry as much rhetorical power as town names. Indeed, the spaces in which the stories of the past were embedded sheds light on the ways in which sixteenth-century people interpreted the natural environment, including trees, springs, stones, and other

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Camden, Britannia, 779. Camden, Britannia, 351, 374. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 171. Alison Chapman, Patrons and Patron Saints in Early Modern English Literature (London: Routledge, 2013), 5.

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topographical landmarks.78 Both the chapels and natural sites that proliferated in the countryside outnumbered parish churches, serving as reminders of the arrival of Christianity in Britain. Holy wells or springs and “gospel oaks,” where local converter-saints preached the gospel or held occasional services, made up most of the natural landmarks. For example, one famous gospel oak stood near the parish church at Polstead in Suffolk, commemorating the seventh-century missionary, St. Cedd, who first preached under the tree. An annual Gospel Oak service continues there to this day.79 There was a point on the East Anglian coastline named for Saint Edmund the martyr where, according to legend, he knelt to pray. The antiquarian William Blundell tells of a walled well dedicated to St. Oswald at Winwick along with an old tree bearing his name.80 St. Columba, the Irish missionary credited with spreading Christianity in Scotland, has a chapel and a well dedicated to him as well as a rocky outcrop where his footprints are said to be set in stone.81 Another St. Columba has several natural and architectural landmarks relaying how she spread the gospel in Cornwall. This St. Columba was a woman, and much less famous than her male counterpart. A virgin-martyr whose only account comes from hagiographer Nicholas Roscarrock, her story is well attended in the Cornish landscape, including the towns of St Columb Major and St. Columb Minor, St. Columba’s Well, and St Columb Port, which is fed by the river that reportedly filled with her blood after her decapitation. The Red Lane in St. Columb Major also commemorates her martyrdom.82 She is not listed in any liturgical calendar, and no Office or Mass survives for her feast. Remembered largely by folkloric oral tradition, her actual existence is uncertain. Nevertheless, she was an important figure in the popular religious imagination in Cornwall even into the sixteenth century because her story was 78

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For an overview of the recent developments in the conversation on religion and the landscape in early modern Britain, see Alexandra Walsham, “Introduction,” in The Reformation and the Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) 1–18. For earlier discussions of these themes, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1983), and Schama, Landscape and Memory. Roy Vickery, Garlands, Conkers, and Mother-Die: British and Irish Plant-lore (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 104–105. William Blundell, Crosby Records: A Chapter of Lancashire Recusancy. Containing a Relation of Troubles and Persecutions, ed. Thomas Gibson (1560–1638), 55–56; see Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 212. For more on Columba’s prints and the sacred footprint in general, see Alexandra Walsham, “Footprints and Faith: Religion and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain and Ireland,” in God’s Bounty?: The Churches and the Natural World, ed. Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (New York: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), 169–183. Roscarrock, CUL MS Add. 3041, 131r–v.

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embedded in the landscape. In walking the path of St. Columba and recounting her tale, locals engaged in an imaginative participation in the story of her life, death, and life-beyond-death. In redescribing the arrival and spread of Christianity in their region, early modern English people could create, reimagine, and reconstruct a future inspired by the martyrs of the past. Some sites were not only reminders or markers, but also miraculous places of divine intercession and healing. For example, St. Hilda’s chapel at Whitby in Yorkshire was famous for healing snakebites, and the area surrounding the chapel contained stones that looked like snakes.83 Even in the late sixteenth century, antiquarian Christopher Watson noted that the locals took him to the place where Hilda turned serpents to stone.84 Devotees to local Irish converter St. Bega in Cumbria believed in miracles associated with her relics, especially the famous stone imprinted with her knees. In Northumbria, the shrines and holy wells dedicated to St. Oswald were still known for their healing power in the late sixteenth century.85 As we saw in the example of Winefride, wells, springs, and fountains were still frequented by locals, as the waters were famous for their healing powers. Sacred waters were important components of pre-Christian religions in Britain, but after the Christianization of these traditional holy sites, they became almost exclusively associated with local founder-saints.86 Wells, springs and fountains dedicated to saints across the country were a fundamental element of late medieval geography. From Anglo-Saxon virgin martyrs like Sexburga in Kent, Osyth in Essex, and Witburga in Norfolk, to male figures such as the converter of the midlands, St. Chad, who had healing wells associated with him in both Staffordshire and London. Even Bede had a healing well dedicated to him.87 Indeed, Bede was a popular figure in the North in his own right, despite not being officially canonized until 1899.88 These examples show 83 84 85 86 87

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See also Wilson, Martyrologe, and Camden, Britannia, 751. BL MS Cotton Vitellius C IX, fol. 63r. Harpsfield, Historia Ecclesiastica Anglicana, “Septimum Saeculum,” Caput XXVI, 40–41. Yorke, The Conversion of Britain, 255. HEHL MS Ellesmere 1128. For more on healing wells, see J. Rattue, The Living Stream: Holy Wells in Historical Context (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1995); for countless examples miraculous healing tales at wells and springs in early modern Britain, see Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, chapter 6. Hegge, The Legend of St. Cuthbert, 3. See also Scutts, “Truth Never Needed the Protection of Forgery,” 282; Allen Frantzen, “The Englishness of Bede from Then to Now,” 229–242, and David Rollason, “The Cult of Bede,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bede, ed. Scott DeGregorio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 193–200; and Richard N. Bailey, “Bede’s Bones,” in New Offerings, Ancient Treasures: Studies in Medieval Art for George Henderson, eds. Paul Binski and William Noel (Stroud: Sutton, 2001), 165–186.

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that the English were, in many ways, personally and emotionally connected to these figures as guardians and healers in addition to viewing them as historical figures. In addition to being frequented by locals, these places often attracted pilgrims from out of town. Many scholars have shown how pilgrimage can offer an escape from everyday life, providing a sense of “communitas” that goes beyond normal social distinctions.89 Canterbury was still a place for Catholic pilgrimage in the early modern period, as it was the founding spot of English Christianity, as was St. Alban’s in Hertfordshire. Until its destruction in 1541, vast numbers of pilgrims flocked to the shrine of St. Etheldreda at Ely, and despite the loss of her relics, her feast day on June 23 continued to be celebrated in the Cathedral.90 The shrines of local founder-saints throughout the countryside, especially in the west, were still frequented by local Catholics and Protestants alike. In addition to serving as reminders of the Christian foundation narrative, these places were sites of inter- and intra-confessional conflict, compromise, and collaboration. Some served as rallying centers for Catholics, such as Biddleston Hall near Holystone, where a spring dedicated to Gregorian missionary St. Paulinus was said to have converted 3,000 in the seventh century, eventually becoming one of Northumberland’s chief centers of Catholic worship and proselytizing activity.91 Similarly, St Etheldreda’s Church in Ely Place in London was originally part of the palace of the bishops of Ely, but after the reformation the palace was used by the Spanish ambassadors, enabling Roman Catholic worship to continue in the church. The shrines of several saints in the North of England had also been rallying points for rebellion; the banner of St. Cuthbert was one of the main rallying symbols during the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, and the suppression of St. Wilfrid’s feast day caused an uproar in the parish of Watton, which soon turned to rebellion as the Pilgrimage of Grace spread.92 These instances reveal the conflicts not only between the English Catholic community and the Protestant monarchy, but also those within the international Catholic Church. In the previous chapter I used Winefride’s Well to discuss the tension between these traditional devotions and post-Tridentine

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See, for example, Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), and more recently Colin Morris and Peter Roberts, eds., Pilgrimage: The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Adair, The Pilgrim’s Way, 78. Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 190. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 395.

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caution, and how this translated into friction between periphery and center, or between local practice and centralized authority.93 Indeed, as Po-Chia Hsia has noted, the Tridentine Church’s desire to present itself as triumphant and militant lent itself to a focus on universalism, which could be in tension with national practices that did not contribute to this vision.94 When it comes to the traditions and practices on the ground, however, the promotion and encouragement of local traditions can be mutually beneficial for both center and periphery. A bull from Pope Paul V in 1607 echoes the letter from Pope Gregory the Great above, encouraging the use of pre-existing devotional sites and emphasizing the benefits of local pilgrimage. The Pope specifically mentioned the importance of the connection between the devotees and their historical predecessors, which would stir them to “prove themselves worthy sons of those forefathers.”95 In other words, the Pope encouraged sixteenth-century devotees to connect with their local history, while at the same time ensuring that the practices and rituals did not contradict the Tridentine vision. Like the early converter-saints themselves, the agents of the post-Reformation mission were willing to engage with local traditions and spaces, practicing careful negotiation rather than aggressive acculturation. Just as Gregory had advised Augustine in the seventh century, this was the sixteenth-century Jesuit strategy, often resulting in a synthesis of post-Tridentine and traditional religion. Though many of the above examples come from the countryside, saintly devotion was not just a rural phenomenon. Due to the distance from central authorities, places like Cornwall, Northumberland, and Cumbria escaped a lot of the destruction that struck central England, thus preserving many traditional sites. However, the legends of saints involved in England’s Christian foundation were represented in image and ritual in urban London as well. For example, Saint Erkenwald, who converted King Sebba and the East Saxons in the seventh century, was buried in Old St. Paul’s Cathedral, and his shrine remained a major pilgrimage attraction until the mid-sixteenth century, when the shrine was plundered under the orders of Henry VIII. Erkenwold remained buried there, along with Sebba, until the remains of their shrines were burned in the Great Fire in 1666. Camden mentions that Erkenwold was still buried there, and that his feast day had been a big celebration at Westmin93 94 95

For more on the tension between local clergy and the central authority, see Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History. Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 125. J. Hagan, “Miscellanea Vaticano-Hibernica, 1580–1631,” in Archivum Hibernicum, 3 (1914), 260–264: Vos, quemadmodum accepimus, gloriamini, Maiores vestri tanta in Deum pietate fuisse, ut Hibernia meruerit hac de causa appellari Sanctorum Insula: igitur exhibete vos dignam eorum progeniem. See also Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 195.

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ster Abbey until the institution of the Book of Common Prayer in 1549.96 Also in London were parish churches dedicated to seventh-century Anglo-Saxon founder-saints, including St. Ethelburga-the-Virgin Church and St. Botolph’s, Aldersgate – both rare medieval buildings that survived the Reformation, the fires, and the blitz. The major places of learning in the sixteenth century, Oxford and Cambridge, also bear markers of founder-saints. In the fifteenth century, St. Frideswide (a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon virgin and founder of the monastery) was declared patron saint of Oxford. Her shrine was and still is located in Christ Church Cathedral. St. Etheldreda, another seventh-century Anglo-Saxon founder of a major monastery, is the patron saint of Cambridge. Beyond England, the missionary efforts of the early English saints are remembered in the Continental landscape. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries secular priests in the Netherlands promoted devotion to the founding saints of their national church, the English Willibrord and Boniface.97 Cadoc, a popular Cornish converter-saint, is venerated in Brittany, with many churches and chapels named after him in northern France. The vast majority of saintly spaces recorded in these antiquarian works were British, Anglo-Saxon, Welsh, or Irish saints of the first eight centuries, revealing the indelible mark of Christian foundation narratives in English memory. Nevertheless, the changes that the early modern period brought to these spaces means that values, ideas about holiness, and thus historical memory were constantly in flux. These spaces serve as sites of negotiation between religious, national, and local identity, situated within ever changing international relationships in this context of reform. Thus national identity is not homogeneous, essential, or fixed, but rather provides a category through which people make sense of themselves. These examples demonstrate new ways of looking at these spaces as well as their role in constituting complementary regional and national pride.

4

Liturgy, Time, and Narrative

In addition to space, Christian origin narratives also play out in the organization of time. But examinations of liturgy allow us to look not at conceptions

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Camden, Britannia, 315. Frijhoff, Embodied Belief, 130. Frijhoff notes that this promotion was a strategy designed to counter Protestant accusations of papal hegemony with more local/traditional forms of worship. Willibrord and Boniface became the patrons of a national confraternity as well as many underground churches.

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of historical, linear time, but rather the ways in which we mark days, weeks, and months of the year. Time, according to Ricoeur, includes the linear succession of daily life with reference to the past, present, and future.98 Liturgical calendars and breviaries act as narratives that not only organize the cycle of the year but also rennarate “the past” for meaning in the present and prefiguration of the future. In these calendars and breviaries, events from linear time are constructed by and absorbed into liturgical memory. Historical experience is incorporated into the cyclical reenactment of paradigmatic events; recent or contemporary experiences can be imagined and reimagined through the liturgy. In other words, “the past” can be reconstituted in light of the ever changing present, and current events can be framed and reframed in light of a malleable and changing past through repetitions and reenactments. Before Edward’s injunctions in 1552, the national religious calendar shared its rhythms with the rest of Roman Christendom while also including local devotions. For example, a sixteenth-century perpetual calendar from the Northeast features pictures of saints and their emblems on the recto side. Alongside New Testament figures and Church Fathers are seventh-century Anglo-Saxon saints, including Edwin, the Northumbrian king who was converted to Christianity through Roman missionaries, the famous King Oswald, Guthlac the monk, and Botolph, who helped convert the East Anglians and established a Christian church in the county of Suffolk.99 As Eamon Duffy put it, it was in feasts, festivals, and ritual observance that “lay Christians found the paradigms and the stories which shaped their perception of the world and their place in it.”100 There were several local variants of the Roman Rite, the most common liturgical rite in the Catholic Church, still in use even after the break with Rome, including the Uses of Salisbury, York, Hereford, Bangor, and Lincoln. These local versions depart from the Roman Rite most notably in their liturgical calendars, which commemorate a large number of local English saints and events. By far the most common of these local variants was the Use of Salisbury, or Sarum Rite, which was widely used throughout southern England (and beyond) until Edward VI’s injunction ordered all service books be destroyed.101

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Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3: 109. CUL Doc. 1370. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 11. Richard Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 418–419. Pfaff also provides the manuscript history of these books as well as their uses from the sixth to the early sixteenth centuries.

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It was restored under Mary from 1553–1558 and finally abolished under Elizabeth by the royal injunctions of 1559, though it continued to be used in English Catholic colleges on the Continent. Historian and cataloguer F.H. Dickinson listed over 30 printings of the Sarum breviary itself between 1500–1544, and at least as many from 1554 to 1557, along with four of the York breviaries and one of Hereford.102 These breviaries renarrated Christianity’s arrival and spread in England, valorizing local heroes and, oftentimes, connecting with communities abroad and bestowing international significance to England as a “blessed nation.” Most of the earliest editions of these breviaries came from Continental printers.103 The first of the Sarum service books ever printed was the breviary, which was much harder to typeset than a missal. Based on this, liturgist Richard Pfaff concludes that there must have been a demand for printed books for the daily office.104 Pfaff speculates that the Continental dominance was “a function more of English technological backwardness” and concludes that it was the overseas printers who correctly perceived a demand.105 English printers did not have the high quality type-fonts and woodcut decoration of the Continental printers.106 These liturgical books were printed mostly for use in cathedrals, chapels, and parish churches in the South.107 Thus there was a market for local breviaries in cathedral and parish churches through the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, and the relatively large number of printed editions attests to the celebration of these local figures in the liturgy. Indeed, most of the saints listed in the later Sarum breviaries are from the first seven centuries of Christianity in England, thus recounting its arrival and spread throughout the island. Most extant breviaries include Roman missionaries like Augustine of Canterbury, important Northumbrian figures like

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FH Dickenson, A list of printed service books, according to the ancient uses of the Anglican church (London: J. Masters, 1850); it is important to note that there was no standard printed Sarum missal, and the bibliographic information (dates, printers, current owners) laid out in Dickinson’s appendices explain that each one is an independent work. See also Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England, 425–27. Most of these dozens of printed editions can be found in the BL, Bodl., or CUL. See Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England, 546–7. The first breviaries were printed in Cologne in 1475, of which only fragments survive, and in Venice in 1483, which was stolen from the CUL and is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, according to E.G. Duff, Fifteenth Century English Books (Oxford, 1917), no. 61. Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England, 548–549. G.D. Painter, “Two Missals Printed for Wynkyn de Worde,” British Library Journal 2, no. 1 (1976): 159–171. Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England, 550–553.

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Cuthbert, the Anglo-Saxon missionaries to the south like Birinus, who converted Wessex to Christianity, and even converter-saints from the Celtic fringe, like Petroc. One Sarum Calendar still in use in the latter half of the sixteenth century (as it notes the death of Queen Mary) includes the saints above along with Gregory the Great and Felix, who had a feast day as well a special feast day devoted to those martyred as part of his mission.108 The spread of the Sarum Use on the eve of the Reformation in England is evidenced by the late addition of “new” feast days, which are, incidentally, all dedicated to foundersaints including Chad, Frideswide, Winefride and David of Wales.109 The York breviary includes similar (though fewer) saints than Sarum, but it gives the Whitby saints Hilda and Wilfrid the most distinction.110 The other breviaries, though not as widely used, also show which saints were celebrated locally in the sixteenth century. The Hereford breviary celebrates seventh-century saints from all over England, both Celtic and Anglo-Saxon, including David of Wales, Botolph, Wilfrid, and Osyth. The Passional includes Eadburga, Birinus, and King Ethelbert, who had been venerated locally in Hereford since the Anglo-Saxon period; there were even frequent memoriae for Ethelbert, and in the late fifteenth century a mass was added to pray that his relics be found.111 In the liturgical renarration and celebration of each of these local converter-saints, a historical narrative of Christian conversion continues to be read by parishioners, not only offering them a version of the foundation story, but also manufacturing a strong sense of England as holy and chosen by God. Though different than the work of historians and antiquarians, devotional culture continued to solidify Augustine, Gregory the Great, and especially local founder-saints and martyrs in collective memory; while they took on a new significance and meaning in light of continuous and shifting efforts of reform, they functioned to produce a strong national sentiment. While liturgy and devotion could serve as a unifying force in a region, it was also used to draw confessional boundaries, as historical narratives played out in ritual practice. For example, early on Henry VIII’s regime had attempted to establish a new relationship between English saints and the papacy. Henrician clergy were instructed to cross out every use of the word papa in the liturgy,

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SAL MS 286. Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England, 445–463. The Use of York was suppressed by Henry VIII in favor of the Sarum Rite, which may partially explain why it has fewer printed editions, but there are dozens of extant manuscripts, which attests to its use in Northeast England. See Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England, 451. Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England, 475.

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which means that St. Augustine was no longer sent to England by the “pope,” but by the “bishop of Rome.” Because Augustine’s mission was no longer referred to as papal prerogative, jussu pape was replaced with jussu regis.112 In places with reforming parish priests, clergy began to challenge papal legacy in England on liturgical grounds. For example, a parish priest in Gloucestershire blotted out dozens of passages not only from the feasts of obvious “pro-papal” saints like Peter or Thomas Becket, but also from a locally famous Anglo-Saxon saint, Aldhelm. This is likely because of the Easter dating controversy in which Aldhelm famously sided with Roman Christianity over the practices of the British Christians in Cornwall and Devon.113 Cuthbert and Wilfrid were also crossed out in some of the York breviaries for the same reason.114 Thus this earliest phase of reform involved the censorship of certain narratives of the past, particularly with founders associated with the arrival of Christianity from Rome. (While the early modern political management of the cult of the saints should not be underemphasized, saints were always political.) In 1552, Edward VI created a new calendar with the passage of “an act for the keeping of holy days and fasting days,” and Elizabeth reinstated this calendar with the 1559 Prayer Book.115 While this certainly would have had some impact on the memory of local saints and thus the Christian origin stories that were told, these purgings of the calendar were easier to dictate than to enforce. Conformist parishioners wanted old saints’ days to be properly observed, and local clerics also made sure that no one was performing “bodily labor” on saints’ days and holy days.116 As we have seen, many local communities continued to celebrate on feast days not included in the Elizabethan Calendar, and even without an abundance of official saints’ days, the year was still shaped by ritual observances.117 For example, David Cressy notes that the church courts had their own legal calendar, which included law days framed by old feast days,

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Portiforum secundum usum Sarum, noviter impressum et plurimis purgatum mendis (London, 1544), sig. AAii. See Aude De Mezerac-Zanetti, “Liturgical Changes to the Cult of the Saints under Henry VIII,” Saints and Sanctity, eds. Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), 182–183. SCL MS 152. See Mezerac-Zanetti, “Liturgical Changes,” 184. See, for example, the York Breviary, Bodl. MS Gough Liturg. 1. For attempts by the Henrician and Edwardian regimes to suppress holy days and examples of their continuance, see Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 5. For many examples of petitions to celebrate saints’ days, see Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 37–38. For a full social and ethnographic history of the calendar in Elizabethan England, see Cressy, Bells and Bonfires (1989).

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including that of Chad, Boniface, and Botolph. Cressy points out the irony that “ecclesiastical courts, whose tasks included enforcing the discipline of the reformed religion, should adhere to the pre-Reformation calendar and perpetuate the memory of [these] saints.”118 Popular almanacs also kept the unofficial saints’ days, and the second edition of the calendar in the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer included them in black letters (which continued in subsequent editions).119 Thus, it was not only Catholics on the fringe who continued to celebrate, or at least encounter, these local founding figures in the liturgy: reformers and conformists still commemorated these local heroes (though perhaps without the sacramentalism). As shown with the antiquarian treatment of St. Oswald above, regional pride was important part of identity negotiation; even if these local saints were no longer venerated as such and, more likely, were criticized for their superstitious cults, they served as meaning-making figures for the community and as tools of national identity formation. Long after the break with Rome, then, the founders of Christianity on the island retained a calendrical place in English society. For example, one of the alternatives to Augustine as the founding father of English Christianity was Joseph of Arimathea, whom Protestants not only remembered but also celebrated in a way that resembles saintly devotion. Many Protestant historians used the Joseph legend to prove Britain’s Apostolic (as opposed to Roman) Christian origins, and, as Alexandra Walsham shows in her discussion of the Glastonbury Thorn, the objects and spaces surrounding the story solidified its place in the Protestant imagination of the past.120 According to legend, upon arriving in Glastonbury with the Holy Grail, Joseph set his walking staff in the ground. The staff took root and grew into a thorn tree, which blooms every Christmas to celebrate the birth of Christ. Glastonbury was a popular pilgrimage destination until the dissolution of the Abbey in 1539, but there is evidence that people continued to visit the ruins throughout the sixteenth century.121 There is no mention of

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Cressy, Bells and Bonfires, 11. William Keating Clay, ed., Liturgical Services. Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer Set Forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Cambridge, 1847), 435–455. This is a printed edition of the 1559 and 1560 (Latin) editions of the Book of Common Prayer, as well as two separate printings of the litany. Alexandra Walsham, “The Holy Thorn of Glastonbury: The Evolution of a Legend in Post-Reformation England,” Parergon 21, no. 2 (2004): 1–25. See also Jack Cunningham, “‘A Young Man’s Brow and an Old Man’s Beard’: The Rise and Fall of Joseph of Arimathea in English Reformation Thought,” Theology 112, no. 868 (2009): 251–259. See William Weston, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, ed. and trans. Philip Caraman (London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1955), 111–112.

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this legend in medieval sources, and therefore it could have been transmitted via oral tradition. The “staff” motif was also common in medieval hagiography, so it could have attached itself to the Joseph legend along the way. Wherever it came from, it was used in the early modern period as evidence of the unbroken continuity of the Church in the British Isles. The legend grew in the seventeenth century and eventually played a role in Jacobean politics.122 Even if saints and their relics and spaces were no longer regarded as conduits of holiness, certain historical ones like Joseph, however apocryphal, remained part of the English historical narrative for centuries. While some traditions changed or were created anew, others had continued their local feast days. Most of the sermons in Mirk’s Festial were designed to be used on festa ferianda, days dedicated to saints on which work was forbidden.123 Even if the saint was no longer venerated in the parish church, devotees would celebrate the feast days in their homes.124 In his description of Dorset, Camden spends a lot of time describing the continuing devotion to St. Aldhelm, who spread Christianity among the West Saxons. Though the town was no longer called Aldhelmsburg at the time of his visit, he notes that on his feast day “there was here kept a great Faire, at which usually there is a band of armed men appointed to keep the peace among so many strangers resorting thither.”125 In addition to parochial and town dedication, relationships with saints were also rooted in occupation. The feast day of St. Piran continued for centuries, as the cult became associated with tinners who continued to recount the stories of his exploits and experiences.126 In Cornwall, Columba’s feast continued to be celebrated locally on the Thursday following All Hallows day, and Eneda, a Welsh converter-saint, was celebrated on the first Wednesday in March with a procession to one of the two wells that bear her name.127 Indeed, many of these saints survived in popular life as patrons of holidays, which often included recourse to a holy well or shrine and a reading or hearing of saints’ lives.128 There were even plays based on many of these legends.

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Richard Broughton, The Ecclesiastical Historie of Great Britaine (Douai, 1633), 110–111, 136–138. See Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 494. Barbara Harvey, “Work and Festa Ferianda in Medieval England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 23, no. 4: 289–308. See Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 156. McClain, Lest We Be Damned, 176. Camden, Britannia, 86–87. Roscarrock Lives of the Saints, 167. Roscarrock, Lives of the Saints, 68, 73. For more on the religion and identity in early modern Cornwall, see the essays in Cornwall in the Age of Rebellion, ed Philip Payton (United Kingdom:  University of Exeter Press, 2021).

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Roscarrock mentions St. Columba’s play still being performed in Cornwall in the late sixteenth century.129 In performing the walk of Columba as well as other plays and liturgical reenactments, participants sacralized versions of the past and solidified it in collective memory. By “sacralize” I do not mean merely that they made the past “religious” (i.e., associated with the supernatural or a Christian identity, though it did do that); rather, I am arguing that beyond merely retelling the past, these yearly reenactments and liturgical renarrations elevates these versions of the past to something analogous to scripture – something timeless and True. I have used the term “devotional culture” to refer to a variety of activities from pilgrimages, festivals, and elaborate plays. By “devotional” or “ritual” culture I do not mean to indicate that they are not also regional, national, or political. Indeed, I would argue that “religious” and “secular” reenactments work to authorize the past in the same way. The contemporary bodies of the reenactors and the audience highlights that questions of the past are being posed from the vantage point of the present.130 This embodied, mimetic, affective ritual (echoed in monuments and place names) mobilizes myths of origin to constitute regional and national identity, fabricate an idea of shared values, and draw social boundaries. Reenactments narrativize history in a way that makes living bodies “stand in” for the dead past and leaves a deep-rooted reference for the sake of the present reader, making certain versions of the past remarkably durable. In religious contexts we often use terms like “ritual and devotional culture,” but in secular or public contexts we use terms like “reenactment” or “memorialization.” These words also draw boundaries and create varying conceptions of what is going on in these moments; in other words, they create ideas about what is “religious” versus what is “secular” or “national” or “political.” Our terms (liturgy or ritual versus reenactment) not only construct definitions of “religion” and ideas of the “secular,” but also masks the ways in which reenactments of national or regional histories powerfully authorize versions of the past and raise them to the level of a sort of timeless claim, making those narratives much harder to criticize or rethink. The imaginative power of the liturgical celebrations or plays or reenactments not only represents a certain historical narrative, but also evokes affective responses from participants. Ricoeur’s Mimesis, after all, is not confined to the “text” or the medium transmitting 129 130

Roscarrock, Lives of the Saints, 67–68. For more on bodies and embodiment in reenactment studies, see Amanda Card, “Body and Embodiment,” in Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms, eds. Vanessa Agnew, Juliane Tomane, and Jonathan Lamb (New York: Routledge, 2020).

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the narrative, but also extends to action on one side and understanding on the other. Telling and retelling the stories of Christian conversion configures and synthesizes a collection of lives into a meaningful whole, which can be understood from the end to the beginning and from beginning to the end, allowing one to repeatedly “read time backwards.” Renarration and reenactment re-cycles and makes the past “reappear” in the present. In other words, repetition gives a sort of necessity to the temporal movement of the narrative – an imagined past providing hope for an imagined future.

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Collections of Saints’ Lives: Foregrounding the Celtic Legacy

Authority is not an element that happens to be found in a particular figure or text; indeed, as this book has shown, authorization is contingent, dynamic, and relational. There is nothing unique about, say, Augustine of Canterbury as a figure, Bede as an author, or the Gregorian origin narrative in particular that made it a powerful tool in the cultural toolbox. Its authoritative status is rooted in the community that held it as such; as Bruce Lincoln puts it, authority is not an entity but an effect.131 An example of this can be seen in early modern English collections of saints’ lives; the authors and editors of these collections mobilized very different figures as authorizing, reflecting the centrality of community in granting sacred status to figures. Central to the debate in polemical histories between Protestants like Bale, Jewel, and Foxe, and Catholics like Stapleton and Persons was the independence of the early British Christians. As discussed in chapter two, Protestants attempted to display the corruption of the Roman Church spread by the Anglo-Saxons, while Catholic historians countered by disparaging pre-Roman Christianity for its “errors” and its failure to convert most of the island. This debate can be detected, though to a lesser extent, in the antiquarian and chorographical works of local historians. For example, in his Perambulation of Kent William Lambarde emphasizes that the Britons had received Christianity long before Augustine brought the Roman version, eventually corrupting the true faith of the island.132 Even in the liturgical sources we can see the battle over historical narratives playing out in the hands of both the state and local clerics. However, the hagiographers who published early modern collections of vitae do not emphasize the tensions between the Christianities; Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Celtic converter-saints

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Lincoln, Authority: Construction and Corrosion, 6. Lambarde, Perambulation of Kent, 16.

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are celebrated alongside one another. The collections examined below were modeled on the genre of medieval hagiographies, and the emphasis is placed on the saints and martyrs who helped spread the gospel locally. This section focuses on three collections of saints’ lives: John Wilson’s English Martyrologe, Nicholas Roscarrock’s Lives of the Saints, and Lives of Women Saints of Our Countrie England, whose author is unknown. The authors are all Catholic, but unlike the introductory material in the national historical works of Stapleton and Persons, none of them include any overtly polemical addresses in their prefaces. While they are obviously embedded in a post-Reformation context, the stories of founder-saints do not seem to be in the service of intraconfessional debates over a specifically “English” spatial or national identity (as we saw in chapter two), nor do they seem to participate in interconfessional disputes over Roman origins. Rather, and in line with local religious identity in the North and the West, what comes forth is a loyalty to regional saints. Writing in the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century, the author of the Lives of Women Saints of Our Countrie England draws on Bede and fifteenthcentury hagiographer John Capgrave as well as contemporary early modern sources, including Cesare Baronio ‘s Annales Ecclesiastici. A section in the “Notes Before the Lives” is devoted to explaining why they included Irish and Scottish saints in a book about English women (they included Welsh saints in this martyrology as well, but since they do not address it as an exception in this section of his notes we can assume that they instinctively included Wales in this imagining of England).133 He explains that, in the time of the Saxons, Northumbria was the most powerful kingdom, and Christianity was able to flourish there largely due to the contribution of Irish and Scottish missionaries. He mentions examples such the Irish virgin St. Modwen, who “founded sundry monasteries of holy virgins in this land.” Drawing on Bede, he explains that there was “such friendship, society, and familiarity between the Religious of [Ireland] and England that gentlemen and others in great abundance went thither to learn both religious life and good letters.” His lengthiest example is that of a man, St. Egbert, who went from a Northumbrian monastery to receive

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BL, Stowe MS 949, facsimile in The Lives of Women Saints of our Countrie of England, Also some other Lives of Holie Women Written by some of our ancient fathers, ed. C. Horstmann, EETS, 86 (1886). It is possible that this is a translation of the lost Latin ‘Manuscript of the women Saintes of England’ by Robert Buckland to which Nicholas Roscarrock refers on several occasions in CUL, Add MS 3041. See also Catherine Sanok, “The Lives of Women Saints of Our Countrie of England: Gender and Nationalism in Recusant Hagiography” in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, Corthell, et.al.. eds., (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 261–280.

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training in Ireland, and from there served as a missionary all over Europe; his vita is included in the Roman, Irish, and Slavic martyrologies and in the metrical calendar of York.134 In highlighting Celtic contributions and including British saints like Winefride, the author’s goal is not to promote these saints over Anglo-Saxon ones; indeed, his list includes mostly seventh-century Anglo-Saxon virgins including Ethelburga, founder of Barking Abbey; Werberga, patron saint of Chester; and Etheldreda (or Audrey), whose association with Wilfrid, spokesman for the Roman position at the Synod of Whitby, made her an unpopular figure among Protestant historians. Instead of these debates, this collection is embedded in the context of martyrdom, as we can see from the fact that the Irish, British, Welsh and Anglo-Saxon women who faced persecution and death are celebrated alongside one another, meant to serve as inspiration and examples for male readers, or “the perfecter sex,” who potentially face the same fate in Elizabethan England.135 This focus on martyrdom naturally provides a history of Christian conversion in England and the spread of the faith in the first seven centuries. The narrative constructed in this hagiography is one of international cooperation as well as local pride in the spread of the gospel, which is reiterated through the devotional element of the genre. For example, the author highlights the connection of the readers to the saints through the shared space of the land: most of these saints “have been bread in this land, where we ourselves have been born, walked on this earth on which we walk, filled this very air which we draw with their renowned fame, blessed it with their merits, magnified it with their miracles, and enriched it with their sacred bones and bodies.”136 This text reflects the continuance of the belief of the immanence of the holy. Through its manifestation of the sacred status of the landscape, the virgin’s body serves as a consecrated and powerful symbol of the continuity of English Christianity from its ancient British past to the present day. In this way, the virginal and uncorrupted bodies of female saints not only reveal conceptions of sanctity in this period, but also serve as instruments of national memory, transmitting the historical narrative of England’s Christian conversion. Another collection of saints’ lives from this period does not shy away from explaining the origins and spread of Christianity by a combination of Celtic,

134 135 136

Lives of Women Saints, 11. Lives of Women Saints, 10. Lives of Women Saints, 9.

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British, and Roman forces.137 Its author, Nicholas Roscarrock was originally from the parish of St. Endelient of the north coast of Cornwall. He was educated at Exeter College at Oxford and later began studying law in London at the Inner Temple (one of the four inns of court), where he became friends with antiquarians William Camden and Richard Carew. He eventually wound up imprisoned in the Tower for recusancy, where he met Lord William Howard and other influential Catholics. In the early seventeenth century he lived under the protection of Lord Howard in Cumberland, where he wrote his Lives.138 Like the author of Lives of Women Saints, neither of these hagiographer/historians nor the people on the ground who served as both their informants and their audience saw the celebration of their Celtic or British Christian tradition as antithetical to the institutional Roman Church. In fact, there is a sense of pride that comes out of these works regarding the idea that their spiritual founders had traveled to them from famous places. Roscarrock begins by listing the saints “to have graced our Island of great Britain, Ireland, and other British Islands bordering about it,” thus conceptualizing all these saints as “English.”139 While Roscarrock emphasizes seclusion, hardship, miracle working, and martyrdom, fitting the medieval model discussed in chapter three, his collection was not in the service of constructing new cults nor resurrecting old ones, but more of an antiquarian desire to record the devotion of saints that still existed. An attempt to catalog every local saint on the island, the manuscript is nearly 500 folios with almost a thousand entries. He includes an extensive bibliography, drawing on historians and hagiographers from John of Tynemouth to Cesare Baronio as well as antiquarians and chorographers like John Leland and William Camden. He also cites Nicholas Harpsfield’s Historia Anglicana several times. According to Orme’s Introduction, Roscarrock’s original information (mostly related to Cornwall and Devon) came from oral sources – stories he gathered from relatives and friends in other parts of Cornwall – as well as material sources, which consisted of descriptions of chapels, wells, parish churches, and monasteries.140 Focusing on this part of the collection, it is clear that the local landscape and custom in the West reflects the understanding that a Celtic missionary 137

138 139 140

CUL MS Add. 3041; the work related to Cornwall and Devon were edited and printed in Nicholas Orme, ed., Lives of the Saints: Cornwall and Devon, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, vol. 35 (1992). I am citing from the printed version unless otherwise noted. Orme, “Introduction,” in Live of the Saints, 4–14. Roscarrock, Lives of the Saints, 53. Roscarrock, Lives of the Saints, 71–73. See also Orme, “Introduction,” in Lives of the Saints, 41.

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effort began in the fifth century from Wales. Roscarrock also included calendars of local feast days and relic lists. Because Cornwall was not conquered by the Saxons until the ninth century, the converter-saints of these region are almost exclusively British, Welsh, and Irish.141 In 1540, Leland recorded some of these saints’ lives and the local rituals that celebrate them, including those of Nectan, Petroc, Boniface, and Piran.142 In the early seventeenth century, Roscarrock noted still-popular saints like the Welsh missionary Cadoc and the Irish princess Burien, who traveled to England to convert the local people to Christianity.143 It was the Irish Saint Piran who became the patron saint of Cornwall, and Roscarrock recalls seeing Piran’s relics being paraded up and down the countryside during the reign of Queen Mary, noting that there is still a chapel, popular with locals, not far from the village of Padstow. Even into the late sixteenth century local parishioners were making donations to Piran’s foot at Perranzabuloe.144 Furthermore, a few of these local cults spread beyond Cornwall: Petroc became the patron of eighteen churches and chapels in Devon as opposed to his six in Cornwall, and Nectan and Piran became patrons of parish churches throughout England. Roscarrock also noted that a few of Piran’s bones wound up in a shrine in Essex, and his feast day was still celebrated in places like Herefordshire.145 Roscarrock, well-aware of the polemical arguments in the histories of Harpsfield and others, did not frame a Celtic Christianity that came from Ireland as a challenge nor a foil to the Augustine conversion narrative, but rather he saw the celebration of local Celtic saints as a point of regional pride as well as evidence of a sacred golden age and England’s special election. Like Lives of Women Saints, Roscarrock’s text also reflects the idea that saints were immanently present – their relationship to the landscape through the natural environment as well as their bodies connected the devotee to the saint, the past, as well as to the realm of the divine. In her description of encouragement tactics by Jesuits like Robert Southwell, Lisa McClain notes that Cornish Christians did not need to follow Southwelll’s suggestion to set up makers or

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142 143 144 145

For more on the Irish birthrights of local English saints, see R. Sharpe, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives: An Introduction to Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), especially 1–8. Though many saints venerated in Cornwall were said to be from Ireland, these claims may be more legend rather than historical reality. Lucy Smith, ed., The Itinerary of John Leland (London: George Bell & Sons, 1907) 187, 230, 232–235. Roscarrock, Lives of the Saints, 61–64. Roscarrock, Lives of the Saints, 105–108. Roscarrock, Lives of the Saints, 165, 158–9, 166–167.

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reminders of saints because places like rocks and rivers already did this, physically connecting to the saints of the past.146 In the case of the West, the majority of these were local founder-saints, representing a foundation narrative featuring not Augustine or Roman missionaries, but the missionary saints who brought Christianity from Ireland and Wales. This celebration of an ancient, pre-Augustinian brand of Christianity did not preclude the Catholics in the North or West from participating in or identifying with contemporary Roman Christianity. For example, the Cornish community in particular collaborated with Catholics in England and abroad, and the English mission supported local Catholic communities by importing resources inclidng books, vestments, and parish priests.147 Thus the variety of myths of origin and founder-saints were not hotly contested at the local level, and the deep connection with the landscape and the attachment to saintly devotion constructed the past (and one’s relationship to it) differently than the way the histories of Stapleton and Harpsfield did. In the 1608 English Martyrologe, from which we have seen examples of local devotion throughout this chapter, John Wilson uses the “English” in his title as a metonym for Britain. Though he does not explicitly address this in his preface, he does include an extended title on the frontispiece: “Conteyning A Svmmary Of The Lives of the glorious and renowned Saintes of the three Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland.” Like the author of Lives of Women Saintes, Wilson also tacitly includes Wales in this definition. His collection celebrates local saints from the Irish Columba to the British Winefride and the Anglo-Saxon Etheldreda. Figures from different regions and ethnicities appear together, suggesting a universal Catholicism that transcends geographical lines.148 Printed at the English College at St. Omers as part of the English Jesuit missionary effort, this book was meant to counter Protestant martyrologies like that of John Foxe.149 The editor’s preface explicitly states that the purpose of the volume was to remind the English of their Catholic heritage: “I have here gathered together and restored unto you again that which the injury of times had violently taken from you, and sought to abolish all memory

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147 148 149

Lisa McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience Among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 (London: Routledge, 2004), 185–186. For more on the distinctive piety of Cornish Christians, see chapter 6, “Katholik Kernow,” 171–201. McClain, Lest We Be Damned, 194–199. Christopher Highley notes this in Catholics Writing the Nation, 80–117. Copies of Wilson’s book were smuggled into England via Dunkirk and Calais. See P.R. Harris, “The Reports of William Udall, Informer, 1605–1612,” Recusant History 8, no. 4: 204–245.

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thereof.”150 Wilson’s Martyrologe, in many ways, reimagined a collective identity that had been muddied by social and (in the case of exiles like Wilson) geographical displacement. Drawing on the theory of JZ Smith, Thomas Tweed defines diasporic religion as “translocative” – moving symbolically between the homeland and the new land. As we saw with Stapleton and Persons in chapter two, imagining “home” involved a consideration of complex national, international, and religious networks.151 In addition to spatiality, Tweed has shown how the cultural process of religion moves the exile community back and forth in time, creating an imagined nation of memory.152 Wilson created a past out of a nostalgic ideal of “home” in order to suppress the pressures exerted by negotiating competing religious, national, and international narratives. In this way (and as we saw in chapter two), Catholic exiles manfactured an idea of homeland that, ultimately, served to create the idea of special territory that is sanctified and set apart. In different ways and for different reasons, these three hagiographies express a unified archipelagic identity rather than one of Anglo-Saxon versus native British lineage, and they produce a regional pride that goes hand in hand with ideas of national sanctification. English Catholics from the North, the West, and those living in exile were connected with Continental Catholic movements. While, as we saw with Winefride’s Well in chapter three, there was a certain amount of negotiation between central Catholic authorities and local tradition, the pre-Roman historical narrative did not foster antiRoman sentiments. While the writers of historical works like Stapleton and Persons, living in exile, drew strong national and ethnic lines in order to negotiate between “homeland and new land,” hagiographical materials like Wilson’s made a different historiographical move: celebrating, like Harpsfield had, local traditions with a Celtic, pre-Roman foundation narrative. Despite maintaining their regional loyalties, they still experienced a sense of connection to a larger, translocal nation.

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Conclusions

Shrines, place names, and the liturgy were key cultural resources for the production of national identity; though produced and consumed among different 150 151 152

Wilson, English Martyrologe, 2v. Thomas Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 139. Tweed, Our Lady, 10.

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audiences than the histories explored in previous chapters, these devotional materials told stories of Christianity’s arrival and spread in England. Bede’s history shows that the Anglo-Saxon era witnessed the emergence of a historical interpretation that viewed English ethnicity as divinely chosen. In the following centuries, historians, liturgists and the religious houses who produced shrines and displayed relics continued to construct a narrative of a sacred and chosen English nation based on the founding figures of those early centuries.153 These devotional/cultural sources drew connections between place, memory, and collective identity. As I showed in chapter two, narratives of the past find symbolic expression in spatial terms. Scholar of nationalism Anthony Smith has described such processes in terms of a “territorialization of memory.”154 Landmarks, rituals, and forms of commemoration are important practices for territorialization. Thus, even before the break with Rome, England had the cultural resources to form ideas of Englishness. Indeed, many have argued that national sentiments can be detected in medieval England.155 The challenges of reformers, as I have shown, indeed modified the liturgy and the landscape, but rather than destroy a sense of regional or national pride, it enhanced it. A strong national sentiment does not imply nor require unity, but rather it requires what liturgical and devotional sources provide: a sacralized view of the land and the people. Indeed, the conflicts of the sixteenth century produced narratives of persecution and sacrifice that only strengthened national sentiments. Furthermore, the rhetorical and affective power of saints in shaping the historical imagination of English people comes from the fact that they not only relayed narratives of the past, but also sacralized them. I would argue there is nothing sui generis about the ways in which “religion” does this; devotional culture and rituals are seen in many contexts, though often called reenactment or memorialization when understood as secular. On the other hand, there are differences between the devotional culture among and between various Catholics and Protestants. But in this context it is more useful, perhaps, to place the various tools in the culture toolbox along a spectrum from fully sacramental to godly/iconoclastic. The tools themselves are relational: these sources were used by Catholics to negotiate between tradition and Trent as

153 154 155

Cynthia Hahn, “Seeing and Believing: The Construction of Sanctity in Early-Medieval Saints’ Shrines.” Speculum 72, no. 4 (1997): 1079–1106. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 1999). Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion, and Nationalism (Romania: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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well as between Catholic communities and Protestant authorities. Protestants, either through destruction, criticism, or nostalgic remembrance, used these saints to deal with cultural and political change. Catholics in exile, too, used hagiography to move between homeland and new land. In this way (and as we saw in chapter two), Catholic exiles manufactured an idea of homeland that, ultimately, served to create the idea of an especially blessed territory. From the view of the local devotee, the affective experiences of retelling the saint’s story, walking the path of their martyrdom, and, in some cases, physically encountering their relics and bodies, necessarily involved the devotees in the construction and reconstruction of the arrival of Christianity in England. The active participation by the devotee in these types of narratives serves as an even more powerful tool for manufacturing a golden age of England, strengthening sentiments of national sanctification and chosenness. In Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England, Andrew Escobedo explores the anxiety, often shared by early modern antiquarians, about “historical loss.” Drawing on mostly literary sources, he argues that the development of an emerging national consciousness disrupted earlier local and religious identities, making it impossible to link the present to the medieval past.156 The variety of sources considered in my study complicate this conclusion. This chapter has shown that, not only were many early modern historians, antiquarians, and devotees able to establish meaningful and sometimes intimate connections with the local medieval past, but I argue that these local connections were forces for national identity. The authors of these antiquarian materials and hagiographies were not unaware of the debates in works like that of Stapleton, as many of them drew on these works to produce their own texts. Nevertheless, they felt some attachment to a translocal nation even while retaining their regional loyalties. Indeed, antiquarians enhanced national pride through each local example of England’s sacred past. Thus regional identity did not necessarily challenge national identity – it sacralized it. Escobedo finds that the more writers like Spenser and Milton tried, “the more they felt that their nation’s history was alien to the present.” Local history, devotional culture, and the names and marks of everyday experience tell a different story – one in which tracing history through the saints connected early modern people intimately with the past. Conflicting histories told of a Protestant Christianity preserved by the Britons versus a Roman Christianity, the proud heir of their Angle ancestors. The foundation stories told

156

Andrew Escobedo, Nationalism and Historical Loss in Renaissance England: Foxe, Dee, Spenser, Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

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through local hagiographic tradition had a different focus and were rooted in a different authorizing audience. Of course, the legacy of the Roman conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, so central to the quintessential history of “English” Christianity of Bede and so widely promoted by Thomas Stapleton and Robert Persons, was certainly repeated through stained glass windows, landmarks, place names, and liturgical materials, though it was complicated by Protestant destruction. By and large, liturgical sources and saints’ lives combinined the tales of Briton, Welsh, Irish, and Anglo-Saxon saints, embracing a more archipelagic narrative in service to the construction of a golden age of England. Looking more closely, then, at the historical imagination of local communities through a variety of sources reveals strong connections to the medieval past – connections that highlight the continuing importance and complementary nature of regional and national identity. Local memory, of course, was also political, as we saw with the association of Cuthbert with the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Northern Rebellion. Certain shrines served as bases for Catholic militancy, while others experienced damage or destruction. Ritual devotion to saints dominated the geographical landscape of early modern England in a variety of ways, and the uses of these particular sites offer broader theoretical and methodological insights regarding monuments and memory: devotional sites are not static or fixed and, at times, the vagueness or ambiguity of the figure actually contributes to their usefulness. The imprecision with which place names or sacred trees can tell a story allows participants, observers, or devotees to engineer the narrative to fit their present situation. If we take seriously that devotional and everyday culture reflects the values and realities manufactured by contemporary social actors, then holy wells and breviaries are far more than obscure folk traditions that remained on the margins. They were powerful tools not only for renarrating the founders of early centuries, but also for understanding contemporary political conflicts, highlighting themes of martyrdom, sacrifice, mission, and destiny. The past as told through breviaries, calendars, saints’ lives, and landmarks can be read in a variety of ways, providing many versions of the Christian origin narrative. The point is not that they were different and sometimes conflicting, but that either way they produced a strong national sentiment before, during, and after the break with Rome. The founders who Christianized the island also sacralized the nation. Indeed, saintly devotion narrativized the past for people across the social and confessional spectrum, and the representation of the past through devotional and ritual culture territorialized memory and produced a national consciousness for people on the ground. Due to the cultural production of England (even if drawing on British sources more broadly)

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in the liturgy, monuments, and the landscape, it was not just elites in London who felt English. These narratives of founding figures functioned as social processes that produced key cultural resources of national identity: myths of election, memories of a great and pure past, and narratives of persecution.

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Conclusion Can one accept, as such, the distinction between the major types of discourse, or that between such forms or genres as science, literature, philosophy, religion, history, fiction, etc., and which tend to create certain great historical individualities? We are not even sure of ourselves when we use these distinctions in our own world of discourse, let alone when we are analyzing groups of statements which, when first formulated, were distributed, divided, and characterized in a quite different way.1 Michel Foucault

… The past is first of all a means of representing a difference.2 Michel de Certeau

∵ In the United States the term “WASP,” or white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, is still an expression people use to describe the establishment elite, hearkening back to the historical ruling class, usually of British descent. In popular culture, the idea of England as a Protestant country (at least historically) is a given, but in the sixteenth century many viewed “English” and “reformed” as mutually exclusive. For some, the traditions and rituals of the Roman Church were integral to what it meant to be English. Though writers from across the confessional spectrum articulated the arrival of Christianity differently, I want to emphasize not how the differences shaped national identity (implying that there is something identifiable and determinative about the narratives of the reformers who eventually won out), but rather how merely articulating, often and in different sources, a community that was elect, blessed, and persecuted came to be crucial in solidifying national sentiment. This is not to say that

1 Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 2002), 24. 2 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 85.

© Lauren Horn Griffin, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004514362_007Lauren

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an emerging shared national sentiment produced homogeneity – as we have seen, it certainly did not bring unity. The political, social, and material realities of the break with Rome shaped these debates over English Christian origins, which contributed to the production of a national identity that would later become a necessary element in the development of nationalism. We can see how later nations (e.g., the United Kingdom and the United States) drew certain cultural resources from these early modern rehearsals of founding figures. Through debates over founding figures, sixteenth-century writers provided a discourse of Englishness which served to manufacture (chapter 1) sovereign jurisdiction, (chapter 2) territory, (chapter 3) a special election and mission over and against other communities, and (chapter 4) a sacralized physical environment. As the fragmentation of Christendom became more apparent, greater power concentrated in local kingdoms (and later republics), and those kingdoms produced narratives to undergird them. England provides a nice test case because the cultivation of myths of origin and election were underway well before the sixteenth century, both in text and in material culture, which could be mobilized to produce a sense of historical commonality and territory. Though these themes had been present (in some capacity) since the Middle Ages, confessionalization provided the impetus to articulate them, over and over, making them the key ingredients in the cultural production of national identity. Furhermore, in my examination of narratives of the arrival of Christianity in England, I focus on how this quest for origins provoked other inquiries. What questions had to be tackled in order to effectively mobilize these founding figures in political debates? In many ways, the question of origins allowed me to examine a whole set of sixteenth-century concerns. Articulating origins in this period led to broader epistemological questions about the past, about the supernatural, about space, and about time. And it allowed me to address how the Middle Ages were constructed and remembered in the early modern period. While many studies focus on the uses of history in the formation of what would become the Church of England, this book moves beyond the construction of a new ecclesiastical order to think about how these stories contributed to a rethinking of the discipline of history, to challenging epistemological certainty, and to strengthening national consciousness. By leaving behind our given narrative of the Tudor period as a tortuous period of dueling binaries (e.g., conservative versus reformed), we can highlight different debates, realize new affinities, and read these histories as continuous acts of national identification. Ultimately, this book serves as an example of how ideas of beginnings and origins function in forming collective consciousness. In doing so, I hope this might contribute to how we see quests for origins play-

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ing out in our own political landscape: how does the deployment of “deeply rooted tradition” construct time and place?3 How does it create an idea of universal, stable, and enduring timelessness in order to naturalize and authorize? How is this fabricated not only in text but also in visual and ritual culture? Our current challenges are not wholly new ones, and this look back at the uses of founding figures in Tudor England provides a provocative historical example of that. Some scholars have begun to use the term “sacred history” to refer to certain sources (church histories, theological tracts, sermons, hagiographies) in order to think about the development of cultural identities in the early modern period, especially burgeoning national identities.4 While this reframing of these sources is a welcome shift, the assumption that “sacred” sources stood outside of culture and poltics, sometimes interacting with them, is an interesting one. Theoretical assumptions can be hidden in these terms, especially implicit definitions of the religious and presuppositions of the secular. In many ways what we are doing is not so much highlighting the ways in which “religious” stuff shaped early modern “political” or “national” (read: secular) stuff, but rather revealing how our constructed categories work. My argument, in this book, has been that narratives of the Christian past did not merely influence English national identity – it comprised it. Similarly, this book shows that an overemphasis on the Catholic retention of miracles could inadvertently construct them as more “religious” and thus less modern than their Protestant counterparts, obscuring how contemporary social actors still mobilize transcendent or universal ideas to legitimate particular claims for use in the present. Thus, while my study uses early modern Catholic sources to think through a theory of origins discourses, it can also be applied to the twenty-first century and our different uses of the same terms, disciplines, narratives and questions: What is history, and can it be used for universal moral claims? What is a nation, or what should it be? How should we publicly memorialize the past, and to what social ends? How do we construct ideas of “religious” versus “political” actors, spaces, and behaviors?

3 Again, I cite the “Dobbs v Jackson Decision, Annotated,” The New York Times, June 24, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/24/us/politics/supreme-court -dobbs-jackson-analysis-roe-wade.html. This is but one contemporary example of the invocation of history to construct “deeply rooted tradition” can make something seem given and universal. 4 See, for example, the chapters of Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World, eds. Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield and Howard Louthan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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Echoing Benedetto Croce’s insight that all history is contemporary history, Simon Ditchfield reminds us that “all hagiography is contemporary hagiography.”5 In addition, narrative history is hagiographical, and hagiographies present historical narratives. Any imagining of the past is always the creation of a present situated in a particular political and cultural framework. When previous associations between the past and the present begin to deteriorate, a fresh understanding of that which connects the new situation to the past addresses the feeling of rupture. In these chapters I have sought to anchor the process of national identity formation to the discursive construction of time and space, especially as early modern people variously imagined England, Britain, Rome, and Europe. Some early modern historians were able to relate the particular history of England to the cycle based on the biblical Revelation, providing a way to negotiate the relationship between history and theology. Some writers expressed their belief that the documents of human history, when laid out “bare and simple,” would not only encourage piety but would also prove the veracity of the True Church (however conceived). Others were already questioning whether universalist ideas could be found in human history at all. Rehashing these origin narratives ultimately led to epistemological questions that prompted a rethinking of the discipline of history and probed the very relationship between historical knowledge and larger truths. Historians also framed space in relation to their specific social realities, using England’s past to construct “Britain” as a singular cultural body. Others (who lived a substantial part of their lives abroad) wrote Anglo-centric histories focused on the ways in which the concept of England, in particular, could not be separated from Catholicism. At the same time, historians reconceptualized how the supernatural could authorize versions of the past, revealing persecution to be more useful than miracles for creating continuity between England’s earliest Christian martyrs and the present. Moreover, the arrival of Christianity in England as told through devotional practices and the realm of everyday experience reveals how these sources dealt with confessional tensions differently, highlighting regional heroes and often foregrounding the Celtic legacy in ways that printed histories did not. The stories of founder-saints – captured in textual histories, maps, stained glass windows, hagiographies, shrines, and healing wells – intimately connected devotees with the past, serving as spaces where local, national, international, and religious identities were produced and negotiated.

5 Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History: Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1.

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This book not only examines the relationship between confessional identities and particular English, British, Celtic, or Roman ones, but also identifies the discourses on founders as the fulcrum. While this approach highlights considerable differences in attitudes among English Catholics, it also reveals how, on some issues, positions from across the confessional divide could be very similar. For the scholars who fled to Douai as well as the folks at shrines in Durham, saints crossed boundaries and played a dynamic part in the construction of an English golden age that made it an especially “blessed nation.” Antiquarian works that described the early modern landscape, liturgical materials such as breviaries and calendars, and the early modern stories of local founder-saints recounted the arrival and spread of Christianity throughout Britain. Liturgies and monuments often framed these origin narratives in terms of local converter-saints – ones that highlight the continuing importance of regional and community history in shaping collective identities. This regional pride was not necessarily in contrast to national identity; on the contrary, I argue that strong local identities could actually bolster English national sentiment. Through their narratives, these founder-saints connected the local devotional space with England, England with the Continent, and the temporal with the transcendent. Saints were also able to bridge time, linking not only the early Middle Ages with the present but also the phenomenological and cosmological, projecting a past that reconfigures the present situation of the reader. Saints were particularly useful figures in this regard: re-telling their stories on feast days, watching their lives acted out on stage, and making pilgrimages to their holy sites each require actions that imitate the plot of the story and connect devotees to the historical moment.6 For scholars of history, I have produced a historical argument regarding the development of national consciousness that reconsiders scholarly characterizations of Catholic contributions; for scholars of political science, I have provided an argument about the cultural production of national identity; and for scholars of religious studies, I have offered a theoretical framework for analyzing discourses of origins. Indeed, the rhetorical strategies I have highlighted in this book can be used as a framework for analyzing origin discourses in a variety of contexts, including those we call “religious” as well as other social groups. There is nothing sui generis about the ways in which “sacred histories” construct origins, as the example from my home state of Oklahoma in the Introduction was meant to show. Discourses on origins involve competing fabrications of time and space as well as the deployment of supernatural, transcendent or universal ideas, even after great shifts in the way the supernatural 6 Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1: 169–190.

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is imagined. These conversations are shaped just as much through what we might now call public history and the realm of ordinary experience as much as written histories. As both historical agents and mythic figures from “our past,” the multivalence of founding figures confer a power that can authenticate and authorize. This book has sought to illustrate the fruitfulness of reading hagiography as historiography as well as viewing national histories as data for religious studies scholars, highlighting the ways in which our own constructed categories and disciplines also create ideas of the past for use in the present. Tudor historians, politicians, and theologians wrote the origins of English Christianity to draw a continuous line to a deep past, to rhetorically construct the territories of England, Britain, and Christendom, and to negotiate changing conceptions of divine interaction in the human world. This focus on founding figures sheds light on changing conceptions of the past, the production of space and spatial understandings of culture, and the ongoing construction of sainthood and martyrdom in the sixteenth century. Through their rearticulation of founding figures, early modern English Catholics and their interlocutors not only reconsidered the nature of historical knowledge and what counts as truth itself, but also produced a strong national sentiment based on myths of origin and sacred land. Indeed, myths of election and constructions of a purer and greater golden age are still used to manufacture strong national sentiments in many European and American societies. For those interested in understanding the persistence of strong national sentiments and nationalist discourse today, this book argues that we must understand the inextricable nature of these cultural resources and national memories and symbols. During this moment in which scholars and journalists are increasingly focused on a perceived rise in “religious nationalisms,” it is crucial to fully examine the cultural bones of a national sentiment to see how, in many cases, myths of origin and narratives of persecution comprise the cultural foundations of national identity. In The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau argues that historians draw an imaginary line between the past and present in order to separate what is “dead” from what is not, forgetting to historize ourselves and fully recognize the ways in which historical processes, and (ever-changing) understandings of history itself, shapes our own writing.7 In some ways, the Catholic view of saints as living and present and doing work in the world is theoretically helpful, recognizing in a real way that these are not “dead” figures from a distant

7 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 85.

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past, but figures we conjure anew every day for our uses in the present. All in all, this book has provided a timely historical example of how people have used origins and tradition to mine divine timelessness from the particular items of human history in order to manufacture a national consciousness that both binds and divides.

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Bibliography Manuscript Sources British Library, London Arundel 72 (Original manuscript of Nicholas Harpsfield’s Historia Ecclesiastica Anglicana, containing the first book and 58 leaves of the second) Cotton Vitellius C IX (Book 1, Christopher Watson’s Th’istorye of Duresme now furst published Anno 1574) Cotton Vitellius C IX (No 11–12, John Harpsfield’s metrical Ecclesiastical History of England) Cotton Cleopatra E IV (Papers relating to the Dissolution of the Monasteries) Cotton Cleopatra E VI (Collectanea satis copiosa) Cotton Nero E. I (No. 1, Life of St Oswald attributed to Byrhtferth of Ramsey) Egerton 3309 (Richard White, Life of St Cuthbert) Sloane 1322 (Robert Hegge, “The Legend of St Cuthbert with the Antiquities of the Church of Durham”) Stowe 105 (Original manuscript of Nicholas Harpsfield’s Historia Ecclesiastica Anglicana, from the 26th chapter of the 7th century to the close of the 11th century) Stowe 949 (The Lives of Women Saints of our Countrie of England)

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Index Abbot, Robert 31, 58–59, 67 Acta Sanctorum 122 Actes and Monuments (Foxe) 70, 74, 77, 158–59 Actes of the Englysh Votaryes (Bale) 32, 35, 37n33, 44, 48, 54 Act in Restraint of Appeals 33, 40 Act of Six Articles 43 Act of Supremacy 33 acts of identification 2, 56, 63, 145, 192 Adam 48 Adelarius, Saint 128, 132 Aelfric of Eynsham 71 affect 144, 154 affective power 149, 187–88 affect and ritual 179 See also power Aidan, Saint 79, 82, 156 Alban, Saint 71, 113 Albigensians 48, 58 Albion 37 Aldhelm, Saint 176, 178 Aldhelmsburg 178 Alfred, King 81–82 All Hallows Day 178 All Souls College at Oxford 154 Allen, William 94, 106, 118, 133 Ambrose, Saint 125, 138 American 5, 196 Anabaptist 133 Angles, the 11, 79–83, 119, 188 Anglo-Saxon 9–11, 22, 27, 29, 31, 33, 38, 47, 50, 54, 58, 60–63, 68, 71–72, 74–79, 81–84, 88, 90–95, 115, 119, 126, 131–32, 146, 148, 154–157, 159–60, 164, 166–67, 169, 172–73, 175–76, 180, 182, 185–89, 191 Anglo-centrism 82, 88–95, 194 Anglo-Saxonism 54, 76 Anglorum Heliades (Bale) 48 Annales Ecclesiastici (Baronio) 29, 53, 137, 181 Annius of Viterbo 37 antichrist 39, 45–46, 48, 64–65, 82, 104, 107, 109–11, 124 Antwerp 44

apocalypse 70, 147 apocalyptic interpretation 8, 70, 110 apocalyptic narrative 50–51, 63, 71 apocalypticism 8, 21, 30 Apologia ecclesiae Anglicanae (Jewel) 69 Apostles, the 10, 35–36, 41, 44, 69, 75, 80, 93, 117, 119 Archipelago, archipelagic 22, 50, 62–63, 78, 83–84, 91–92, 95–96, 146, 186, 189 Aristobulus of Britannia 36 Aristotle 47 Arthur, King 75, 84, 90, 112 Arviragus, King 35, 75 Asad, Talal 98 Asaph, Saint 166 Askew, Anne 51, 110 astrology 112 Athanasius 138 Augustine of Canterbury 9–12, 24, 31, 34, 38–39, 45–49, 57, 62, 66, 73, 75, 78–79, 81–84, 89–93, 107, 109–10, 113–14, 116, 118–21, 126, 128, 130–31, 151–56, 163, 171, 174–77, 180, 184–85 Augustine of Hippo 124–127 authority 5–6, 14–16, 21–22, 25–26, 28, 30, 34, 38, 40–41, 44–45, 53, 58, 60–63, 67, 75, 81, 86–89, 94, 99–102, 105, 108, 110–11, 116, 118, 120, 122, 126, 130, 133, 136–37, 141–42, 144, 165, 171, 179–80, 186, 188–89, 193–96 ecclesiastical 31, 42, 48, 62, 72 papal 33–34, 61, 63–65, 70, 89 temporal 33 Backus, Irena 12, 27 Bale, John 12, 21, 27, 29, 32–33, 35, 37–39, 43–58, 60, 67–68, 70–71, 81–83, 85–87, 90, 105, 110, 112–13, 115, 118–20, 124, 127, 129, 132, 163 Bamburgh 158 Bangor monks 47–8, 81–2, 113, 173 baptism 34, 47, 153 Barnes, Robert 28, 39, 43, 46 Baronio, Cesare 14, 29, 53, 86, 137, 181, 183 Basingwerk Abbey 136

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Index Battle of Heavenfield, the 147, 156 Battle of Maserfield, the 158 Bauckham, Richard 45–46, 71 Becket, Thomas 48, 66, 131, 176 Bede 9–10, 33n21, 38–39, 47, 50, 57, 60–61, 73, 75, 77–78, 82, 88–94, 106–7, 109, 111, 116–17, 118n62, 119, 121, 123–24, 131, 146–47, 154, 161, 169, 180–81, 187, 189 Bega, Saint 169 Belinus, King 75 Bellarmine, Robert 122, 134 Benjamin, Walter 1 Berossus 37 Bertha, Saint 10, 79, 126, 153–54 Beuno, Saint 135 Bible, the 10, 19, 35–37, 44, 52, 56–57, 60, 68, 71, 86. See also Revelation Biddleston Hall 170 binaries 100, 140, 192 Birinus, Saint 175 Blundell, William 168 Boniface, Saint 10, 45, 113–16, 128, 131–32, 147, 166, 172, 177, 184 Book of Common Prayer 172 Book of Homilies, The 58, 148 Borromeo, Carlo 137 Bossy, John 102, 120n68 Botolph, Saint 173, 175, 177175, 177 boundaries 8, 15, 22–23, 60–61, 75, 79, 94–95, 97, 99, 101, 112, 131, 133, 141, 146, 175, 179, 195 Bourdieu, Pierre 20, 165 Brennus, leader of the Senones 75 breviaries 12, 22, 149, 173–76, 189, 195 Brexit 8 Brittany 172 Britons 9–11, 35–37, 47–50, 61–2, 73–75, 79–84, 91–96, 126, 131, 155, 160, 164, 188–189 British. See identity Broadway, Jan 17, 150, 157 Broughton, Richard 36, 178n122 Brown, Peter 17, 18n31, 144, 145n1 Brutus of Troy 75 Burien, Saint 184 Burke, Peter 17 Cadoc, Saint

172, 184

Cadwallon, King 156–57, 160 Caesar, Julius 75 Cedd, Saint 168 Calfhill, James 58 Calvinists 59 Cambridge 53, 106, 172 Camden, William 36, 152n25, 153–55, 158n43, 161, 164, 166–67, 169n83, 171, 172n96, 178, 183 Cameron, Euan 102, 103n9, 122 canonization 122, 129, 169 Capgrave, John 137, 181 Caradoc 135 Carew, Richard 183 Carmelite libraries 43, 48, 53 Castelli, Elizabeth 17, 18n31 categories, categorization 4, 5, 15–19, 58, 97–98, 193, 157, 167, 172, 196 Catholics Writing the Nation (Highley) 23, 90–92 celibacy 49–50, 164 Celtic 74–75, 90, 95, 135, 162, 164, 175, 182–83, 186, 194–95 bishops 153 Christians 49, 94, 156, 159, 164, 184 saints 146, 148, 181–82, 184 certainty 1, 14, 24, 41, 85–87, 124, 127, 192 Certeau, Michel de 191, 196 Chad, Saint 166, 169, 175, 177 Challenge Controversy 68 Challenge Sermon 68, 97, 99 chosenness 4, 10, 20, 23, 27, 37, 60, 65, 79, 83, 93, 111, 124, 144, 175, 187–188 Christ 22, 38, 40n46, 41, 44, 46, 48–49, 64, 70, 80–83, 88, 93, 104, 118–19, 127, 132, 155, 177 Christendom 31, 40n46, 41, 61, 74, 82, 89–90, 94, 115, 146, 173, 192, 196 Church of England 55, 58, 70, 73, 83, 90, 106, 128, 192 Claxton, William 150, 161, 162, 164 Cole, Henry 69 collective memory 17, 20, 40, 42, 92 140, 144, 165, 175, 179, 186–87, 192, 195. See also identity Collinson, Patrick 111n38, 157 colonialism 2, 196 Columba, Saint 147, 168–69, 179, 185

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224 Colwell, Thomas 153 Confutacyon of Tyndales Answere (More) 40, 41n47 Congregation of Sacred Rites and Ceremonies 122 conservatives 6, 12, 27–29, 32, 40–42, 48, 51, 55, 57, 65, 71, 76, 81, 97, 102, 105, 112, 121, 127, 139–40, 161, 166, 192 Cornwall 166, 168, 171, 172, 176, 178–79, 183–85 cosmic interpretation 21, 29, 31–32, 41, 64–65, 87, 95, 97, 133, 195 Cotton, Robert 36 Cranmer, Thomas 63, 64n5, 68, 107 Cressy, David 147n6, 176, 177 critical methodology 14 Croce, Benedetto 194 Cromwell, Thomas 34, 43, 136 cult of the saints 29, 42, 49, 122, 137, 157–58, 177–78, 183–84 culture 1–2, 6–7, 15–16, 21, 24, 105, 112, 144, 148, 150, 167, 175, 179, 187–89, 191, 193, 196 material 13, 19–21, 101, 133, 140, 144–45, 149, 152, 192 ritual 6, 16, 20, 22, 151, 156, 179, 189, 193 cultural production 1–4, 7–8, 9, 11, 20–25, 42, 151–52, 192, 195–97. See also fabrication Cumberland 183 Cumbria 169, 171 Cunningham, Jack 29n13, 36, 37n33, 37n37, 61n4, 73n36, 74n41, 104n13, 112n42, 177n120 Curran, John 35, 48n70, 74–75, 112n42 Cuthbert, Saint 84, 90, 150, 156, 158, 160–64, 170, 175–76, 189 Cyprian, Saint 131 Danes, Danish 128, 158, 161 David of Wales 175 De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae (Parker) 53 De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae (William of Malmesbury) 35 De Civitate Dei (Augustine) 124 De vera differentia regiae potestatis et ecclesiasticae (Foxe) 34

Index De Vera Obedientia (Gardiner) 41–42 demystification 32 Derrida, Jacques 13, 16 devil 104, 107, 111. See also Satan and Lucifer Devon 167, 176, 183–84 Dialogi Sex (Harpsfield) 77, 83, 90n91, 111n38–39, 112n43, 115n50, 116n52, 119n63–64, 120n66, 127n93 Dialogue Concerning Heresies (More) 15n25, 124 Dillon, Anne 15, 17–18, 120, 128–30, 132 Dionothus 47–48 discourse 5, 8–9, 19, 23, 63, 73, 112, 141, 191–92, 195–96 national 145 origins 1–2, 4, 6–7, 9, 13–15, 22, 24, 32, 68, 100, 140–42, 193, 195 religious 17, 62, 96 spatial 62, 73, 90, 92 Ditchfield, Simon 17, 40, 194 Dobbs v. Jackson 3n4, 101n5, 193n3 Dorset 152, 178 Douai 77, 195 doubt 13–14, 28, 32, 58–59, 116, 141, 165 Dover 22 Drayton, Michael 154, 167 druid 80 Duffy, Eamon 18, 66, 148, 167, 173 Dugdale, William 149 Durham 22, 156, 158, 161–62, 164, 195 Eadburga, Saint 167, 175 Easter (dating) 71, 90, 94, 176 Ebba, Saint 131, 167 ecclesiastical reform 4, 11, 15, 29–30, 34, 40, 42, 51–54, 61, 73, 78–79, 106, 111, 148, 156, 163, 177, 192 Edmund, Saint 168 Edward, King 49, 61, 63–66, 68, 70, 72, 76, 82, 120, 152, 173, 176 Edwin, King 128, 156, 164, 173 Egbert, Saint 182 Elizabeth I, Queen 36, 62–63, 68, 73, 76, 90, 94–96, 106, 117, 125, 132, 136, 152, 164, 174, 176–77, 182 Eleutherius, Pope 33–34, 66, 93 Endelient, Saint 183

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Index English Martyrologe (Wilson) 74n40, 117, 154n32–33, 155n38, 158n43, 169n83, 181, 185–86 Englishness 4, 23, 57, 72, 95–96, 187, 192. See also identity Eobanus, Saint 128, 132 epistemology 1, 14, 21, 24, 26, 32, 59, 67, 85, 192, 194 Erkenwald, Saint 171 Escobedo, Andrew 72, 188 Essex 167, 169, 184 Ethelburga, Saint 172, 182 Ethelbert, King 10–11, 79, 84, 126, 128, 153–54, 156, 175 Etheldreda, Saint 167, 170, 172, 182, 185 ethnicity 3–4,7–8, 10, 15, 22, 31, 48, 60, 62, 75, 78–79, 92, 95–98, 146, 185–87 ethnocentrism 3, 60. See also identity Europe 3–4, 9, 11, 19, 45, 61, 68, 74, 77, 79, 100, 102, 115, 125, 128, 130, 134, 138–39, 145, 158, 182, 194 Eusebius of Caesarea 36, 50, 110, 117 evangelicals 11, 21, 27–29, 32, 38–43, 45–46, 54–55, 57–58, 61, 64, 68, 70, 82, 96, 108 Excalibur 112 fabrication 6, 17, 19, 56, 156, 165, 195. See also cultural production Faganus and Davianus, missionaries 34 Fairfield, Leslie 43–44 Falconer, John 135n115, 136–39, 142 Felix, Saint 175 Fisher, John 65–66 Flacius, Matthias 30, 43, 53–54 Fortresse of the Faith (Stapleton) 88–90, 93, 106–7, 125–26 Fortress Overthrown (Fulke) 89n89, 104n12, 106, 107n21–23, 108n24–27, 112 Foucault, Michel 6n10, 26n1, 57, 191 founding figure 1–2, 7–8, 15, 18, 22–23, 25–26, 30, 41, 50, 52, 57, 60, 96, 102, 113, 141, 143–45, 154, 177, 187, 190, 192–93, 196 Foxe, Edward 33–34, 73 Foxe, John 6, 12, 35–36, 46n62, 51n79, 62, 64, 65n8, 67–68, 70–72, 75, 76n45, 81, 83, 85–87, 89, 93, 97, 105, 110–11, 118n60, 120, 129, 131–32, 136, 148, 159–60, 163, 180, 185, 188n156

France, French 37, 53, 94, 105, 115, 131, 172 Frankfurt 43, 68 Frankish 10, 79, 114 Frideswide, Saint 172, 175 Frijhoff, Willem 105–106 Fulke, William 75, 89, 102, 104n12, 106–109, 111–12, 124, 136, 139 Fuller, Thomas 36n27, 77n47, 150 Gardiner, Stephen 41–42, 66 Genesis, Book of 37 Geneva Bible 65, 74 Gennadius of Massilia 50–51 Geoffrey of Monmouth 33n21, 34n21, 34n23, 35, 37, 75, 90 Galfridian narrative 35, 75, 82, 90 Germany, Germanic 7, 30, 91, 93, 131, 158 Gibbons, Richard 77n46, 77n49, 84, 86, 104n12 Gildas 37, 49 Ginzburg, Carlo 27–29, 53 Glastonbury 35, 49, 80, 177 Gloucester 158 Gloucestershire 176 God 5–6, 8, 14–15, 22, 28–29, 34, 42, 44, 55, 63, 66–67, 80–81, 85–86, 90–91, 96, 99–105, 108–11, 114, 116, 119, 122, 124–25, 127, 129–30, 133, 138, 140–41, 144, 147, 164, 175 godly, the 11, 32, 55, 64, 72, 75–76, 87, 97, 104, 112–13, 118, 187 Goetz, Hans-Werner 33, 51 golden age, a 3, 19, 23, 32, 45, 56, 184, 188–89, 195–96 Gospel, the 10–11, 36, 67, 75, 79, 86, 89, 93, 109, 118, 166–68, 181–82 Grabes, Herbert 23 Grafton, Anthony 52 Gregory the Great 10–11, 39, 44, 66, 73, 75, 81, 83–84, 93, 118–19, 147, 154–56, 171, 175, 180 Gregory, Brad 67, 133 Guiderius, King 75 Guthlac the monk 173 Gwytherin 135 Habington, Thomas 154 Hadfield, Andrew 65

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226 hagiography 9, 11–12, 14, 16–17, 21, 50–52, 54, 58, 67, 74, 97, 101–2, 105, 114–15, 117, 120–21, 124, 133–34, 137, 140–41, 144, 150, 155, 162, 178, 180–83, 186, 188–89, 193–94, 196 Harding, Thomas 69–70, 72n33, 133 Hardyng, John 35 Harpsfield, Nicholas 12, 22, 41, 48, 61–63, 73, 76–88, 90–93, 96, 101–2, 111–16, 118–21, 123–24, 126–27, 129, 132, 136, 138–39, 158, 184–86 Haunse, Everard 123 Heal, Felicity 13, 27, 33, 50–51, 69 heaven 19, 61, 64, 100, 111, 130, 146 Hebrew Bible 27, 147 Hegge, Robert 150, 158–60, 162, 164–65, 169n88 hell 111 Henrician period 11, 27, 32, 41–42, 56–57, 61–62, 72–73, 76, 118, 120, 152, 175 Henrician conservatives 35, 40–43 Henrician evangelicals 11, 21, 27–28, 35, 38, 57, 61, 82, 108 Henry VIII, King 26, 31, 33–34, 36, 38, 40–41, 43, 58, 63–64, 66, 73–74, 89, 161, 167, 171, 175 authority 42 break with Rome 20, 27, 36, 57, 63, 99 Hereford 33, 173–75 heretics 30, 41, 43, 47, 85, 99, 110–11, 113, 119, 126–27 Hesse 115 Highley, Christopher 23, 90–94, 185 Hilda, Saint 169, 175 Historia Anglicana Ecclesiastica (Harpsfield) 61–62, 76–79, 81, 84, 113, 119, 121, 183 Historia Ecclessiastica Gentis Anglorum (Bede) 9–10, 30, 38, 47, 60–61, 82, 88–94, 106–107, 109–111, 118–119, 124, 146, 154, 187 Historia regum Britanniae (Geoffrey of Monmouth) 35 Holy Grail 35, 177 homogeneity 23, 172, 192 Hooper, John 118 Horne, Robert 77 Hsia, Po-Chia 171 humanism 40–42, 54, 120–21, 142, 148

Index iconoclasm 3, 109, 152 identity 6, 17, 20, 23, 32, 55, 72n35, 89, 92, 97–98, 137, 151–52, 158, 172, 177–78, 186 British 11, 50, 61, 74n38, 84, 91 Catholic 9, 17, 22, 61, 78, 83, 164 Christian 5, 7, 142, 179 collective 20, 92, 186–87, 195 confessional 8–9, 55, 60, 79, 83, 96, 98 English 8, 11, 20, 22, 25, 50, 63, 94, 108 ethnic 7, 31, 48, 98, 146 formation 5, 9, 24, 177 national 1–4, 7–10, 12, 15, 19–24, 48, 50, 58–59, 62–62, 88, 96–98, 108, 113, 144–46, 151, 157, 172, 177, 179, 181, 186, 188–90, 192–96 regional 20, 146, 160–61, 163–5, 179, 188 religious 4, 7, 25, 42–43, 48, 50, 92, 97–98, 172, 181, 188, 194 spatial 74, 84, 90, 181 idol, idolatry 64, 119, 148, 152, 163 Illustrium majoris Britannie Scriptorum ... Summarium (Bale) 37, 44, 47n69 Image of both Churches (Bale) 44, 45n59–61, 46, 49–54, 86n75 innovation 3–4, 30, 56, 197 Ingham, Patricia 30 Indigenous Americans 6 Ireland, Irish 9, 49–50, 58, 62–63, 74, 79, 82–83, 88, 91, 94, 96, 117, 162, 169, 172, 181–85, 189 missionaries 62, 79, 156, 168, 181 monks 38, 79, 156 Isidore of Seville 80 Israel, Israelite 26–27, 37, 147 Jacobean period 178 James I, King 84, 94–95 Jerusalem 49 Jesuits 84, 92, 132, 137, 139, 142, 171, 185 Jewel, John 36n29, 62, 64, 68–72, 75, 87, 97, 99n1, 107, 120, 124, 129, 163, 180 John, King 44n55, 48 John of Beverly 90 John of Constantinople 44 John of Tynemouth 183 Johnson, Ben 167 Joseph of Arimathea 10, 12, 20, 34–6, 48–50, 58, 74n41, 75, 80–2, 93, 128, 177–78

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Index Josiah, King 64–65 Judeo-Christian 5 Julius II, Pope 42 Jutes 11 Katharine of Aragon Kent 47, 155–56 Kidd, Colin 91–94

31, 33–34

Laboryouse Journey (Bale) 52, 53n86, 55 Lambarde, William 89, 149, 153n29, 155, 180 Lambert, Francis 45, 51 landmarks 10, 22–23, 144, 149–50, 152, 155–56, 158, 162, 166, 168, 187, 189 landscape 9–10, 12, 19–20, 55, 101, 112, 130, 134n113, 144, 146–50, 152, 153n29, 155–56, 168–69, 172, 182–85, 187, 189–90, 195 legitimation 8, 13, 15, 25, 31, 39, 43–44, 51, 58, 61–64, 68, 70, 100–1, 103, 105, 108–9, 117, 120, 125, 129, 133, 138, 141, 152, 193 Leland, John 52–55, 83, 184 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 24, 165 Life of Mary Magdalene (Maurus) 49 Life of More (Harpsfield) 127, 142 liminality 19, 142–43 Lincoln, Bruce 16, 100, 101n4, 145, 180 Lincolnshire 158 Lindisfarne 79, 156, 158, 159n48, 160 liturgy 10, 19, 40, 64, 69, 71, 105, 122n74, 135, 137, 141, 144, 146, 151, 155, 172–76, 177, 179, 186–87, 190 liturgical calendars 12, 168, 173 liturgical materials 74, 189, 195 liturgical reenactments 9, 179 Lives of the Saints (Roscarrock) 181, 183 Lives of Women Saints of Our Countrie England (unknown) 181, 183–85 London 11, 44, 82, 139, 152, 154, 169–72, 183, 190 Louvain 62, 69, 88–89 Low Countries, the 43, 53, 105 Loyola, Ignatius 122 Lucifer 64. See also devil and Satan Lucius, King 10–11, 33–34, 49, 66, 80, 84, 93 Luther, Martin 30n14, 45, 65n8, 72, 108

Magdeburg Centuriators 30, 43, 48, 54, 81–82, 90, 112, 118, 129 magic 101–2, 112, 120, 138, 142 martyr 15, 17, 19, 47, 51, 67, 74, 92, 99–104, 109–14, 117–18, 120, 123–25, 127–32, 138–39, 141–43, 145–46, 148, 154, 160, 166–69, 175, 187 Catholic 110, 120, 130, 133 Christian 47, 71, 104, 110, 194 contemporary 46, 103, 117, 124, 127–29, 133, 142 English 46, 48, 68, 70–71, 104, 113, 120 medieval 103, 110, 113–15, 118n60, 121, 132 martyrdom 15, 17–18, 22–24, 58, 65–68, 70, 99, 103–5, 110, 113–15, 127–32, 135, 141, 144, 159, 168, 182–83, 188–89, 196 martyrology 51, 70, 92, 158, 161, 164, 166, 181 Matthias, Flacius 30, 43, 53–54 Maurus, Rabanus 49 McClain, Lisa 184 McCutcheon, Russell 98n114 Mellitus and Justus, missionaries 10, 82, 84, 90, 147 memory 3, 12, 16, 21, 24, 43, 50, 89, 95, 144, 152, 165–66, 172–73, 176–77, 182, 185–87, 189–90, 196 collective 17, 20, 40, 42, 140, 144, 165, 175, 179 territorialization of 7, 96, 165, 187 Merlin 90, 112 Michael, Archangel 115 Mildreth, Saint 149 Middle Ages 30–31, 58, 102, 118, 122, 132, 135, 144, 158, 160, 192, 195 Milton, John 12n15, 39n42, 72n34–35, 76n45, 188 miracles. See supernatural modernity 4–5, 9, 16–18, 102, 141, 151, 179, 187, 193, 196 Modwen, Saint 181 Momigliano, Arnaldo 15, 16n27, 53 monarchy 31, 38, 56, 63, 74, 83–84, 92, 125, 145, 160, 170 monastic communities 28–29, 35, 39, 42, 48–49, 78, 86 monuments 4–6, 20, 23, 55, 113, 137, 149–56, 162, 165, 167, 179, 189–90, 195

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228 More, Thomas 40–1, 43, 48, 65, 89, 120, 124–25 Moses 48 Muntzer, Thomas 108 myth 7, 9–10, 16, 23, 190, 196 Christian 2, 4, 17 origin 1–3, 31, 179, 185, 192, 196 religious 1, 8 narrative 9–11, 14, 20, 22–23, 26–27, 29, 31–32, 34–38, 43–44, 46, 49–50, 52–54, 56–59, 61–62, 65–66, 68, 71–80, 82, 84–85, 92, 97–99, 103, 111, 113, 116, 118–19, 123, 130, 32–33, 135–36, 142–44, 147, 150–52, 154, 156–61, 163–67, 170, 175, 180, 182, 185–94 apocalyptic 50–51, 63, 70–71 Augustine 11, 31, 90, 93, 107, 109, 151–52, 154–55, 184 Catholic 12, 129, 135, 141–42 cosmic 21, 29, 31–32, 41, 64–65, 87, 95, 97, 133, 195 origin 1–3, 17–20, 22–26, 24, 37, 56, 60–63, 72, 76, 83, 86, 88, 91, 96, 100, 110, 133, 135, 140–45, 149, 172, 180, 189, 194–95 nation 1–7, 11, 23, 35, 50, 55–56, 60, 63, 65, 72, 78, 83, 91, 95–96, 98, 100, 108, 131, 144, 186, 189, 192–93 blessed 11, 20, 57, 100, 151, 174, 195 Catholic 73 Christian 5, 7, 33 English 94–95, 155, 187 translocal 22, 96, 146, 186, 188 nation-state. See nation nationalism 2, 3, 7, 187, 192 Christian nationalism 7–8 religious nationalism 3, 7–8, 196 See also identity naturalization 6, 9, 14, 20, 30, 60, 151, 193 Nectan, Saint 184 Neri, Philip 122 Netherlands, the 158, 172 New Testament, the 172 Ninian, Saint 49 Noah 37, 48 Northern Rebellion, the 163–64 Northumberland 171

Index Northumbria 10, 79, 82, 90, 114, 156, 159–60, 167, 169, 173–74, 181–82 nostalgia 8, 149, 186, 188 Obedience of a Christian Man (Tyndale) 28n10, 38–39, 44n55 Ochino, Bernadino 64–65 Oklahoma 4–7, 20, 195 Old Testament, the 26, 65 Oldcastle, John 48, 51 Origen 35 Origin 1, 5–6, 9–10, 12, 24, 26–27, 56, 59, 61, 68, 72, 75, 99, 101–2, 107, 130, 133, 139–40, 156, 162, 182, 192, 195–97 Christian 1–3, 11, 19–22, 24, 32, 34–36, 49, 56–58, 61, 63, 65, 68, 70–72, 77, 80, 88, 91–92, 96, 100, 103, 105, 118, 132, 135, 140–45, 149, 172, 176–77, 188, 192 ethnic 83 myth 3, 31, 179, 185, 192, 196 narrative 1–2, 10, 17–19, 22–24, 26, 34, 37, 56, 60–63, 71–72, 76, 83, 86, 88, 96–97, 100, 110, 133, 140–42, 144–45, 149, 172, 180, 189, 194–95 Roman 38, 58, 181 See also discourse Oswald, King 10, 71, 84, 111, 114, 128, 131–32, 147–48, 150, 156–61, 164, 168–69, 173, 177 Oswiu, King 158 Oswyn, King 128 Osyth, Saint 128, 167, 169, 175 Oxford 62, 76, 82, 111, 154, 172, 183 Padstow 184 pagan 11, 34, 47, 66, 93, 113, 115, 120, 124, 147–48, 152, 156, 159, 164, 166 Palestine 73 papal power 27, 33–34, 38–39, 45, 61, 63–65, 67, 70, 89. See also authority papal tyranny 40, 45 Paris, Matthew 39 Parish, Helen 39, 49 Parker, Matthew 31, 50, 53–54, 56, 68, 73, 75–76, 152, 163 Patrick, Saint 49, 82 Paul, the Apostle 10, 36, 135 Paul V, Pope 171 Paulinus of York 90, 154, 156, 170

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Index Penda, King 156 Perambulation of Kent (Lambarde) 89n90, 149, 153n29, 155, 180 periodization 33, 46, 50, 56–57, 60 persecution 15, 20, 22–23, 47, 58, 99–100, 102, 109–10, 129, 131, 142, 145, 182, 194. See also narrative Persons, Robert 22, 36, 62–63, 73, 76–77, 88, 92–97, 103, 114, 123–24, 127, 129, 131, 134, 138, 142, 180–81, 186, 189 Peter, the Apostle 10, 36, 49, 93, 115, 135, 176 Petroc, Saint 175, 184 Pfaff, Richard 173–174 Philip, the Apostle 35, 49, 93 Picts, Pictish 9, 11, 76, 79, 83 pilgrimage 21, 135–36, 140, 144, 146, 151–54, 158–59, 170–71, 177, 179, 189, 195 Piran, Saint 178, 184 Pole, Reginald 63, 65–68, 76, 85, 92 polemic 12–13, 77, 84–85, 94, 111, 113, 128, 130, 139, 142, 159, 164, 180–81, 184 Ponet, John 64 pope, the 29, 31, 33–34, 38–340, 42, 45, 56–58, 65–67, 75, 80, 116, 118, 176 postmodern 9, 59 power 8, 13, 15, 20–21, 24–26, 38–39, 45, 68, 70, 100, 102, 108, 122–25, 130, 133, 145, 148–49, 167, 169, 179, 187, 192, 196 prayer 14, 114, 133, 144, 154, 160 Pro Ecclesiasticae Unitatis Defensione (Pole) 65 prophecy 30–31, 44–45, 52, 82, 112 proselytization 170 purity 15, 45–46, 58, 64, 79 reform 13, 43, 65, 68, 70, 102–3, 108, 115, 118, 131, 135, 138, 140–41, 148, 166, 172, 175–76 minded 3, 27, 28, 38, 50, 52, 58 “Reformation, the” 18–19, 33, 46, 65, 77, 140–41, 158, 170, 172, 175 reformers, reformed 2, 11–12, 21, 23, 26–27, 30–32, 35–36, 39, 44–45, 47–49, 51, 55, 57–58, 73, 80, 96, 99, 102, 104–6, 108–13, 115, 118, 120–21, 124, 127, 133, 137, 139–42, 145, 149, 177, 187, 191–92 relics 35, 49, 101–2, 113, 122, 133, 136, 145, 158, 160, 169, 170, 175, 178, 184, 187–88

229 religion, religious 4–7, 9, 15–17, 24, 32, 43, 46, 48, 57–58, 62, 69, 71, 77, 80, 92–94, 96–98, 100–1, 125, 137, 150–52, 155–57, 160, 165–68, 171–73, 179, 181, 186–87, 191–95 identity 4, 7, 25, 42–43, 48, 50, 92, 97–98, 172, 181, 188, 194 material 7, 16 nationalism 3, 196 studies 4, 97, 195–96 See also identity rhetoric 1–2, 4, 6–7, 9, 11, 24, 31, 53–54, 56, 60, 75, 195–96 nationalist rhetoric 8, 24 rhetorical power 21, 24, 149, 167, 187 Revelation, Book of 8, 21, 27, 31–32, 44–46, 51–52, 57, 64, 70, 83, 88, 147, 194 Ricoeur, Paul 21n35, 151, 173, 179, 195n6 ritual 7, 11, 16, 20, 140, 144–45, 148, 150–52, 171, 173, 175–76, 179, 184, 187, 189, 191 culture 6, 11, 16, 19–20, 22, 133, 151, 155, 179, 189, 193 Rome 1, 4, 11–12, 19–21, 27, 31, 33–38, 40, 42–44, 46, 49, 57–58, 60–63, 73–75, 77, 79, 91–93, 95, 97, 99, 106, 128, 131, 135, 137, 144, 159–60, 163, 173, 176–77, 187, 189, 192, 194 Roman. See identity Roscarrock, Nicholas 114, 166n71, 168, 179, 181, 183–84 Royal Supremacy 33, 42, 63–65, 76, 83 sacralization 20, 23, 27, 62, 79, 99, 144, 147, 179, 187–89, 192, 196 sacred history 12, 16–17, 66, 97–98, 151, 165, 193, 195 sacred kingship 4, 63, 65 Saint Albans 71, 113, 170 Samothes the Giant 37 Sarum Calendar 175 Sarum Rite 173–74 Satan 45, 64 Saxon 11, 38, 47, 49, 66, 79, 84, 89, 94, 107, 166, 181, 184 East 171 West 152, 159, 178 schism 83, 89, 111, 117, 127

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230 Scotland, Scottish 50, 58, 62–63, 74, 79, 84, 88, 94–95, 113–114, 117, 146, 156, 162, 168, 181, 185 monks 38, 62, 79, 156 Sebba, King 171 secular 46, 76, 102, 141, 172, 179, 187, 193 secularization thesis, the 141n131 Seven Seals, The 54 Shadows of Doubt (Tutino) 13n17, 14n20–23, 28n8, 29n11, 53n87, 55n100, 59, 85n73, 138n120 Shagan, Ethan 42, 129, 138, 141 Shell, Alison 149–50 shrine 9, 12, 17, 19–22, 80, 101, 122, 135–36, 138, 140, 144–45, 149–50, 152, 154, 158, 160–62, 166–67, 169–72, 178, 184, 186–87, 189, 194–95 Simeon the Metaphrast 36 Smith, Anthony 3n3, 4n5, 26n3, 60n3, 187 society 3, 101, 165, 177, 181 sola scriptura 14, 27–29, 38, 42 soteriology 41 Southwell, Robert 184 Spain, Spanish 36, 84, 94, 105, 170 space 1, 6, 8, 21, 23, 60–62, 72–75, 84, 90, 92, 96–97, 181, 187, 196. See also identity Stapleton, Thomas 12, 22, 41, 48, 61–63, 76–77, 88–94, 96, 101–3, 106–12, 116–18, 123–27, 129, 131–32, 134, 136, 138, 142, 148, 180–81, 185–86, 188–89 state. See nation-state stay-at-home Catholics 62–3, 88, 96, 113 Strasbourg 68 Stuart, Mary 73 Suffolk 43, 167–68, 173 sui generis 24, 287, 195 supernatural 6, 11, 14–15, 21–22, 25–26, 41, 48, 65, 83, 86, 99–110, 117, 124–25, 130, 133, 140–45, 148, 157, 164, 179, 192, 194–95 superstition 38, 49–50, 64, 71, 80, 99, 102–3, 106, 117, 123, 126, 136, 138, 146, 148–49, 157, 162–64, 177 Survey of Worcestershire (Habington) 154 Sutcliffe, Mathew 58, 75n43 Switzerland, Swiss 43, 158 Synod of Whitby 90, 94, 156, 159, 162–64, 175, 182

Index Tabbs, Saint 167 temporality 1, 14, 22, 26–27, 33, 39, 42, 46, 51–52, 56–57, 64–65, 72, 87, 108, 141, 164, 180, 195 Ten Commandments, the 4–5, 20 territorialization 7, 12, 96, 187 Tertullian 35 Theodoret 117, 125 Theorizing Myth (Lincoln) 16 Thirkeld, Richard 128 transcendence 14, 15, 22, 26, 61, 101, 113, 141, 185, 193, 195 translocality 22, 96, 146, 186, 188 transubstantiation 71 Trent (Council of), Tridentine 65, 102–3, 106, 120–23, 129, 134n112, 135, 137–38, 140, 148, 171 post 73, 122, 129, 131, 134, 139 pre 129, 138–39, 170–71, 187 Tudor period 1, 4, 8, 23, 25, 45, 72, 97, 103, 125, 136, 145, 159, 192–3, 196 Tudor, Mary 61, 63, 65, 70, 76, 80, 82, 111, 161, 174–75, 184 Tutino, Stefania 13–14, 16n27, 27–28, 55n100, 59, 85n73, 138n120 Tyndale, William 28, 31, 38–40, 43, 46 United Kingdom, the 192 United States, the 4–5, 7, 24, 191–2 universal truth 13–14, 26–27, 29, 31, 51, 55–56, 59, 96, 71–72, 83, 108, 171, 194. See also certainty and cosmic interpretation Urith, Saint 167 Ursula, Saint 113 Vatican, the 77 Verstegan, Richard 77, 88n82 Vitae Romanorum Pontificum (Barnes) 39 Vocacyon of John Bale (Bale) 35, 49, 51, 86n74 Waldensians, the 48 Wales 63, 74, 91, 95, 135, 146, 166, 181, 184–85 North Wales 135, 166 Welsh 50, 62, 75, 82, 88, 91, 95–96, 135, 158, 166, 172, 178, 181–82, 184, 189

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231

Index Walsham, Alexandra 14, 18, 44, 101, 103, 106, 112, 122, 129–30, 132, 134, 139, 147, 166, 177 Watson, Christopher 158, 161n53, 162–63, 169 Werberga, Saint 182 Wessex 175 “West, the” 156, 159, 181, 183, 185–86 Westminster Abbey 171–72 white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) 191 White Church of Oswestry, the 158 White, Hayden 16 Wilfrid, Saint 90, 170, 175–76, 182 William of Malmesbury 35, 37, 39, 49 William the Conqueror 95 Willibrord, Saint 172

Wilson, John 74n40, 114, 115n49, 117n57, 154, 155n38, 158n43, 166n70, 169n83, 185–86 Winefride, Saint 10, 113, 128, 132, 134–39, 142, 169, 175, 182, 185 Well 123, 131, 135–36, 145, 150, 156, 170, 186 Witburga, Saint 169 Wolsey, Thomas 33 Woolf, Daniel 78, 145, 149, 157 Worcestershire 153 Wycliffe, John 45, 85, 113 York 154, 158, 173–76, 182 Yorkshire 169 Zwingli, Ulrich

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Lauren Horn Gri���n (PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara) is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Louisiana State University. Her research and teaching focus on religion, politics, media, and technology.

Supplements to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 22 9 789004 514355

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Lauren Horn Griffin - 978-90-04-51436-2

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FA B R I C AT I N G F O U N D E R S I N E A R LY M O D E R N E N G L A N D Lauren Horn Gri���n

In Fabricating Founders in Early Modern England, Lauren Horn Gri���n argues that in order to understand nationalisms, we need a clearer understanding of the types of cultural myths, symbols, and traditions that legitimate them. Myths of origin and election, memories of a greater and purer past, and narratives of persecution and mission are required for the production and maintenance of powerful national sentiments. Through an investigation of how early modern Catholics and Protestants reimagined, reinterpreted, and rewrote the lives of the founder-saints who spread Christianity in England, this book o�fers a theoretical framework for the study of origin narratives. Analyzing the discursive construction of time and place, the invocation of forces beyond the human to naturalize and authorize, and the role of visual and ritual culture in fabrications of the past, this book provides a case study for how to approach claims about founding ��gures. Serving as a timely example of the dependence of national identity on key cultural resources, Gri���n shows how origin narratives – particularly the founding ��gures that anchor them – function as uniquely powerful rhetorical tools for the cultural production of regional and national identity.

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FA B R I C AT I N G FOUNDERS IN E A R LY M O D E R N ENGLAND History, Rhetoric, and the Origins of Christianity Lauren Horn Gri���n