Mumpsimus and Sumpsimus : the intellectual origins of a Henrician bon mot

Henry VIII's appearance before the assembled houses of parliament on Christmas Eve 1545 was perhaps his finest hour. In what has been called a ‘pioneer royal Christmas broadcast’, the king delivered an impassioned and eloquent speech lamenting the religious divisions that afflicted his kingdom, and urging his subjects towards unity and charity. 1 According to William Petre, the king himself wept as he recounted how ‘charity between man and man is so refrigerate’, and few of his audience could restrain themselves from doing likewise. 2 Another eye-witness, the chronicler Edward Hall, wrote down the speech ‘worde for worde, as near as I was able to report it’. This account gives details of how Henry illustrated the breakdown of fraternal love among his people: ‘the one calleth the other Hereticke and Anabaptist, and he calleth hym again, Papist, Yypocrite and Pharisey’; rival preachers inveighed against each other ‘without charity or discrecion’. To the king's mind, the blame for this deserved to be apportioned to all sides, and, to reinforce the point, Henry brought forward one of the more curious metaphors of contemporary religious discourse: ‘some be to styff in their old Mumpsimus, other be to busy and curious in their newe Sumpsimus’. 3 Recent historians of the reign have understandably devoted considerable attention to his speech, arguably the most famous of all Henry VIII's public pronouncements, and most have quoted the mumpsimus–sumpsimus idiom, with varying degrees of wry amusement. 4 Yet there has been little attempt to explain why the king should use precisely these words to epitomise the polarisation of religious positions in the early 1540s. 5 It is not always apparent from modern accounts that the terms ‘mumpsimus’ and ‘sumpsimus’ did not represent the king's own assay at faux-bucolic neologism, but were an established (though not long-established) literary trope. In the following short discussion, I hope to demonstrate how an investigation of the derivation and precedents of the phraseology employed by Henry in his Christmas speech can throw some revealing light on the processes by which religious typologies were constructed and utilised in the course of the Henrician Reformation, as well as providing some points of orientation in that most formidable of terrae incognitae, the mind of Henry VIII himself. 6 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Footnotes 1 The phrase is Diarmaid MacCulloch's: Thomas Cranmer: a life, New Haven–London 1996, 348. 2 PRO, SP 1/212, fos 110v–11r (Letters and papers, foreign and domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R. H. Brodie, London 1862–1910 [hereinafter cited as LP], xx/2, 1030). 3 E. Hall, Hall's Chronicle, ed. H. Ellis, London 1809, 864–5. The charge of religious name-calling was hardly new in 1545. In an earlier exhortation to unity and charity, Thomas Starkey had lamented the fact that ‘eche one in hart iugeth other to be eyther pharisee or heretyke, papist or schismatike’: An exhortation to the people instructynge them to unitie and obedience, London ?1536, fo. 27v. 4 J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, London 1968, 470–1; S. E. Lehmberg, The later parliaments of Henry VIII 1536–1547, Cambridge 1977, 229–31; S. Brigden, London and the Reformation, Oxford 1989, 378; G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors, 3rd edn, London 1991, 200; C. Haigh, English reformations: religion, politics, and society under the Tudors, Oxford 1993, 164; R. Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, Basingstoke 1993, 172; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 348; G. W. Bernard, ‘The making of religious policy, 1533–1546: Henry VIII and the search for the middle way’, Historical Journal xli (1998), 348. 5 The exception here is Lehmberg, Later parliaments, 231, which notes that the phrase was derived from a 1517 treatise by Richard Pace. As I shall show, this does not give the complete picture. 6 For two recent stimulating, though contrasting, attempts to locate Henry's religious centre of gravity see Bernard, ‘The making of religious policy’; D. MacCulloch, ‘Henry VIII and the reform of the Church’, in D. MacCulloch (ed.), The reign of Henry VIII: politics, policy and piety, Basingstoke 1995, 159–80

The Mask Strikes Back: Blackness as Aporia in Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno

What is the American Gothic a reaction to? Whereas other thinkers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne locates the building blocks of the American Gothic in Puritan Christianity or Amerindian Genocide, I argue that Melville posits the genesis of chattel slavery and the construction of racial category as the repressed events that haunt the Americas and return uninvited. By using the Gothic motif of the living corpse, the famed writer of Moby-Dick addresses the social bereavement which Blackness comes to represent in the Americas. By looking for truth on the skin and flesh, the main characters of Moby-Dick and “Benito Cereno” represent the Enlightenment precept that truth can be arrested via observation and interpretation. Melville presents two Black characters as impasses in this project of interpretation: Moby-Dick’s drowned boy, Pip, and “Benito Cereno’s” undead leader, Babo

Ted Kaczynski: Evil or Insane?

Explores the life of the infamous Unabomber, and demonstrates why his manifesto on society and his extraordinary intelligence makes him the most unique and brilliant serial killer in United States history

Review of Vrinda Dalmiya's 'Caring to Know'

'Caring to Know' argues that “caring is not the ‘other’ of reason and that our lived experiences of caring and being cared for can be useful resources for truth-seeking” (1). This claim is fleshed out over six chapters using a creative blend of analytical feminist theory, virtue theory of knowledge, and cross-cultural philosophy. The brief conclusion braids together different strands of the argument. The review examines the potential of Dalmiya's 'humble relational knowers' for cross-cultural philosoph

The Dark and Middle Ages

For the most part only Plato\u27s teachings supported by a limited version of Aristotelian cosmology supportive of Platonism survived the decline of ancient Greek philosophy during the Roman Empire. Christianity later prevailed, and toward the end of the Middle Ages Aristotle’s secular perspective was only taken into account by Arab philosophers such as Averroes and Avicenna. After the collapse of Arab civilization during the twelfth century, the secular concept of a double truth between belief and reason put philosophy on equal footing with religion in such universities as Cordoba and the University of Paris. After a large assortment of ancient Greek texts were shipped from Constantinople to Italy in 1453 to prevent their destruction by pagan invaders, so-called Nominalists among European philosophers such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham featured the independent analysis of the universe based on assumptions already pursued by Aristotle. In effect Greek philosophy in its entirety came to be “resurrected,” setting the stage for the inception of science as exemplified by Copernicus, Galileo, and Bacon

The Civil Rights Movement: The Power of Television

Overview: “I am not a nigger” (Thomas). These five words seared through American television screens in May of 1963. James Baldwin, a preacher and novelist, declared his freedom from the chains of discrimination in an interview with Kenneth Clark and forever changed the conscience of black and white television owners. When asked if he was optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the nation, Baldwin made one thing clear: the fate of America lies within the ability to answer the question, why was the ‘nigger’ created? Born in Harlem in 1924, Baldwin grew up following in his father’s footsteps as a preacher, then went on to work on a railroad in New Jersey and eventually became a freelance writer and moved to Europe. Despite spending the majority of his adult life in Paris, Baldwin demonstrated the power of media by never ceasing to tell the story of his life as black man living in America, the influence of brotherhood, and the power of voice (Reference.com). Moments similar to Baldwin’s interview validate the reign of television and the impact of media on the Civil Rights Movement. During the interview, all the personal challenges that James Baldwin faced become apparent in his mannerisms, his gestures, and in every one of those five words. Baldwin’s unique and articulate comments, combined with access to the majority of American citizens via television media, left an impression that would span across states and decades. Commonly heard legal and moral arguments on injustices such as segregation and discrimination paled in comparison to Baldwin’s interview. It must be noted that the impact media had on the Civil Rights Movement was not unintentional by organizational leaders. For that reason, this paper will examine the use of television as a means to build momentum towards change, the implications of peaceful demonstrations on public consciences, the Church and its role in sustaining the movement via media, and the ability of unbiased television to shatter stereotypes. Despite the prominence of racially biased television and media during the Civil Rights Movement, coverage of demonstrations and interviews of protestors sparked national interest and quickened the pace towards racial equality. By employing understanding I have gained from documentaries, footage of demonstrations, online encyclopedias, journal articles, essays, and personal perspectives given by journalists who themselves covered the Civil Rights Movement, I intend to inform my reader about the implications of media coverage during the Civil Rights Movement

The Unsuccessful Inquisition in Tudor England

The Spanish Inquisition was tasked with finding heretics and either returning them to their faith or punishing them for their unfaithfulness. This institution lasted for hundreds of years and prosecuted thousands of cases across the Iberian Peninsula. When Mary Tudor took the throne, she instituted her own, smaller inquisition in her attempts to return her people to the Catholic faith. Yet while the Spanish Inquisition was a secretive organization, the trials and arrests in England were far more public and accessible. Much of the methodology and questioning processes were similar, yet Mary’s Inquisition met great resistance and died with her after only a few years. Martyrs were created from the “poor souls” trapped and killed by Bloody Mary and Bloody Bishop Bonner. Secrecy was the Spanish Inquisition’s main weapon and advantage, and Mary’s Inquisition could not and did not succeed without it