Helen Parish

‘Impudent and Abhominable Fictions’: Rewriting Saints Lives in the English Reformation’

This article explores the growth of polemical controversy over the nature of the English church and its history in the sixteenth century. It examines the work of a number of sixteenth-century Protestant history writers, with particular focus upon their treatment of medieval ecclesiastical history. Their rewriting of the Life of Dunstan is indicative of the shift in perceptions of holiness that took place not only between the tenth and sixteenth centuries, but between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the end. The appeal to the past was not simply a search for the historical origins of beliefs and practices, but an effort to rewrite the history of the church by reassessing the reputations of its heroes.

'Monks, Miracles and Magic': The Medieval Church in English Reformation Polemic

Abstract English evangelical writers in the sixteenth century argued that the age of miracles had long since passed. In part, this argument served as a defence against the allegation that the Protestant Church could adduce no evidence that it enjoyed divine approbation, given the apparent lack of wonders and miracles associated with its members. However, the denunciation of the miracles of the medieval Church also helped to cast the Roman Catholic Church and its saints as the false congregation of Antichrist, and thus to reinforce the identity of the nascent Protestant Church. The consensus among Catholic and Protestant writers that the devil could and did work wonders opened up a debate over exactly which (if any) miracles claimed by the medieval Church deserved to be seen as signs of Gods favour. From the premise that true miracles had ceased, evangelical writers were able to portray medieval miracles as deceptions, magic or diabolic wonders, and there was a great deal of polemical capital to be made from these interpretations. This article uses the works of early English evangelical writers, including William Tyndale and John Bale, to argue that the condemnation of medieval miracles, and accusations of magic and necromancy in the Church, were central to the reinterpretation of the history of the medieval Church during the era of the Reformation, and a crucial part of the search for a Protestant historical identity in the events and personalities of the past.

‘Lying Histories Fayning False Miracles’: Magic, Miracles and Mediaeval History in Reformation Polemic

Abstract Miracles, which had been a common feature of late mediaeval piety and devotional literature, were a favoured target of evangelical polemicists in the sixteenth century. Protestant history writers sought to expose as frauds, deceptions and diabolic wonders, the miracles associated with the heroes of mediaeval Catholicism, and with key elements of traditional theology. The false miracle, it was argued, was not an innocuous deception, but rather an indication of the power of the devil and his agents within the Roman church. The search for such feigned wonders and legerdemaines became a crucial part of the separation of personalities of the past into adherents of true and false religion, and the re-evaluation of the miracles of the mediaeval church was to be vital in the shaping of a historical identity for the nascent Protestant church in the sixteenth century.