English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829

Francis Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409455653
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317143161
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

In spite of an upsurge in interest in the social history of the Catholic community and an ever-growing body of literature on early modern 'superstition' and popular religion, the English Catholic community's response to the invisible world of the preternatural and supernatural has remained largely neglected. Addressing this oversight, this book explores Catholic responses to the supernatural world, setting the English Catholic community in the contexts of the wider Counter-Reformation and the confessional culture of early modern England. In so doing, it fulfils the need for a study of how English Catholics related to manifestations of the devil (witchcraft and possession) and the dead (ghosts) in the context of Catholic attitudes to the supernatural world as a whole (including debates on miracles). The study further provides a comprehensive examination of the ways in which English Catholics deployed exorcism, the church's ultimate response to the devil. Whilst some aspects of the Catholic response have been touched on in the course of broader studies, few scholars have gone beyond the evidence contained within anti-Catholic polemical literature to examine in detail what Catholics themselves said and thought. Given that Catholics were consistently portrayed as 'superstitious' in Protestant literature, the historian must attend to Catholic voices on the supernatural in order to avoid a disastrously unbalanced view of Catholic attitudes. This book provides the first analysis of the Catholic response to the supernatural and witchcraft and how it related to a characteristic Counter-Reformation preoccupation, the phenomenon of exorcism.

CHAPTER 1
Early Modern Catholics and ‘Superstition’

The history of English Catholic responses to the supernatural – whether the supernatural is understood to include miracles, visions, ghosts, witchcraft, demonology, or exorcism – has shadowed the political and theological history of the Catholic community. As Ian Bostridge observed of the literature on witchcraft, ‘Witchcraft theory shadows developments in theology. The holy and the demonic move in step.’1 Confessional attitudes towards the boundaries of the supernatural and preternatural, of right religion and harmful superstition, are governed and influenced by theological and philosophical developments. To a remarkable degree, political divisions within English Catholicism found expression in divergent attitudes to the supernatural. These differences of opinion were sometimes the result of far-reaching disagreement about the philosophical and theological grounds of Catholic belief; on other occasions, they were politically motivated and had more to do with the ways in which Catholics chose to relate to the intellectual culture around them. Either way, the case for studying English Catholic responses to the supernatural as a lens through which the neuroses and internal dynamics of the community are laid bare is a compelling one.

Perhaps the most striking result that emerges from such a study, given the contrary impression given in virtually all anti-Catholic literature of the period, is the sustained survival of a distinctively Catholic tradition of measured scepticism concerning supernatural phenomena across three centuries. This tradition never enjoyed an uncontested dominance within the Catholic community. However, its circumspect approach to the relationship between faith and philosophy, religion and science has arguably stood the test of time to a greater extent than the unconstrained scepticism of some Protestant authors and the ire of its authoritarian critics within the Catholic community. The fact that the Catholic voice of caution was frequently marginalized within a marginalized community did not prevent its long-term survival and it should not prevent its contemporary exposure to academic scrutiny.

Supernaturalism, ‘Superstition’ and the Roots of Scepticism

For educated mediaeval and Counter-Reformation Catholics, the word ‘supernatural’ did not mean what it does to most people today. The supernatural denoted God and the activity of his grace, and the word ‘preternatural’ was applied to the activity of spirits other than God. Counter-Reformation authors sought to make this distinction, which already existed in Scholastic philosophy, a clear one that was understood by everyone. The Spanish Jesuit Martin Del Rio consistently made use of the word ‘preternatural’ to describe the workings of magicians in his influential Disquisitiones Magicae (1595). The category of ‘preternatural effects’ which worked beyond the normal bounds of nature ranged from the activity of the devil and the demonic operations of magicians to the morally neutral powers of the human soul. Del Rio himself confessed that the human imagination had bizarre properties and could affect the formation of an embryo in the womb.2 Likewise, the spirits of the dead appearing from purgatory were holy, not evil. The preternatural included the activities of all spiritual agents other than God and his immediate servants, the angels.3 The disembodied souls of the dead, demons and the devil himself, as well as the powers of the living human soul all fell into this category. Counter-Reformation defences of the Catholic church against Protestant accusations of superstition produced ‘the most vigorous language and the most obviously original elaborations of the tradition’,4 in which phenomena thoughtlessly accepted in the mediaeval world were rigorously rationalized.

By the end of the sixteenth century, Catholics were consistently portrayed as superstitious in Protestant propaganda, distinguished by their acceptance of the miraculous and the preternatural in addition to the revelation of Scripture. This rendered them idolatrous and potential allies of the devil. However, this dichotomy of Protestant and Catholic disguised two important facts: first, that many Protestants were as much preoccupied with the supernatural as their Catholic counterparts, and secondly, that Counter-Reformation Catholics had their own careful definitions of superstition. The suppression of the ‘radical Reformation’ in Continental Europe, the influence of the ‘cessationist’ theology of John Calvin, who argued that miracles ceased around the time of the death of the last apostle, and the installation of Protestantism as the faith of the political establishment in England all led to the progressive official downgrading of the supernatural in sixteenth-century England. However, as the case of the exorcist John Darrell was to demonstrate, interest in the supernatural remained very much alive in some sections of the Protestant community.

Euan Cameron has argued that the Counter-Reformation attitude to ‘superstition’ consisted of two main imperatives: to purge, purify and homogenize rites, and to defend the value of rites that were officially approved by the church.5 These imperatives had the potential to come into conflict (if someone believed that an officially approved rite was being misused, for example), but in practice the two arguments were normally deployed in different pastoral contexts. In a mission territory, maintaining the value of the rites themselves was more important than it was in a Catholic country, where fighting abuses was of paramount importance.

So successful was the equation of Catholicism with superstition by Elizabethan propagandists that it is easy to forget that, when Catholicism was the established religion, the relationship between Protestantism and superstition was reversed in Catholic propaganda. In his official defence of the Marian burnings, The Displaying of the Protestants (1556), Miles Hogarde attacked the Protestants for their superstition. He mocked gospellers who condemned relics ‘in their bookes’, yet flocked to the fires of Smithfield to gather up the bones of their ‘pseudomartyrs’.6 In particular, he singled out the credulity of some spectators at the burning of John Rogers in 1555:7

… divers marchaunt men and others, which seing certayne pigions flying over the fire that haunted to a house harde adioyninge, beyng amased with the smoke forsooke their nestes, and flew over the fire, were not ashamed boldely to affirme that that the same was the holy ghoste in the lykenes of a dove … Then by the lyke argument they might have sayde that crowes which the same time hovered over the fyre, were devels. But what blasphemy is this, such opinionative fooles to beleeve or credite such fansies? The Heathen poetes never devysed more toyes upon Iupiter, Diana, Actaeon, Io, or suche other counterfaites, then the madbraynes of the protestantes have invented tales upon these Ethnikes.

In Hogarde’s view, the Protestants were guilty not only of credulity but also of imposture, convincing the unlearned to believe in feigned miracles. Hogarde wrote not as an embattled defender of the Catholic cause but in the belief that the Marian restoration was a permanent return to normality, and Protestantism no more lasting than previous heresies. Eamon Duffy has recently drawn attention to the sober ‘orthodox’ martyrology of Marian Catholicism in Nicholas Harpsfield’s never published Life and Death of Sir Thomas Moore,8 which stood in stark contrast to the popular, outlandish Catholic martyrologies of the Elizabethan and Stuart periods. Alexandra Walsham has demonstrated that clerical versions of these martyrologies ‘meticulously censored sensational details which might provoke a fresh wave of scoffing Protestant attacks on “popish credulity”’, and continued a humanist tradition of hagiography into the penal era.9

Even after their exile to the Continent, Nicholas Harpsfield and Thomas Stapleton mocked John Foxe for claiming the same miracles for his ‘martyrs’ as Protestants refused to concede to Catholic saints.10 In the preface to his translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (1565), Stapleton systematically demonstrated the inconsistency of the Protestant position. They were unwilling to believe the documented miracles of the saints, and yet they believed in miracles wrought by Protestant martyrs on mere hearsay:11

If it seme incredible that the bodyes of dead men may remaine uncorrupted and sounde, why is it tolde for a miracle that the hart off Zwinglius was found whole in the ashes, all the rest of the body being burned up? If visions appearing to some, not to al that are present seme fabulous, let it be a fable (as in dede it is, being thereof eye witnesse my selfe) that he telleth of Latimers hart bloud, when he suffred in Oxford. Iff the Crosse of saint Oswalde seme a superstitious tale, how much more fonde and fabulous is the tale of one that suffred at Bramford, with a greate white crosse, appearing in his brest?

The miracles reported by Bede, Stapleton argued, were far more trustworthy than those reported by ‘upstert sectaries’. Catholic and Protestant scepticism shared a common origin in the Renaissance humanist dislike for corruptions in hagiographies, but this original unity of critical purpose was obscured by the polemical use to which scepticism was put by Protestant authors determined to tar all Catholics with the same brush. Denominational slurs of this kind often went unanswered, but there was one notable exception to this in a printed controversy that occurred between the Protestant James Calfhill and the Catholic John Martiall in 1565–66. This was initiated by the publication of Martiall’s Treatyse of the Crosse (1565), an attack on Protestant iconoclasm against crosses and crucifixes and a defence of Catholic practices such as signing with the cross. Calfhill replied with An Aunswere to the Treatise of the Crosse (1565) in which he claimed that the sign o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Early Modern Catholics and ‘Superstition’
• 2 Catholicism, Enlightenment and ‘Superstition’
• 3 Ghosts and Apparitions in the English Catholic Community
• 4 Catholics, Witchcraft and Magic in Reformation England
• 5 Catholics and Witchcraft in the Age of Enlightenment
• 6 Dealing with the Devil: Catholic Exorcisms
• Appendix 1: Documented Catholic Exorcisms in England, 1577–1815
• Appendix 2: ‘Three Discourses of Witches and Witchcraft’ by Gregory Greenwood
• Bibliography
• Index