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William Tyndale, the Bible translator and Reformation martyr, enjoyed a sudden revival of interest in the mid-nineteenth century. This article examines one important aspect of his Victorian rehabilitation – his memorialization in stone and bronze. It analyses the campaigns to,erect two monuments in his honour – a tower on Nibley Knoll in Gloucestershire, inaugurated in 1866; and a statue in central London, on the Thames Embankment, unveiled in 1884. Both enjoyed wide support across the political and ecclesiastical spectrum of Protestantism, and anti-Catholicism was especially prominent in the first initiative. Both monuments emphasized the blessings of the Bible in English, the importance of religious liberty, and the prosperity of England and the Empire as a result of its Reformation heritage. The article argues that controversy concerning Tractarianism and biblical criticism was brushed under the carpet, and Tyndales distinctive evangelical theology was deliberately downplayed, in order to present the martyr as a unifying figure attractive to a broad Protestant coalition.
This book presents a contemporary, eyewitness account of the life of Martin Luther translated into English. Johannes Cochlaeus (1479–1552) was present in the great hall at the Diet of Worms on April 18, 1521 when Luther made his famous declaration before Emperor Charles V: ‘Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen’. Afterward, Cochlaeus sought Luther out, met him at his inn, and privately debated with him. Luther wrote of Cochlaeus, ‘may God long preserve this most pious man, born to guard and teach the Gospel of His church, together with His word, Amen’. However, the confrontation left Cochlaeus convinced that Luther was an impious and malevolent man. Over the next twnety-five years, Cochlaeus barely escaped the Peasant's War with his life. He debated with Melanchthon and the reformers of Augsburg. It was Cochlaeus who conducted the authorities to the clandestine printing press in Cologne, where William Tyndale was preparing the first English translation of the New Testament (1525). For an eyewitness account of the Reformation—and the beginnings of the Catholic Counter-Reformation—no other historical document matches the first-hand experience of Cochlaeus. After Luther's death, it was rumoured that demons seized the reformer on his death-bed and dragged him off to Hell. In response to these rumours, Luther's friend and colleague Philip Melanchthon wrote and published a brief encomium of the reformer in 1548. Cochlaeus consequently completed and published his monumental life of Luther in 1549.
which they reflect key elements of the cultural history of the period 1510–80, political, poetic and religious. The Introduction discusses a number of texts from before the Henrician Reformation, including Edmund Dudley’s Tree of Commonwealth, the writings of John Skelton and William Tyndale, and Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue concerning Heresies. Chapter 1 examines Sir Thomas Elyot’s seminal work of Tudor political thought, The Governour. It then moves on to analyse the writing of the Henrician Reformation, in particular the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt. The second chapter
.” Finally, it registers William Tyndale’s and the 1560 Geneva Bible commentators’ theoretical dismissal but practical adoption of these strategies of allegoresis. Many critics and literary historians provide useful introductions to the classical and biblical exegetical traditions that we know as allegory and typology.1 Several emphasize the discontinuity between allegory and typology, which depends on the historicity of its terms and developed as a description of the way in which the Old Testament is related to the 1 Besides Erich Auerbach’s “Figura” in Scenes from the
This book addresses a perennial question of the English Reformation: to what extent, if any, the late medieval dissenters known as lollards influenced the Protestant Reformation in England. To answer this question, this book looks at the appropriation of the lollards by evangelicals such as William Tyndale, John Bale, and especially John Foxe, and through them by their seventeenth-century successors. Because Foxe included the lollards in his influential tome, Acts and Monuments (1563), he was the most important conduit for their individual stories, including that of John Wyclif (d. 1384), and lollard beliefs and ecclesiology. Foxe’s reorientation of the lollards from heretics and traitors to martyrs and model subjects portrayed them as Protestants’ spiritual forebears. Scholars have argued that to accomplish this, Foxe heavily edited radical lollard views on episcopacy, baptism, preaching, conventicles, tithes, and oaths, either omitting them from his book or moulding them into forms compatible with a magisterial Reformation. This book shows that Foxe in fact made no systematic attempt to downplay radical lollard beliefs, and that much non-mainstream material exists in the text. These views, legitimised by Foxe’s inclusion of them in his book, allowed for later dissenters to appropriate the lollards as historical validation of their theological and ecclesiological positions. The book traces the ensuing struggle for the lollard, and indeed the Foxean, legacy between conformists and nonconformists, arguing that the same lollards that Foxe used to bolster the English church in the sixteenth century would play a role in its fragmentation in the seventeenth.
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book talks about the changing nature of the debate on the English Reformation. It discusses the history of the sixteenth-century Reformation as written by modernist professional historians of the later nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book examines the work of certain important later writers who cared about the issues raised by the Reformation and saw them as deeply relevant to their own times. It explains why the debate mattered to the later writers and not simply what the debate was. The book is concerned with the historiography of the Reformation as seen through the eyes of men who were contemporaries of the English Reformation-William Tyndale, John Frith, Margaret Campbell Barnes, John Foxe and John Bale.
historians with fifteenth-century history was transferred to a religious context. Monarchs, religious teachers and individuals of learning and pious life were portrayed as the moving forces of the English Reformation. The social, economic and geographic underpinnings went unrecognized. Above all, the reformers urged that theirs was the historically accurate Christianity. William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536), pupil of John Colet, stood in the tradition of humanist textual criticism exemplified by Lorenzo Valla, Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther. Tyndale’s New Testament aimed
for reading, writing and maths, as well as greater central oversight from the Department of Education to monitor schools’ performance. 25 That this increasing focus on standards was the general direction of travel politically and culturally was further emphasised by scandals like the ‘William Tyndale affair’, which was the subject of huge press coverage, and demonstrated the potential of a populist appeal based on results and teacher competence. Dominic Sandbrook describes the battle over the school as ‘an irresistibly symbolic confrontation between two
persons to declare to the people the great overthrow of the French king, and to do the most they can to encourage them to this invasion this summer’. The war did not materialize. Nor did a son for Henry, and Wolsey’s successor, Thomas Cromwell, had to follow through the break with Rome precipitated by the king’s divorce from Catherine and his marriage to Anne Boleyn. During the build-up to the divorce, Henry had launched a pamphlet debate arguing the merits of his case, although the reformist publications of William Tyndale had in many respects already paved the way
made their first faith void.” ’ 5 Throughout his life Cochlaeus remained an enthusiastic persecutor of heresy wherever he found it. With unconcealed pleasure he chronicles the decline and fall of the short-lived Anabaptist ‘kingdom of a thousand year’ at Münster (1534–5) – from the excesses of its tailor-turned-king, John of Leiden, to the massacre of his followers. Cochlaeus prides himself on directing the authorities to the clandestine printing press in Cologne where William Tyndale was preparing the first English translation of the New Testament in 1525, and