Gregory D. Dodds, Exploiting Erasmus: the Erasmian Legacy and Religious Change in Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009)

Reviews / ERSY 30 (2010) 57–93 81

Gregory D. Dodds, Exploiting Erasmus: The Erasmian Legacy and Religious Change in Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). xx, 405 pp. ISBN 978-0-8020-9900-6.

Historians’ estimation of Erasmus’ influence on the English Reformation has been in serious decline in the past several decades. James McConica’s confident assertion (in 1965) that the English Reformation was “fundamen- tally Erasmian in nature” has yielded to a landscape of glancing references and radically diminished assessments, the result of work by revisionist historians like Patrick Collinson, Christopher Haigh, and Eamon Duffy, who employ a binary Catholic/Protestant template for interpreting the Reforma- tion. Asserting the Church of England’s essential Protestantism and attack- ing interpretations of the English Reformation by both nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic apologists and mid-twentieth-century mainstream historians like A.G. Dickens, these historians embrace the notion that “Protestantism and then Calvinism came to dominate English religion” (xvi). As a result, they leave little room in their narratives for Erasmus; thus they in effect replicate the move of sixteenth-century Protestants who could not forgive Erasmus for his refusal to reject papal authority and who in their pursuit of certainty in matters of religious belief could find little room for Erasmus’ supposedly undogmatic version of Christianity in a Europe increasingly polar- ized between ideological Protestantism and Counter-Reformation Catholi- cism. Gregory Dodds’ important new study is shaped in response to these interpretive orthodoxies. Seeking to document Erasmus’ continued influence on the English Reformation, Dodds organizes his book around an effort to connect two undisputed moments of Erasmian influence in early modern England, one in the early years of the reign of Edward VI and the other a century later when England was entering into the Civil War that would, for a time, destroy the reformed Church that Edward’s reign established and Elizabeth’s reign reaffirmed. The first of these was the publication in 1547 of Royal Injunctions that required all parish churches to own copies of a translation of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the Gospels and Acts, thus elevating it, along with the Great Bible, the Book of Homilies (1547), and the soon-to-be published Book of Common Prayer (1549/1552), to the status of a founding document of the Reformed English Church. The second was the invocation of Erasmus by the second Earl of Falkland and his followers who in the 1640s sought to portray the events leading up to the English Civil War as “an abandonment of the Erasmian principles of unity, peace, and tolerance”

(xii). Falkland, according to Dodds, evoked Erasmus to defend his belief that “[t]rue Christianity … was unified, non-dogmatic, and theologically flexible,” seeking “to carve out a space for the English church between … the extremes of Catholicism and Calvinism” (xii). Dodds here defines two forms of Erasmian influence in England: (1)the development of a public awareness of Erasmus’ name through publication, reception, and reference in polemic argument to Erasmus’ works, and (2) Erasmus’ service as a source for rhetorical appeals to common ground that, according to Dodds, recur throughout this period at moments of conflict between differing factions within the developing Church of England. Exploiting Erasmus begins with treatment of the first of these, then moves to the second; Dodds claims not to trace the influence of Erasmus’ ideas, per se, but instead to show how Erasmus served “as a counterpoint in English thought” to the domination of “first Protestantism and then Calvinism” in English religion (xvi). Dodds therefore speaks not of an Erasmian influence but instead of an Erasmian legacy, a two-fold presence, the first an exploitation by religious and political leaders of “the stature and memory of Erasmus to further their own agendas,” and the second and more specific, the employment—sometimes on both sides of a debate—of the rhetorical strategy of making a plea for “conformity, peace, tolerance, and the via media” as a way of attempting to undermine one’s opponent in a theological controversy (xvii). Dodd’s review of Erasmus’ influence on the English Reformation begins with Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the Gospels and Acts. This work was translated into English at the court of Henry VIII, supposedly at least in part by the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth but seen finally through the press by Nicholas Udall. The Royal Injunctions of 1547 established this work as one of the founding documents of the Edwardian revolution in religion, a level of significance comparable to the books that would transform English worship from Latin to the vernacular and establish a style, structure, and practice for public worship that has been central to the identity of the Church of England through whatever vicissitudes of theological or doctrinal controversy might otherwise trouble it. John Jewel and Richard Hooker would defend it against claims that it was too Protestant or too Catholic; after the Commonwealth government’s failure to find a suitable replacement, the leaders of the Church of England under Charles II could do little more than restore it to use. Tracing the reception of Erasmus’ books, and especially the Paraphrases, in England in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries provides the grounding for Dodds’ first of two lines of argument in his Erasmian recovery effort. For about the first third of this book he focuses on the Paraphrases