Catherine Parr by Susan James

Author:Susan James [Susan James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752462523
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The sentiments expressed are not novel but they indicate that the book was with her often enough to be used as a convenient journal and that John Chrysostome’s sermon on the words of Jesus – ‘Thou shalt love the lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might, and thy brother as thyself. There is no greater commandment than these’ – were words ‘most truly impressed in the heart’ of Henry’s queen.75

It is important to understand that the ferment of religious ideas on the continent, preached in pulpits, argued in university lectures, propounded in diets, published in biblical commentaries and in attack and counterattack tracts and books had not yet calcified along hard dogmatic lines of antiecumenicalism. The field of the Word was still being plowed and harvested and the varieties of grain to be found there had not yet been meticulously separated. The same multiplicity of ideas existed in England where around the structure of the Henrician Settlement, dependent on the oscillating beliefs of England’s mercurial monarch and supreme head of the English church, radicals such as Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Edward Crome fought a daily religious battle of the word with both moderates such as the Bishop of Chichester and with conservatives such as Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and Thomas Thirlby, Bishop of Westminster. ‘It is much to be lamented,’ wrote the queen in 1546, ‘the schisms, varieties, contentions and disputations, that have been and are in the world about Christian religion, and no agreement nor concord of the same among the learned men.’76 The Eucharist and sacrificial character of the mass, clerical celibacy, a belief or disbelief in the efficacy of religious processions, icons and images, the definition of divinely authorized Sacraments, and the existence of Purgatory were all hotly debated issues with sensitive political implications. Exposed to the noise and confusion of this religious maelstrom, yet married to the unpredictable creature that was its centre in England, Catherine in her own religious thinking realized the necessity of tempering a fearless declaration of religious conscience with a public voice of political expediency. So ‘anonymous’ became the identity of the translator of Psalms or Prayers, and Thomas a Kempis and ‘other holy works’ the culpable parties if Prayers or Meditations hit amiss.

While the queen’s beliefs continued to maintain a foundation sympathetic to Erasmean humanism and secular learning, as evidenced by her support of Cambridge University and its scholars, she incorporated in the superstructure rising above that foundation most of the major ideas of Luther, plus some of the more radical ideas of the Calvinists. Even when she attacked Erasmus’ ideas, as she began to do in 1546, she continued to read his books.77 By the time her religious beliefs had matured, inevitably, an undercoat of humanism could still be glimpsed beneath the high gloss of Lutheran evangelicalism. And if by 1546 she had become one of those who secretly patronized the Zwinglian sacramentary views of Anne Askew, as

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.