Abstract
In 1527, Henry VIII (1509–47) began the process of repudiating his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in order to marry her lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn. His movement between these two women — and also between their children by him — accompanied a rejection of papal authority in England, an authority which had allowed by dispensation Henry’s marriage to Catherine, his elder brother’s widow, in 1502, but which was now refusing him the divorce he so wanted. In response, Henry and his principal ministers pushed through Parliament a series of statutes eroding papal power in England and enshrining Henry’s supreme headship over the Church of England.1 The 1534 Act of Royal Supremacy was accompanied by the delegitimization of Mary, Henry’s daughter by Catherine, in favour of the children of his marriage to Anne Boleyn, by the Act of Succession of the same year.2 Effectively named a bastard, Mary was sent away from court in 1531, at the age of 15. Her father refused to see her until after his first two wives had died and he had married his third, Jane Seymour, in 1536. Mary never saw her mother again.
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Notes
For a succinct description of the legislation, see Richard Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 16–23.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 23.
A. G. Dickens, who has recently defended the arguments he made 40 years ago in The English Reformation (New York: Schocken Books, 1964)
in his chapter, ‘The Early Expansion of Protestantism in England: 1520–1558’, included in a collection edited by Margo Todd, Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).
See Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984)
Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)
Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, C.1400–C.1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
There were approximately 800 exiles. See C. H. Garrett, The Marian Exiles: A Study in the Origins of Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 41–2.
Some of Foxe’s biographers, including his son Simeon, have found this a quite surprising honour, given Foxe’s social status and the fact that he was not a graduate of Magdalen. However, fellows of Magdalen were normally natives of Lincolnshire, the county of Foxe’s birth. This preference was a legacy of the college’s founder, William of Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester, who was born in Lincolnshire. A new college founded in 1448, Magdalen (like Brasenose) was also, from an early date, able to board independent students — i.e.commoners. See A. L. Rowse, Oxford in the History of the Nation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), 52.
Warren Wooden suggests that had there been doubts about Foxe’s orthodoxy in 1539, he would not have been awarded his fellowship, so it is likely that his conversion accompanied his religious study at Magdalen (Warren W. Wooden, John Foxe [Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983], 2). This interpretation is complicated, however, by the fact that Foxe’s chambre-fellow and assigned companion (which as a commoner he warranted) at Brasenose was Alexander Nowell, future Dean of St Paul’s. Nowell, a noted Protestant, left the college in the year of Foxe’s transfer to Magdalen, by which time the two had formed what would be a life-long friendship. He was several years older than his young charge, and one must assume that he exerted some influence over the younger man.
J. F. Mozley, John Foxe and his Book (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1940), 25; Wooden, John Foxe, 3.
Simeon Foxe, ‘The Life of Mr John Fox’ (attributed to Samuel Foxe), in John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London: Company of Stationers, 1641), II, A5v. The Latin manuscript is Lansdowne 388, 2r–51v. There is some debate as to which of Foxe’s sons wrote the memoir. Mozley, however, argues convincingly that the author was the younger son, Simeon (Mozley, John Foxe and his Book, 2–9). When the memoir was published Samuel had been dead for eleven years and a note from a relative of the Foxes attached to the memoir identifies its author as D. doctorem Foxum, an appropriate title for Simeon, but not for Samuel, etc. (BL MS Lansdowne 388, 2r).
William Haller, The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 14.
Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 65.
David M. Loades, The Oxford Martyrs (London: B. T. Batsford, Ltd, 1970), 30.
See C. S. L. Davies, Peace, Print and Protestantism, 1450–1558 (St Albans: Paladin, 1977), 302
Steven Mullaney, ‘Reforming Resistance: Class, Gender, and Legitimacy in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, in Print, Manuscript and Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England, ed. Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 238.
Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978], 36, 39).
See also Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London and New York: Routledge, 1996
Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], 253).
Jesse Lander, ‘Foxe’s Books of Martyrs: Printing and Popularizing the Acts and Monuments’, in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 69.
(John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 2
A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation [New York: Schocken Books, 1964], 305
Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down [London and New York: Penguin, 1971], 96).
Mark Breitenberg, ‘The Flesh Made Word: Foxe’s Acts and Monuments’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 25, 4 (1989): 388; Mullaney, 238–9.
Patrick Collinson, ‘Biblical Rhetoric: the English Nation and National Sentiment in the Prophetic Mode’, in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 17.
Collinson cites J. R. Green’s A Short History of the English People (London, 1874), 447.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 76).
Charleton, Women, Religion and Education, 66. Lady Mary Grey (d. 1578) was the daughter of the Duke of Suffolk, and sister to Lady Jane Grey. Lady Margaret Hoby (1571–1633) was a dedicated diarist, and some of her journals have been published as The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: the Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, ed. Joanna Moody (London: Sutton, 1998). Lady Mary Rich (d. 1678) was the Countess of Warwick. Katherine Brettergh (d. 1601) was the wife of William Bettergh, High Constable of West Derby Hundred, an active persecutor of Catholic recusants. Her ‘godly’ death was memorialized in William Harrison’s Deaths Advantage (1602). Brilliana Harley was the wife of Sir Robert Harley, the firt Earl of Oxford (1661–1724).
For Foxe’s editing of letters between male martyrs and their female ‘sustainers’, see Thomas S. Freeman, ‘“The Good Ministrye of Godlye and Vertuouse Women”: the Elizabethan Martyrologist and the Female Supporters of the Marian Martyrs’, Journal of British Studies 39 (2000): 8–33.
See Ellen Macek, ‘The Emergence of a Feminine Spirituality in the Book of Martyrs’, Sixteenth Century Journal 19, 1 (1988): 65.
Eric Josef Carlson, Marriage and the English Reformation (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 58.
See Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053–75
idem, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
Natalie Davis, ‘City Women and Religious Change’, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995)
Susan C. Karant-Nunn, ‘Continuity and Change: Some Effects of the Reformation on the Women of Zwickau’, Sixteenth Century Journal 13, 2 (1982): 17–42
Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
Merry E. Wiesner, ‘The Reformation of the Women’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, Sonderband: Die Reformation in Deutschland und Europa: Interpretationem und Debatten, ed. Hans R. Guggisberg and Gottfried G. Krodel in collaboration with Hans Füglister (Gutersloher Verlagshaus, 1998), 208.
Merry Wiesner, ‘Luther and Women: the Death of Two Marys’, in Feminist Theology: a Reader, ed. Ann Loades (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1990), 125. Wiesner argues that Luther established the New Testament figure of Martha, the good housewife, as the female ideal, at the same time denigrating her sister Mary, who devoted herself to Christ through learning his teachings, and Mary the mother of Christ, blessed for her virginity.
Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 40.
Roper, Holy Household, 2, 130–1. On the importance of the word ‘whore’ in classifying disorderly womanhood in post-Reformation England, see also Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
Early Modern England’, in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 163
idem, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 24.
See, for example, chapters by Malcolm Gaskill, Laura Gowing, Martin Ingram and James Sharpe in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England, ed. Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (London: UCL Press, 1994).
idem, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003).
See also James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft and in England, 1550–1750 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996)
Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
idem, ‘Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England’, Gender and History 10, 1 (April 1998): 1–25.
Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1988), 67.
Susan Dwyer Amussen, ‘Gender, Family and the Social Order, 1560–1725’, in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
idem, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)
David Underdown, ‘The Taming of the Scold: the Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England’, in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
See, for example, Peter Lake, ‘Anti-popery: the Structure of a Prejudice’, in Conflict in Early Stuart England; Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London: Longman, 1989)
and idem, ‘The Significance of the Early-Modern Identification of the Pope as Antichrist’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980): 8–25.
see, for example, Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982)
Peter Lake, ‘Anti-popery’; Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1987).
On clerical celibacy as a mark of Antichrist, see Helen L. Parish, Clerical Marriage and the English Reformation: Precedent, Policy and Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 119–23.
See Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on Top’, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995, first pub. 1975), 131.
Charles C. Butterworth, ‘Erasmus and Bilney and Foxe’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library 57 (1953): 575–9
John Fines, ‘A Note on the Reliability of Foxe’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 14, 2 (October 1962): 173–4
A. G. Dickens, ‘Heresy and the Origins of English Protestantism’, in Britain and the Netherlands, vol. 2, ed. John S. Bromley and Ernest H. Kossman (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1964)
J. A. F. Thompson, ‘John Foxe and Some Sources for Lollard History: Notes for a Critical Appraisal’, in Studies in Church History, vol. 2, ed. G. J. Cuming (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965).
Patrick Collinson, ‘Truth and Legend: The Veracity of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, in his Elizabethan Essays (London: The Hambledon Press, 1994)
John Foxe’s Account of the Marian Persecution in Kent and Sussex’, Historical Research 67 (1994): 203–11
Sarah Elizabeth Wall, ‘Racking the Body, Shaping the Text: the Account of Anne Askew in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, Renaissance Quarterly 54, 4.1 (Winter 2001): 1165–96. See also ‘“St Peter did not do thus”: Papal History in the Acts and Monuments’, John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs Online Variorum Edition: Introductory Essays (http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/foxe/apparatus/introessays.html).
On Foxe’s invention of the Catherine Parr story, see John King, ‘Fiction and Fact in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (London: Scholar Press, 1997), 31–2.
(John Guy, Tudor England [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 196).
Interpreting Juan Luis Vives’s Instruction of a Christian Woman (written for Catharine of Aragon), Susan Wabuda has noted his emphasis on women’s use of obedience as a means by which she could ‘turn[ed] convention on its head, by revealing herself to be the strong and capable partner in the union’. See Susan Wabuda, ‘Sanctified by the Believing Spouse: Women, Men and the Marital Yoke in the Early Reformation’, in The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 119.
See Carole Levin, ‘Women in the Book of Martyrs as Models of Behavior in Tudor England’, International Journal of Women’s Studies 4, 2 (1981): 199.
Honor McCusker, John Bale: Dramatist and Antiquary (Bryn Maur, PA: 1942), 4–5.
See Margaret Aston, ‘Lollardy and the Reformation: Survival or Revival?’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49 (1964): 149–70.
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© 2005 Megan L. Hickerson
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Hickerson, M.L. (2005). Introduction. In: Making Women Martyrs in Tudor England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510692_1
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