Tudor Histories of the English Reformations, 1530-83 by Thomas Betteridge

Author:Thomas Betteridge [Betteridge, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781840142815
Goodreads: 5050073
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing
Published: 1999-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

107 Ibid., p. 332.

Chapter Three

'Making New Novelties Old': Marian Histories of the Reformation

By helpe of these the byshoppes effeminate,

Against lady faith did so much preuaile,

That certain of hir men to them was captiuate,

And for hir sake was laide fast in gayle,

Then before hir was drawne such a vaile,

That she was so hid, fewe men could hir se,

Tyll God sawe time, that seene she should be.

Miles Hogarde, The assault of the sacrame[n}t of the Altar1

Miles Hogarde's2 representation of the Edwardian Reformation as a time when Lady Faith was veiled perfectly illustrates the problems but also the opportunities that writing histories of the period 1530-53 created for Marian3 writers. The problem the veil reflects is how to describe the Henrician and Edwardian Reformations in a way that acknowledges their destructive effects while simultaneously constructing them as having no long-term impact on the truth of Catholic teaching. The opportunity that the veil expresses is the possibility of enacting in writing the purging of the past from the present and the creation of a radical discontinuity between pre- and post-1553 of the kind that many in the Marian regime desired. The veil marks a point of crisis in the self-understanding of the Marian regime in its embodiment of these two possibilities. It can be read as a metaphor for the paradoxical nature of the Marian regime's understanding of its relation to the immediate past as being simultaneously discontinuous from it and as depending on it for meaning. The lifting of the veil, the repetition of a moment of restoration and revelation, was a central element in the Marian regime's construction of itself. Indeed in a sense the lifting of the veil was the ration d'être of the Marian regime, the banishment of the cloud that had obscured the face of truth for the preceding twenty years.

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