John Bale and the Development of Protestant Hagiography in England

1973 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie P. Fairfield
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Intensive Study ◽  
John Bale ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Golden Legend ◽  
Anne Askew ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Scholarly Attention

One of the consequences of the Reformation in England (as elsewhere) was that for Protestants, at least, the image of sainthood changed considerably. Erasmus'sColloquieshad poked fun at the kind of saint honoured by theGolden Legend; and Thomas Cromwell drove the point home in his Injunctions of 1536 and 1538. ‘New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth …’ and a new cause naturally creates its new heroes. The changing conception of sainthood in sixteenth-century England, culminating in Foxe'sActes and Monuments,has attracted not a little modern scholarly attention, as for example in Helen C. White'sTudor Books of Saints and Martyrs.But one pivotal figure in this development deserves more intensive study: John Bale (1495–1563), the famous antiquary, dramatist and protestant propagandist. In the 1540s Bale published works on two protestant ‘saints’—Sir John Oldcastle and Mistress Anne Askew—which did much to imprint the new definition of sainthood on the English mind. For these little tracts alone (and particularly in the light of Bale's later relationship with John Foxe) Bale's contribution to protestant hagiography invites a closer look.

Talking Books

2019 ◽  
pp. 185-229
Author(s):  
Jennifer Richards
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
John Bale ◽  
Printing Process ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Written Form ◽  
Oral Testimony ◽  
Anne Askew ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Authorial Voice

This chapter explores the printed books of the sixteenth century as ‘talking books’; it also explores how the voice is implicated in the printing process. It focuses on the work of two print-aware authors, John Bale and William Baldwin, who worked with the most influential ‘talking book’ in England in the 1540s: Erasmus’s Paraphrases. It explores Bale’s attentiveness to the physical voice of Anne Askew in his editions of her Examinations (1546, 1547), arguing that he uses print to turn the written form of her oral testimony into a script for oral readers. It attends to Baldwin’s representation of the voices of illiterate working men, medieval magistrates, and an array of untrustworthy characters, including some noisy cats, to create careful ‘listeners’ who are aware of the manipulative authorial voice that lies behind literary voices on the page as well as the risks of affective ‘mishearing’.

Anne Askew

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Available P ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
John Bale ◽  
Biographical Information ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Untimely Death ◽  
Radical Reformation ◽  
Anne Askew ◽  
Church Policy

Anne Askew was born of a notable Lincolnshire family and became a Protestant voice of radical reformation at the end of the reign of Henry VIII. According to Bale, Askew was compelled to marry Thomas Kyme as a substitute for her sister’s prior betrothal upon her untimely death. Askew sought a divorce after Kyme drove her from their home for her unorthodox beliefs. It is likely that her vocal criticisms of church policy regarding demonstrations of faith brought her to the attention of the bishops. She was first interrogated by Bishop Bonner and subsequently released before being re-captured. During her second imprisonment, Bishop Gardiner and Chancellor Wriothesley conducted the interrogation and torture, which historians generally attribute to the effort to prove the Protestant leanings of Henry VIII’s last queen. The unusual torture Askew endured as a gentlewoman has been understood to suggest her direct affiliation with the circle of Katherine Parr. In 1546, at age twenty-five, she was burned at the stake as a heretic. She became a significant martyr when John Bale and John Foxe published accounts of her interrogation, imprisonment, and torture. Askew is known almost exclusively from the two narratives she wrote of her interrogations: The first examinacyon (1546) discusses her beliefs and her efforts to frustrate her interrogators; The lattre examinacyon (1547) describes her re-arrest and the judicial torture she endured along with interrogation leading to her execution. John Bale first published her works along with commentary and framing, which supply much of the biographical information about Askew that remains available.

The Study and Editing of the Vernacular Chronicles

After Alfred ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 22-38
Author(s):  
Pauline Stafford
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter surveys interest in the vernacular Anglo-Saxon chronicles from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, together with their study and editing. It sees these endeavours as both scholarly and antiquarian, but they also as linked to periods of definition of, and concern with, England and Englishness from the Reformation through to nineteenth-century medievalism. It discusses successive editions and their presentation of these chronicles, and argues that editions have not been neutral but have played a role in constructing these texts as a single national chronicle. It stresses the importance of the most recent editions, which present each chronicle separately.

Persecution and Toleration in the English Reformation

1984 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 163-187
Author(s):  
G. R. Elton
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Real ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
External Pressures ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

The century of the Reformation, in England as elsewhere, sharpened all conflicts and augmented persecution. As the unity of Christendom broke up, the rival parties acquired that sort of confidence in their own righteousness that encourages men to put one another to death for conscience sake; an era of moderation and tolerance gave way to one of ever more savage repression. To the openminded willingness which characterized the humanism of Erasmus and More as well as the Rome of Leo X there succeeded the bigotry typical of Carafa, Calvin, Knox and the English puritans; only the gradual evaporation of such passions, produced by each side’s inability to triumph totally, produced a weariness with religious strife which made the return of mutual sufferance possible. That, at least, is the received story. Historians of toleration, as for instance Jordan and Lecler, firmly described the history of persecution in this way. Jordan identified six developments which led to its decline in sixteenth-century England: a growing political strength among dissident sects, the impossibility of preventing splintering and preserving uniformity, the needs of trade which overrode religious hostility, experience of travel, the failure to suppress dissident publications, and finally a growing scepticism which denied the claims to exclusive truth advanced by this or that faction. In other words, only two things moved men, once they had fallen away from the generosity of the pre-Reformation era, to substitute an uneasy toleration for a vigorous persecution: the external pressures of experience and the decline of religious fervour. By implication, men of power called for repression and only those who could not hope to win favoured toleration, until general exhaustion set in. It is a convincing enough picture, and much evidence no doubt supports it. But it is a picture—a general and rather schematic panorama which makes little allowance for the real opinions of individuals. On this occasion I should like to test it by looking at the attitudes of two highly articulate sixteenth-century Englishmen—Thomas More, humanist and loyal son of the universal Church, and John Foxe, humanist and faithful protestant. Both, we know, were men of sensitivity and sense. How did they stand to the problem of persecution?

Defining Heresies: Catholic Heresiologies, 1520–50

2007 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 241-251
Author(s):  
David Bagchi
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Causal Connection ◽  
Traditional Definition ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Medieval Heresy ◽  
Traditional Understanding

Few historians nowadays would endorse a simple causal connection between the Reformation and the rise of toleration. Indeed, reformations Protestant and Catholic have become almost synonymous with ‘confessionalization’ and ‘social disciplining’. Nonetheless, the transition from the persecuting society of the Middle Ages to something approaching a pluralist society was an early modern phenomenon which has attracted renewed attention in recent years. This transition was facilitated by the breakdown of the traditional understanding of heresy. The role of Protestantism in de-stabilizing the heresy discourse of mid-seventeenth century England has been expertly delineated by Ann Hughes in her study of Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena and the responses to it. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the Catholic understanding of heresy was entirely stable during this period. As I hope to show in this survey of Catholic heresiologies from the period 1520 to 15 50, controversialists encountered difficulties when they tried to conscript patristic and medieval heresy discourses into the sixteenth-century conflict. An instability at the heart of the traditional definition of heresy – over whether heresy is primarily a doctrinal error or a moral failing – seemed at first to provide a solution to these difficulties. Ultimately and ironically, however, it made their case vulnerable to a Protestant charge of subjectivism.

Through Several Glasses Darkly: Historical and Sectarian Perceptions of the Tudor Church

Tudorism ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
PATRICK COLLINSON
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
Acts And Monuments

This chapter surveys the perceptions of the Tudor Church since the sixteenth century. It argues that the history of the Tudor Church has been punctuated, bisected, fractured, and forever complicated by the Reformation, which meant different things to different people. One of the visions of the Tudor Church seen through very dark if rose-tinted glass was that enjoyed by Anglicans in the century or so following the recatholicising Oxford Movement of the 1830s and 1840s. In this perspective, what happened to the Tudors was sensible and non-revolutionary. The Anglo‐Catholic version of the Tudor Church was a reaction against the story of British Christianity which had been told between the 1560s and 1580s by John Foxe in Acts and Monuments of the Church, or its more familiar title, ‘The Book of Martyrs’.

Racking the Body, Shaping the Text: The Account of Anne Askew in Foxes “Book of Martyrs”*

2001 ◽  
Vol 54 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 1165-1196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas S. Freeman ◽  
Sarah Elizabeth Wall
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
John Bale ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
Anne Askew

Current scholarship on Anne Askew has tended to disparage the editorial tactics of John Bale, her first editor, as intrusive and distorting. In contrast, the reprinting of her text by John Foxe, in his “Book of Martyrs, “ has been commended for its lack of editorial intervention. Yet afresh consideration of Foxes work with Askew's narrative suggests that Foxe's shaping force in the text was as strong as Bale's, if more subtle. Furthermore, attempts to locate Askew's authorial agency within one text or the other impose modern ideas about authorship on a period in which such ideas were still being formed.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document