John Calvin and the English Catholics, c. 1565–1640

This article examines the assessments of John Calvin's life, character, and influence to be found in the polemical writings of English Catholics in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. It demonstrates the centrality of Calvin to Catholic claims about the character and history of the established church, and the extent to which Catholic writings propagated a vibrant ‘black legend’ of Calvin's egotism and sexual depravity, drawing heavily not only on the writings of the French Calvinist-turned-Catholic Jerome Bolsec, but also on those of German Lutherans. The article also explores how, over time, Catholic writers increasingly identified some common ground with anti-puritans and anti-Calvinists within the English church, and how claims about the seditious character of Calvin, and by extension Calvinism, were used to articulate the contrasting ‘loyalty’ of Catholics and their right to occupy a place within the English polity

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

Papist as heretic : the burning of John Forest, 1538

This article examines the circumstances surrounding the condemnation and burning for heresy of the Observant Franciscan John Forest in 1538. Forest's principal 'heresy' was his adherence to the papacy, making him the only Englishman to be burnt for this offence by any Tudor regime. His fate, however, can be placed in the context of an increasing willingness of Henrician apologists in the 1530s to identify papal claims as heretical, particularly over the issue of the authority of a general council, to which Henry VIII had appealed over the divorce. The papal convocation of the council of Mantua in 1536–7, and Henry's need to impugn its authority, provides the immediate context for Forest's condemnation. The article also demonstrates how the harshness of Forest's treatment was related to his avowed equivocation over the oath of supremacy, and how Forest and a number of other conservative priests and laypeople were able to employ strategies to subvert the government's attempts to bind their consciences. It concludes by suggesting a number of reasons, political and theological, why the policy pursued with Forest was not repeated

The shaping of a community : the rise and reformation of the English parish c.1400-1560

Churchwardens' accounts are fast threatening to oust wills from their position as the first port of call for historians seeking to recreate the religious and social experience of'ordinary' English people in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In a book brimming with graphs, tables and pie-charts, Beat Kiimin demonstrates how a systematic analysis of the income and expenditure described in surviving churchwardens' accounts (in particular those for ten sample parishes) can be used to substantiate the now increasingly familiar emphasis on the vitality of late medieval religious life. The seductive lore of these fascinating documents should not blind us to their limitations: little over 200 often incomplete sets survive from this period from nearly 9,000 parishes, and this book is understandably not able to tell us whether any principle more dependable than happenstance accounts for the pattern of survival. Why, for example, do Devon and Somerset between them provide 16 per cent of all surviving sets? None the less, in analysing these sources more rigorously than any previous commentator, Kumin paints a compelling picture of how churchwardens (here convincingly demonstrated to have been drawn overwhelmingly from the broad middle swathe of parish society) were able to extract from their communities, and apply to communal purposes, very substantial sums of money, usually considerably more than the crown was able to raise from the same communities in direct lay taxation

(Re)defining the English Reformation

The study of the Reformation has arguably never been in better shape, as new books and articles appear with dizzying regularity. The current rude good health of the subject can be substantiated by a few minutes spent with the catalog of the British Library. A title keyword search under “Reformation” produces 490 items for the 1960s, dipping to 449 for the 1970s. But in the 1980s, this shoots up to 656 and remains at almost exactly that level through the 1990s. In the new century up to the end of 2007, no fewer than 563 books with the word “Reformation” in the title have been published and deposited at the British Library. Moreover, the concerns of Reformation history and theology are now regularly cropping up in places where they have not been much in evidence before: in art history, musicology, and literary studies, for example. To point to just one particular case, the study of William Shakespeare—always a reliable barometer of Anglo‐American cultural and academic preoccupations—has taken a decidedly religious turn over recent years, in which questions of the meaning and impact of the Reformation are very much to the fore.1 The collective problem faced by students of the Reformation, if indeed we have a problem, is not therefore one of nurturing a tender and precarious plant, struggling to thrive in stony and unyielding historical soil. Rather, it is the challenge of maintaining order and coherence in a large and untidy garden, alive with luxuriant foliage, periodic colorful blooms, and a smattering of undesirable weeds

A Comparative Analysis of the Right To Appeal

The thermoneutral zone (TNZ) curve lies between the ambient temperatures (Ta) where an endothermic animal uses the least amount of energy to maintain a balance between the heat production from the animal’s own metabolism and the heat lost to the environment. If the animal is exposed to Ta’s over the upper critical temperature (UCT), which is the highest temperature that is still in the TNZ, the animals have to use energy to cool down. If they are exposed to temperatures lower than the lower critical temperature (LCT), which is the lowest temperature that is still in the TNZ, the animal have to use energy to warm up. In the present study oxygen consumption was measured at different Ta’s to determine the TNZ in two and three week old broiler chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus). Two different protocols were used and compared, a pseudorandom protocol in which chickens were exposed to seven temperatures in two hour periods for each run and a more typical progressive protocol in which Ta decreased gradually, one or two degrees per hour. The TNZ in two weeks old chickens was between 30.7 ˚C- 36.4 ˚C and between 28.8 ˚C- 32.7 ˚C in the three weeks old chickens. In chickens the TNZ shifts remarkably during the first few weeks of life towards lower temperatures as the animals acquire thermoregulatory competence. The method with a pseudorandom protocol takes more factors, like activity, into consideration than a typical progressive protocol