THE SEMANTICS OF REFORMATION: DISCOURSES OF RELIGIOUS CHANGE IN ENGLAND, C. 1414 – 1688 By [Copyright 2016] Benjamin Michael Guyer Submitted to the graduate degree program in History and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson: Jonathan Clark ________________________________ Luis Corteguera ________________________________ Katherine Clark ________________________________ Steven Epstein ________________________________ Geraldo Sousa Date Defended: March 07, 2016 The Dissertation Committee for Benjamin Michael Guyer certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: THE SEMANTICS OF REFORMATION: DISCOURSES OF RELIGIOUS CHANGE IN ENGLAND, C. 1414 – 1688 ________________________________ Chairperson: Jonathan Clark Date approved: March 07, 2016 ii Abstract The Semantics of Reformation: Discourses of Religious Change in England, c. 1414 – 1688 examines how the events of the sixteenth century were conceptualized as the English Reformation. The word ‘reformation’ was widely used during these centuries, but its meaning changed in significant ways. By adopting a linguistic methodology, the dissertation studies reformation as a concept in motion; consequently, the English Reformation, a term widely used today, is treated not as an analytic category but as a historiographical label that developed contingently. The chapters fall into three roughly equal sections, each of which covers a distinct discourse of reformation. Chapters one and two cover the first discourse, which identified reformation as the work of a church council. This discourse began at the Council of Constance (1414 – 1418) and remained firmly in place in all Christian localities through the mid-sixteenth century, when it was challenged by a new discourse: reformation by armed resistance, which is introduced at the end of chapter two and discussed in chapters three and four. The Anglo-Scots reformer John Knox brought this discourse to England’s doorstep through his work The History of the Reformation of the Church of Scotland , which discussed how Knox and his associates pursued a program of religious revolution in mid-sixteenth century Scotland. With Scotland’s church reformed by force, English theological debates about reformation sometimes carried revolutionary implications. When civil war engulfed the entire British Isles in the 1640s, England saw its own reformation by armed resistance. The final two chapters study how Anglican apologists developed a third discourse of reformation in the 1650s. After the regicide of Charles I in 1649 and the ensuing political oppression, Anglican apologists claimed that Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I brought about the English Reformation. They argued that unlike the Scottish Reformation and the reformations of mid-seventeenth century England, iii both of which were accomplished by force, Tudor sovereigns accomplished the English Reformation by law. With the restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England in 1660, this apologetic vision became the standard historical assumption in English society. iv Acknowledgements In piam memoriam Matthew Christopher Guyer July 12, 1984 – March 05, 2015 Frater et Miles A dissertation takes many years, and in that time I have become indebted to many people. I would like to thank my committee members, Luis Corteguera, Katherine Clark, Steven Epstein, and Geraldo Sousa. I am especially grateful to my advisor and chair, Jonathan Clark. Antha Cotten-Spreckelmeyer and the Department of Humanities gave me the opportunity to present the Distinguished Graduate Teaching Assistant Lecture in 2015; the revisions and additional writing made during the last year of research are in many ways due to the perspective gained in preparing that presentation. For this, I am also thankful. Conversations with colleagues have been no less beneficial, and I have learned much from David Scott Gehring, Benjamin T. G. Mayes, W. Brown Patterson, Richard Rex, Keith Stanglin, Marjorie Swann, and Darrick Taylor. I thank Kathy Porsch for giving me time off from work when it was much needed. Throughout my time at KU, I have loved teaching. I thank my students for the many rich memories that they have given me. My family, and especially my parents, have been consistently supportive and understanding, particularly in the last months of the writing process. I am above all indebted to my wife Rachel, with whom life is such joy, and for whom there is no debt. v Table of Contents Introduction p. 1 Chapter One The Body Broken: Conciliar Reformation and Ecclesial Division p. 28 Chapter Two Heads or Members? Bodies in Conflict p. 75 Chapter Three Dangerous Positions: Debating Reformation in Elizabethan England p. 126 Chapter Four Angel or Devil: Royal Reformation and its Opponents p. 186 Chapter Five ‘These Times of Reformation’: Discourses of Reformation in the 1650s p. 250 Chapter Six Reformed Catholics, True Protestants: The Sixteenth Century in Later Stuart England p. 289 Epilogue p. 341 Bibliography p. 344 vi Introduction I. How did the English Reformation get its name? This might seem like a question not worth asking because the answer should be obvious. According to Bob Scribner, ‘‘The Reformation’ is the general label historians use to describe the series of upheavals in the religious life of Europe during the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries.’ 1 According to this line of reasoning, the English Reformation was therefore a ‘series of upheavals in the religious life of [England] during the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries’. Intuitively, it makes sense to apply Scribner’s words in this way. If one were to look at the vast amount of publishing concerned with ‘the Reformation’, one would find that the label describes both a transnational series of events and their more local manifestations. Just as one can read about the European Reformation, 2 one can also read about national histories such as the German Reformation, the Scottish Reformation, and the Swiss Reformation; 3 one can just as easily peruse studies of Catholic responses to these, which are often collectively termed ‘the Counter-Reformation’ (on which, more below). Those interested in a chronological scope slightly larger than that given by Scribner can study the Bohemian Reformation and determine whether it was, as one recent study has argued, ‘the first Reformation’. 4 And of course, one can read about the English Reformation. But did contemporaries describe religious upheavals as the Reformation? If not, why do we, and when did we begin to do so? 1 Bob Scribner, Introduction, in Bob Scribner, Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (eds.), The Reformation in National Context (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 1. 2 See, e.g., Alister McGrath, The Intellectual origins of the European Reformation , second ed. (Blackwell Publishing, 2004); Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (Viking, 2004). 3 See, e.g., Thomas Brady, German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400 – 1650 (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Alec Ryrie, The origins of the Scottish Reformation (Manchester University Press, 2006); Bruce Gordon, The Swiss Reformation (Manchester University Press, 2002). 4 Thomas A. Fudge, The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia (Ashgate, 1998). 1 The Reformation is an unquestioned historiographical category because we have spent very little time studying the category itself. In 1985, A. G. Dickens, John M. Tonkin, and Kenneth Powell collaborated on a volume entitled The Reformation in Historical Thought , which was intended to ‘start breaking the ground’ on the study of Reformation historiography. 5 The authors assumed, however, that the Reformation was conceptualized from the time of its inception. Their first chapter, entitled ‘Views from Within’, began by personifying its subject: ‘The Reformation inherited a mature world of humanism, aspiring not merely to eloquence but also to broad visions and periodizations of human history.’ 6 The Reformation was introduced as if it were wholly formed—wholly periodized—from the very beginning. The same assumption animated Rosemary O’Day’s 1986 volume The Debate on the English Reformation . O’Day’s volume seems to have been written without any knowledge of The Reformation in Historical Thought , which was not cited in the bibliography. O’Day opened her work with a chapter entitled ‘Contemporary Historiography of the English Reformation, 1525 – 70.’ As with Dickens, Tonkin, and Powell, she portrayed the Reformation as an event identifiable from its very beginning (and thus before its conclusion). O’Day even claimed that ‘It created its own historiography’, thereby giving the English Reformation the attribute of agency. 7 A similar argument is found in Thomas Betteridge’s more recent Tudor Histories of the English Reformations, 1530 – 83 . He concludes that ‘ The English Reformation, a simple struggle between two coherent and opposing doctrinal camps, Protestant and Catholic, was a result and not the cause of the social and cultural conflicts that were the English Reformations.’ 8 5 A. G. Dickens and John M. Tonkin, with Kenneth Powell, The Reformation in Historical Thought (Harvard University Press, 1985), p. v. 6 Ibid., p. 7. 7 Rosemary O’Day, The Debate on the English Reformation (Routledge, 1986), p. 5. 8 Thomas Betteridge, Tudor Histories of the English Reformations, 1530 – 83 (Ashgate, 1999),