John Bale and Religious Conversion in Reformation England by Oliver Wort

Author:Oliver Wort [Wort, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Great Britain
ISBN: 9781317319962
Google: OoVECgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-06T16:11:06+00:00

‘Speke ye to me …?’ ‘What wolde ye with me?’ ‘What is the matter?’ Though Catholicus claims to be very eager to speak with Hereticus – ‘I have ben a great whyle, very desirous to talke with the’, he says – still the addressed is left oblivious as to why this might be.13 There is humour here, but given what was oft en at stake when contrary religious opinions encountered one another in the early sixteenth century, we should perhaps be on our guard. John Heywood’s comedy The Pardoner and the Frere, which was printed in 1533, can act as our guide on the matter. The verbal struggle Heywood stages between his two representatives of religion results in mud-slinging, in name-calling, in accusations of heresy, and these escalate into a physical violence that not only overwhelms the play’s figures of authority – the local parson or curate, and his parishioner ‘Neybour Pratte’ – but also promises to recur: ‘adew, to the devyll, tyll we come agayn’, the fractious pair vow.14 Apparently disorder is the natural and inevitable result of religious dispute, which is maybe why the teasing to-and-fro of Gwynneth’s Catholicus gives way to something more serious. The still ignorant Hereticus is astonished that Catholicus ‘shold be so desyrous, to talke’ with him and presumes a case of mistaken identity, ‘[f]or I suppose ye knowe me not’. Catholicus’s response is anything but reassuring: ‘yes well ynough, by syghte and here say’.15 Readers who spot ‘heresy’ in Catholicus’s ‘hearsay’ can guess where this dialogue might be leading.

How well we know ourselves and others, and how much better others know us, are chief concerns of Gwynneth’s work, particularly as these relate to religious identity. Although a response to the martyr John Frith’s rejection of transubstantiation, A Boke Made by John Frith Prisoner in the Tower of London Answeringe unto M Mores Lettur which He Wrote agenst the First Little Treatyse that John Frith Made (1533), Gwynneth’s work was prompted more particularly by a concern that not infrequently this ‘most notable and wylye heretyke Fryth’ was being praised for his ‘lernynge and myche gentylnesses … [for his] very syngulare and great pacyence’.16 Inexplicably, Gwynneth thought, ‘some not onely praysed and commended, but also pytied and lamented [him] … for his dew and just punishment corporall … as though he had ben a man utterly cast away without cause’. Given the disparity between Frith’s fate, his condemnation and immolation as a heretic, and his reputation among some, Gwynneth determined to discover the truth regarding Frith’s heresy or otherwise. This he did by taking up a copy of Frith’s book and reading it, so that he ‘myght perfytly perceyve, ye very hole cause of hys worthy deth’. What he discovered on reading, and rereading, was ‘the tortuouse and croked wylynesse of an heretyke’.17

It is only in the last twelve chapters of the text, though, that Gwynneth sets about demolishing Frith’s beliefs on the Eucharist; the rest of the work is instead given over to an

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