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FROM THE PREFACE
It is astonishing how little attention is paid even by
historians to the religious controversies
in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, save in the most
general terms. Yet it was then that the
major issues of the time (as seen by the people of that
time) were most fiercely debated by
Catholic and Protestant, by Anglican and Puritan –
issues that have in varying forms
continued till today.
One reason for this neglect may be a distaste for such
controversy, as being (in Shakespeare’s
words) a “devilish-holy fray”. Another may be that the
controversies were obviously religious
and so related to matters which, however important they
may have seemed to the people
of that time, have faded in importance with the passing
of time. Yet a third may be that the
writers who engaged in the controversies were, for the
most part, minor figures; or if, as in
some cases, they were major figures, the part they
played in the controversies was minor in
comparison with their contribution to the history and/or
literature of the age.
On the other hand, it has to be stressed
that the political, social and economic issues of the
time (so dear to most historians) were inextricably
interwoven with the religious issue,
whether traditional or reformist. Certainly, a perusal
of the contents of the controversies
leads to the conclusion that their basic issues were as
much political as religious, with the
Catholics and the Puritans from their differing
viewpoints making the same demand of the
Anglican bishops, “By what authority?” In this demand
one may well find the seeds of the
main political issues that have developed in England –
and in the world at large – from that
day to this...
It is with such considerations in mind that I have
undertaken the task of compiling the
present anthology, not just as a selection of
interesting passages merely juxtaposed without
apparent order, but rather as a selection of those
passages which (in my opinion) best serve
to illustrate the ongoing movement of the controversies.
So I have not left the passages to
speak for themselves, as best they can once taken out of
context; but linked them together
with a running commentary, to make up for their
inevitable loss of context. I have, moreover,
chosen them in relation not so much to their subject as
to their author, considering that the
subject is in any case closely bound up with the
personality and religious commitment of the
author. And so this volume is entitled with reference
not so much to the controversies in
general as to the individual controversialists of the
Elizabethan age.
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FROM THE PROLOGUE:
About a quarter of a century ago, as a postgraduate
student at Cambridge, I wrote a dissertation on Spanish
religious texts in English translation in the 16th and
17th centuries, supervised initially by Professor Edward
Merryon Wilson and, after his death, by Dr. Richard
Luckett. The present volume, while its focus and scope
are quite different, is in many ways a development of
that work.
Much has changed since the 1970s, not least that the
lines drawn between Reformation studies and
Counter-Reformation studies have become less sharply
drawn and modern scholarship is working its way towards
the perception that “Christianity in its protestant
forms” is not “an entirely different species from either
medieval Christianity or the Roman Catholicism shaped by
the Counter-Reformation” [Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and
People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 12
]. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to
conceive of the whole process of the rejection of the
authority of Rome in terms of anything other than
hostility and opposition. In particular, in
post-Reformation England
Importation of [Catholic books] from English
and foreign continental presses was forbidden; illicit
Catholic presses and caches of books were searched for
and destroyed by government pursuivants; bonfires of
them and of other popish artifacts were a common
cautionary demonstration; Catholic texts were expurgated
where they impugned Protestantism; the legislation
regulating the book trade had profound implications for
the distribution of Catholic texts
It is frequently assumed that such
restrictions rendered Catholic literature all but
powerless to exert any influence at all in
post-Reformation England, except among committed
recusants who were prepared to run the risk of
distributing and owning forbidden books. The fact that
Protestant divines were exempted from the general
prohibition is also often passed over, since they were
granted access to such works in order to be able to
refute them. Little attention has been given to
assessing the extent to which, while refuting the
“popery” of Catholic literature, they assimilated and
perpetuated other aspects of the Catholic texts in their
possession. My aim in these pages is, first, to draw
attention to those elements within the Church of England
which were receptive to aspects of pre- and
Counter-Reformation literature and, second, to examine
the texts by which such culture was transmitted.
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Discourses of