Reformation Reputations

The Power of the Individual in English Reformation History

David J. Crankshaw, George W. C. Gross, David J. Crankshaw, George W. C. Gross

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030554330
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030554347
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book highlights the pivotal roles of individuals in England's complex sixteenth-century reformations. While many historians study broad themes, such as religious moderation, this volume is centred on the perspective that great changes are instigated not by themes, or 'isms', but rather by people – a point recently underlined in the 2017 quincentenary commemorations of Martin Luther's protest in Germany. That sovereigns from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I largely drove religious policy in Tudor England is well known. Instead, the essays collected in this volume, inspired by the quincentenary and based upon original research, take a novel approach, emphasizing the agency of some of their most interesting subjects: Protestant and Roman Catholic, clerical and lay, men and women. With an introduction that establishes why the commemorative impulse was so powerful in this period and explores how reputations were constructed, perpetuated and manipulated, the authors of the nine succeeding chapters examine the reputations of three archbishops of Canterbury (Thomas Cranmer, Matthew Parker and John Whitgift), three pioneering bishops' wives (Elizabeth Coverdale, Margaret Cranmer and Anne Hooper), two Roman Catholic martyrs (John Fisher and Thomas More), one evangelical martyr other than Cranmer (Anne Askew), two Jesuits (John Gerard and Robert Persons) and one author whose confessional identity remains contested (Anthony Munday). Partly biographical, though mainly historiographical, these essays offer refreshing new perspectives on why the selected figures are famed (or should be famed) and discuss what their reformation reputations tell us today.

© The Author(s) 2021

D. J. Crankshaw, G. W. C. Gross (eds.)Reformation Reputationshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55434-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Reformation, Life-Writing and the Commemorative Impulse—The Power of the Individual

David J. Crankshaw¹ and George W. C. Gross¹

(1)

King’s College London, London, UK

David J. Crankshaw

Email: [email protected]

George W. C. Gross (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Prologue

Heroes and Heroines

Culture War

Making Reformation Reputations

The Commemorative Impulse: Monuments and Epitaphs

The Fallen Celebrity: Defending the Indefensible

Memorialization in Film

Reformation Reputations Made and Marred

Keywords

AnthologyAutobiographyBiographyCelebrityChivalryCiceroCulture warDesiderius ErasmusElegyEpitaphFameFilmGeorge CavendishGloryHagiographyHeroHeroineKnightMartyrMemoryMonumentPlutarchPopularityRenaissance humanismRobin HoodRole-modelSaintThomas BecketThomas WolseyWorthies

End Abstract

Prologue

It is a cliché that we live in a ‘celebrity culture’. The noun ‘celebrity’—‘the state or fact of being well known, widely discussed, or publicly esteemed’—is often taken to refer to an ephemeral condition, to be contrasted with ‘fame’, yet the oldest attestation, dating from Chaucer’s time, suggests synonymity.¹ Nevertheless, ‘fame’ (‘the character attributed to a person or thing by report or generally entertained’)² was probably more common in early-modern usage than ‘celebrity’³ and shared with ‘reputation’—first recorded c.1390 in the phrase ‘of reputacioun’, meaning ‘of high esteem’⁴—the possible connotation of longevity, a connotation inadequately acknowledged by the Oxford English Dictionary, for had not Shakespeare’s Cassio cried out ‘Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial’?⁵

‘Celebrity’, Tillyard declares, ‘appears to have been made in the eighteenth century’.⁶ Barry, introducing a special periodical issue devoted to that theme, seems to agree, remarking, however, that ‘fame and celebrity have coexisted for centuries’ and that the latter phenomenon has a ‘prehistory’ that ‘can be traced to coins and portraits, iconic representations of the famous in Western culture since Roman times’. Why that ‘prehistory’ should be linked exclusively to the visual is far from clear, but then her overview is full of untested assumptions, culminating in the baffling statement that the ensuing essays chart ‘the history of the privatization and commodification of individual subjectivity’.⁷ The muddle continues in a recent book by Antoine Lilti, who (according to Cowan)

finds the invention of celebrity in the century of Romanticism and Revolution from 1750 to 1850[.] … Lilti argues that celebrity should be distinguished from other forms of notoriety, most notably glory (gloire) and reputation. Glory is the judgement of posterity, reserved for those who have achieved great things and have been remembered as such; reputation is a localized form of notoriety in which a person’s character is known and judged by his or her peers.

Since when were ‘glory’ and ‘reputation’ forms of ‘notoriety’? Is Lilti (or his translator) unaware of that word’s usual pejorative meaning? Strangely, Cowan fails to comment on this linguistic perversity and in glossing Lilti accepts much of his taxonomy:

Early modern scholars will recognize glory as a ‘keyword’ of the era[.] … Reputation was also key to understanding the honor culture that was so crucial to the maintenance of the pre-modern social order: reputation was the essence of one’s place within the social order and it was key to the maintenance of identity within that order. Unlike glory, reputation was important for everyone: it was not the preserve of magistrates and other elites. Women and commoners were equally invested in maintaining their sense of honor amongst their peers.⁸

While ‘reputation’ certainly could have a narrowly contemporaneous and localized application,⁹ its usage is likely to have been far more fluid than either Lilti or Cowan allow, and it is telling that both Barry and Cowan occasionally use ‘fame’, ‘renown’ and ‘reputation’ with no obvious distinction. Definitional tangles do not, however, vitiate Cowan’s piece, which is valuable in questioning the supposed conceptual novelty of ‘celebrity’ and, relatedly, in challenging ‘the chronology of its putative emergence’—i.e. the Habermas-inspired fixation with the eighteenth century. Instead, he insists, ‘the history of modern celebrity needs to be placed within a much longer durée history of fame’.¹⁰ The present volume is, in part, a contribution to just such a history.

But fame for whom? Like beauty, reputation is in the eye of the beholder, and it mattered a great deal to the denizens of Tudor England whose eye that was. For the author of a tract on gentility, there could be no doubt

that true honor consisteth not in the admiration of common people, but in the vertue of him that therwith is indued. And that the reputation which a few wise men do give unto a gentleman is of more worth then that of the multitude, wherupon is inferred that the respect which is borne to any man by them of the Court and citie (beeing the best and wisest sort) is more estimable then that which is borne by the common people.¹¹

What we might regard as snobbery was an indelible feature of the mind-set; ‘popularity’ was a dirty word.¹² Then there was the calculation, and sheer chutzpah, that could be involved in the quest for renown. No stranger to ambition, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) drew attention to those aspects when he wrote that

the winning of honour is but the revealing of a mans vertue and worth without disadvantage, for some in their actions doe affect honour and reputation, which sort of men are commonly much talked of, but inwardly little admired: and some darken their vertue in the shew of it, so as they be under-valewed in opinion....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Reformation, Life-Writing and the Commemorative Impulse—The Power of the Individual
• 2. 1535 in 1935: Catholic Saints and English Identity: The Canonization of Thomas More and John Fisher
• 3. Thomas Cranmer’s Reputation Reconsidered
• 4. ‘Agents of the Reformation’: Margaret Cranmer, Anne Hooper and Elizabeth Coverdale
• 5. Anne Askew
• 6. ‘A Man of Stomach’: Matthew Parker’s Reputation
• 7. John Whitgift Redivivus: Reconsidering the Reputation of Elizabeth’s Last Archbishop of Canterbury
• 8. Anthony Munday: Eloquent Equivocator or Contemptible Turncoat?
• 9. Polemic, Memory and Emotion: John Gerard and the Writing of the Counter-Reformation in England
• 10. Rehabilitating Robert Persons: Then and Now
• Back Matter