Monks, Miracles and Magic by Helen L. Parish

Author:Helen L. Parish [Parish, Helen L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Western, Medieval
ISBN: 9781136522055
Google: jnQWDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-29T16:14:51+00:00

Plate 3 Archbishop Dunstan, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, M S 161 fol. l r

The fluctuating reputation of Dunstan in the sixteenth century reflected the determination of evangelical writers to locate the conflict between miracle and magic, Christ and Antichrist, in Christian history. Evidence of disunity, innovation and sorcery in the history of the medieval church and its saints had been a crucial part of attempts to endow the nascent national church with an historical identity after the break with Rome. However, the study and reinterpretation of the past continued to play an important role in the debates of the sixteenth century, not only in defining the identity of the reformed churches in relation to the church of Rome but also in defending the established English church from the assaults of radical Presbyterianism. It was for this purpose that Matthew Parker as archbishop of Canterbury sought to compile a history of the English church which would offer a historical validation for the Elizabethan settlement and present a cogent defence of the English episcopacy and of the primacy of the see of Canterbury.110 Parker’s history was not without its contradictions. While it was clearly important to uphold the history and the pre-Augustinian origins of the English episcopacy, it was equally vital to distance the national English church from the contaminations of Roman doctrine and practice and to ensure that the spread of Christianity in England was not associated too closely with prelates who, in Protestant myth at least, were the agents of Antichrist. The case of Dunstan would clearly be problematic. Dunstan the necromancer and usurper of temporal authority was certainly not the ideal weapon against Presbyterian critics, but it would hardly serve Parker’s purpose to start expunging weak links from his historical chain. Parker thus chose to tread the middle course. He noted that Dunstan had been forced to flee after antagonising King Edwin, and drew attention to the promotion of monasticism in England by Dunstan, Oswald and Aethelwold. Dunstan, he wrote, ‘ad Johannem Papam pro pallio profectus, petiit authoritate papali eiiciendi e coenobiis coniugatos clericos Monachos inducendi sibi concedi potestatem’, a summary which perhaps reflected Parker’s personal interest in the question of clerical marriage in the English church. The biography of Dunstan was distinctly less fulsome in praise of its subject than other lives in the volume, but more moderate in its approach than the interpretations advanced by Bale and Foxe.111

Dunstan’s actions in defence of the jurisdiction of the English church and her bishops in the tenth century had brought him to the attention of those who sought the answer to Henry VIII’s ‘Great Matter’ in the precedents provided by English history. By the second half of the sixteenth century, Dunstan had fallen foul of that same preoccupation with the past. The direction of the history of Christianity in England to the service of the nascent national church operated with different criteria and objectives to the defence of the right of the king to settle his marital problems within his realm.

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