Sacred History and National Identity

Comparisons Between Early Modern Wales and Brittany

Jason Nice

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317316268
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The late sixteenth century saw a redrawing of the borders of north-west Europe. Wales and Brittany entered into unions with neighboring countries England and France. This book uses Brittany and Wales' responses to unification to describe a comparative history of national identity during the early modern period.

1 The Uses of Sacred History

No question has exercised the writers of histories more than the origins of peoples.

Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (1566)¹

It would be naive to assume that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Welsh and Breton writers composed the sacred historiography of their provinces without any knowledge of, or reference to, the burgeoning field of English and French sacred historiography. In fact, the shape of English and French sacred historiography during the period from the first publication of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1559) to Claude Robert’s Gallia Christiana (1626) had a direct and important influence on the contemporary writings of Welsh and Breton antiquarians and ecclesiastical historians. For example, Welsh and Breton writers emulated the English and French use of sacred historiography to define national identity in terms of geographical and historical sacred space. This chapter analyses the function of English and French sacred historiography in order to grasp how Welsh and Breton writers adapted the genre to suit their own needs.

Jacob Burckhardt identified the Renaissance as a period particularly sensitive to the relevance of historical erudition for contemporary political life.² According to Agnes Heller, ‘However past-directed the thinking of the Renaissance Man may have been in some respects, in practice he lived entirely in and for the present. The past was their ideal, but keeping pace with the present was the true - and dynamic - motive of action’.³ The subject for Burckhardt, Heller and others is, of course, renaissance humanism. In the following chapters, I stray from the main current of research in this period by focusing upon the neglected offspring of humanism: early modern antiquarianism and ecclesiastical history. These disciplines are not the same, but their practitioners shared many preoccupations. Several recent works have inadvertently compared ecclesiastical history and antiquarianism, but far fewer have openly considered them together. Anthony Grafton has attempted the only blatant comparison in a chapter on ‘The Ant-like Industry of Ecclesiastical Historians and Antiquarians’.⁴ However, Grafton considers them separately except for one important observation whereby he explains, ‘The tradition [of both antiquarianism and ecclesiastical history] took on its first clear shape in the Hellenistic world … [when] it became a matter of urgency to show that one came from an old state, which possessed a venerable religion, as well as a long standing political, social, and scholarly tradition’.⁵ This shared concern with origins overcomes the numerous differences between the fields of antiquarianism and ecclesiastical history.⁶ As Eric Cochrane explains, ‘Many of the sacred historians were, if not principally antiquarians … at least thoroughly familiar with the methods and standards of the equally humanist field of antiquarian studies’.⁷ This idea underscores my consideration of early modern antiquarians and ecclesiastical historians as participants in the same scholarly enterprise. Henceforth, the shorthand term ‘érudit’ shall denote authors from both disciplines.

By their very name antiquarians located their primary scholarly interest in antiquity. In the case of ecclesiastical historians this is not as obvious, but Arnaldo Momigliano clears the way for comparison with a simple observation:

… in no other history does precedent mean so much as in ecclesiastical history … [because] in the Church conformity with the origins is evidence of the truth … This in a sense simplifies the task of the Church historian. He has to write the history of an institution which began in a precise moment, had an original structure, and developed with clear changes.⁸

The exact same could be said of the antiquarian. It is important to clarify my use of the term antiquarianism, as opposed to a ‘proper’ history, since my research only considers half of the antiquarian enterprise. Here again, Momigliano’s groundbreaking article ‘Ancient History and the Antiquarian’ provides a useful definition of antiquarians as opposed to historians:

(1) Historians write in a chronological order: antiquaries write in a systematic order; (2) Historians produce those facts which serve to illustrate or explain a certain situation: antiquaries collect all the items that are connected with a certain subject, whether they help to solve a problem or not.⁹

For Momigliano, along with many other recent scholars, the antiquarians’ use of non-written evidence was their most defining characteristic, and also the most persistent point of attack by contemporaries such as Francis Bacon: they ‘altogether subordinated literary texts to coins, statues, vases and inscriptions’.¹⁰ Yet antiquarians also prized ancient documents, and this second form of evidence also attracted the careful attention of ecclesiastical historians.¹¹ Or, in other words, ‘Sacred and humanist historians thus agreed on one end, the truth, and on the means for getting there, authentic documents’.¹² The belief that the truth could be located in the origins of a religion, state or dynasty, led the érudits on a common quest into the archives and in doing so dissolved traditional disciplinary boundaries.¹³

Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius (1513–17) demonstrates the political impetus behind the exploration of origins during the early modern period. He considers the cases of several founders, including Moses and Aeneas, and states that ‘the virtue of the builder is discernable in the fortune of what was built, for the city is more or less remarkable according as he is more or less virtuous who is responsible for the start’.¹⁴ According to Machiavelli, it should not be any surprise that a man as great as Aeneas founded a city as powerful as Rome. Yet, what about cities, or nations, that did not possess a classical foundation myth? Ecclesiastical historians and antiquarians provided the answer. According to Edward Said, ‘a beginning methodologically unites a practical need with a theory, an intention with a method’.¹⁵ This chapter considers the ‘practical needs’ of the governments of England and France, which sponsored the exploration of the ecclesiastical ‘beginnings’ of the kingdoms.

In regards to antiquarian studies, Stuart Piggott remarks, ‘They took place, not as a disinterested academic activity, but as part of the contemporary search for precedent and authority in all branches of life and thought, and above all in the quest for respectable antecedents’.¹⁶ Furthermore, he continues, ‘Scholars, Churchmen and Statesmen in Tudor England were concerned with establishing their new world on newly defined foundations, but these foundations had themselves to be a recognizable part of the ancient world of classical or biblical antiquity’. Michel Sot’s analysis of episcopal lists connects the functionality of sacred historiography to the antiquarian project described by Piggott when he states that ‘the entire work is in effect oriented towards the present’.¹⁷ This could be applied to any form of history, at any given time, but the form of the episcopal list is particularly well oriented towards the present since, as Sot relates, ‘In this history, two moments are privileged, the period of origins on one hand and the immediate contemporary epoch on the other. At one end of the list, the time of the origins is treated with particular care’.¹⁸ As a result, scores of medieval scholars used the episcopal list to locate classical antecedents for contemporary places or institutions, and the utility of the genre ensured its continued popularity for both érudits and their patrons in early modern England, France, Wales and Brittany.

In the sixteenth century, the principal objects of this historical utility, and the first obstacles in the way of a comparison of English and French historiography, are the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. On the one hand, the fact that the confessional divide produced so many polemical histories proves the point that these scholars were not disinterested academics. Yet, on the other hand, since so many recent studies of sixteenth-century historiography emphasize the dissimilarities between polemical texts produced on opposite sides of the confessional divide, the similar functions of Catholic and Protestant historiography in non-confessional spheres tends to be overlooked.¹⁹ In 1934, Pontien Polman first proclaimed the polarized and politicized nature of sixteenth-century religious history, and the sound logic of his argument has guided scholars ever since. For example, in this tradition, Simon Ditchfield concludes:

There existed important differences between the role history writing played in Protestant and in Catholic circles. For the former, the primacy of scripture combined with the conviction that only the earliest centuries provided models of pure Apostolic Church practice, history had a fundamentally negative, polemical role. For the Catholics, relying as they did not only on scriptural authority, but also on patristic and later tradition both written and unwritten, history had an altogether positive, constructive role. It was charged with no less a task than demonstrating the unbroken continuity of the Apostolic tradition between the early, persecuted Church of the martyrs and the present.²⁰

Yet, while admitting the polemical features of Catholic and Protestant historiography, Ditchfield focuses instead upon the internal function of sacred historiography within the Catholic Church, which I argue can and should be examined cross-confessionally.²¹ Somewhere in between the two extremes of Catholic and Protestant approaches to the past, identified as historical continuity versus severance from the past, is an important middle ground that is necessary to identify before attempting a comparison between the two traditions of sacred historiography.

Cesare Baronio’s Annales Ecclesiastici (1588–1607) and Flacius Illyricus’s Magdeberg Centuries (1559–74) have come to epitomize the polarization of Catholic and Protestant historiography.²² Their respective monuments to sectarian historical erudition are doctrinally dissimilar, and thus represent the extremes of Polman’s model. However, the didactic utility of Protestant historiography, especially in regards to the apostolic church, bears a close enough similarity to Catholic historiography to enable breathing room for meaningful comparisons to be drawn between the two traditions. For both Catholics and Protestants, historical evidence always went hand in hand with doctrinal truth, and a desire to have the authority of the first centuries of the church on their side.²³

Was the Middle Ages a period of drastic inversion of the principles of the apostolic church? Or did the values of the apostles continue directly from the classical to the modern era?²⁴ Without going into much detail, the Catholic thesis, epitomized by Baronio, is best represented by the phrase semper eadem (ever the same).²⁵ Accordingly, if Protestant historiography is considered the opposite of this approach, then it should be assumed that Protestant historians adopted a never-the-same interpretation of the past.²⁶ However, this ignores the Protestant emphasis on the unbroken continuity of the persecuted ‘true church’ (or ‘invisible church’) from the time of the apostles to the present. Flacius’s Catalogus testium veritatis (1556, 1562) and Magdeberg Centuries (1559–74) demonstrated the continuatio doctrinae between Protestantism and the early church by presenting the names of at least 400 precursors of Luther, which included many ancient prophets, patriarchs and apostles.²⁷ Thus, the same apostles could represent the founders of unbroken ecclesiastical traditions for érudits on both sides of the confessional divide. John Bale’s Image of Bothe Churches (1545–6) set forth a similar thesis that at once attacked the corrupt See of St Peter while also focusing upon the unbroken continuity of the ‘true church’ - semper eadem.²⁸ A similar bipartite thesis later emerged in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1559, 1563, 1570 and 1583), which I will return to later.

In the case of Catholic France, Gallican historians often veered into the traditionally defined area of Protestant negativist historiography. These historians, particularly those with parlementaire inclinations, emphasized the pristine original condition of things and viewed change as a process of corruption:

Gallicanism viewed the conversion of Constantine and the summoning of the first ecumenical councils by him and his suc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Uses of Sacred History
• 2 Britannia and Gallia Christiana
• 3 The Universal and the Particular
• 4 Wales
• 5 Brittany
• 6 The Welsh and Breton Diaspora in Rome
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index