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Offending God: John Foxe and English Protestant Reactions to the Cult of the Virgin Mary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Thomas S. Freeman
Thomas S. Freeman*
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
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Extract

On 20 January 1574, at about 7.00 p.m., Alexander Nyndge, one of the sons of William Nyndge, a gentleman of Herringwell, Suffolk, suddenly went into violent paroxysms. Edward Nyndge, Alexander’s brother, intervened. Edward was a Cambridge graduate and a former fellow of Gonville and Caius, and his University education had apparently prepared him for just such an emergency. He immediately declared that Alexander was possessed by an evil spirit and summoned the villagers to come and pray for his brother’s recovery. As the praying continued, Alexander’s convulsions grew worse; a half dozen men had to hold him in his chair. Meanwhile the onlookers were praying extemporaneously. Suddenly someone invoked both God and the Virgin Mary. Edward pounced on this remark and admonished the crowd that such prayers offended God. The evil spirit, in a voice ‘much like Alexanders voice’, chimed in, endorsing the propriety of the prayer. But ‘Edward made answere and said thou lyest, for ther is no other name under Heaven, wherby we may challenge Salvacion, but thonly name of Ihesus Christe’. This point settled, Edward proceeded to organize his brother’s exorcism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 39: The Church and Mary , 2004 , pp. 228 - 238
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004

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References

1 Edward Nyndge, A Booke declaring the Featfull Vexation of one Alexander Nyndge (?1574), sigs A2r-A4v. I would like to thank Professor Eamon Duffy for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this paper.

2 See Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven, CT, 1992), 379–593 Google Scholar; for the suppression of various aspects of the cult of the Virgin Mary see 402-3, 415-18, 465, 490, 580-2, 585.

3 Durston, Christopher, ‘Puritan rule and the failure of cultural revolution, 1645-1660’, in Durston, Christopher and Eales, Jacqueline, eds, The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560-1700 (Basingstoke, 1996), 210–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 This episode is described in John Foxe, Christ Jesus Triumphant, trans. Richard Day (1607), sig.A4r.

5 John Foxe, Tlte Ecclesiasticall History, contaynyng the Actes and Monumentes, 2nd edn (1570) [hereafter 1570], 1774-7.

6 Cf. Egregium opus… doctoris seraphici sancti Bonaventure, 2 vols (Strasburg, 149 5), 2, fol. 84V with 1570, 1775. All translations in this article are my own.

7 Cf. Opus…Bonaventure, 2, fol. 84V with 1570, 1775.The psalter read ‘Assiste pro nobis ante tribunalem dei. Suscipe in fine animas nostras, et introduc nos in requiem eternam’ (fol. 88r); Foxe dropped the first of these sentences from his version of the psalter.

8 1570, 1773. Eamon Duffy has observed that the Wayland primers ‘clearly represent the religion approved for lay use in Mary’s reign’ (Duffy, Stripping, 526-7, 538-9).

9 Duffy, Stripping, 542-3.

10 A copy of the 1555 edition of the primer, now in the BL (shelfmark C.35. c.22), has all the passages praising the Virgin Mary and the saints as intercessors lightly rased out. Clearly this is not a case of wanton vandalism, but is instead the work of a non-Catholic trying to retain the primer for use in personal devotions.

11 Duffy, Stripping, 540.

12 For an interesting example of this, outside the scope of this paper, compare Foxe’s printing of the prayer to St Laurence (1570, 1773) with the version in the primer (The Primer in Latin and English (after the Use of Sarum) [1555], sig. Fiv).

13 The Primer in Latin and English, sig. M4r.

14 1570, 1774. Foxe underscored the polemical point he was making in rewriting these lines in a marginal note placed next to them: ‘The office of Christ given to our Lady’.

15 1570, 1777 (my emphasis).

16 Cf. John Bale, Scriptorum iltustrium maioris Brytanniae … catalogus (Basel, 1557), 624-5 and John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Dayes (1563) [hereafter 1563], 388. For the close relationship between Bale and Foxe, and Foxe’s use of Bale as a source, see Thomas S. Freeman, ‘John Bale’s book of martyrs?: the account of King John in Acts and Monuments’, Reformation, 3 (1998), 175-223.

17 Bale, Catalogus, 624-5.

18 Bale’s Catalogus was divided into centuries.

19 1570, 860.

20 Cf. 1570, 860, with Jodocus Beissel, Rosacea augustissime christiferae Maria corona (Antwerp, 1495), sig. B5V.

21 Gilles Gérard Meersseman, Ordo fraternitatis: Confraternitie e pièta dei laid nel Medioevo, 3 vols (Rome, 1977), 3:1157-8, 1164-5. For further background on Alanus de Rupe and the confraternity he established see Anne Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages (University Park, PA, 1997), 24-5, 66-7, 77.

22 Magister Alanus de Rupe, sponsus novellus beatissime virginis Marie …de immensa et ineffabili dignitate et utilitate psaletrii… virginis Mariae (Gripsholm, 1498). The story of Alanus’s ‘betrothal’ to the Virgin, almost identical to Beissel’s version, is on sigs S6v-S7r.

23 1570, 860.

24 1570, 924.

25 Cf. 1570, 924-5 with Jodocus Clichtoveus, De puritale conceptionis beatae Mariae virginis: libri duo (Paris, 1513), fol. 24r-v. Clichtoveus’s work is itself an interesting attempt to present the arguments of Duns Scotus and other scholastics who championed the Immaculate Conception buttressed by humanist source criticism. For a discussion of De puritale see J.-P. Massaut, Critique et tradition à la vielle de la Réforme en France (Paris, 1974), 37-45.

26 Cf. 1570, 925-6 with Clichtoveus, De puritate, fols 27r-29v, 31v-32r, 33r, 35r-v, 38r-39r, 41r. Foxe was also misrepresenting Sixtus’s bull which excommunicated anyone who denounced either the maculist or immaculist position as heretical. (See Rene Laurentin, ‘The role of papal magisterum in the development of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception’, in Edward D. O’Connor, ed., The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception (Notre Dame, IN, 1958), 265, 298-300).

27 Cf. 1570, 926, with Clichtoveus, De puritate, fols 23r, 45rv-46r, 47v-51r.

28 For details of the episode see R. Reuss, ‘Le Procès des Dominicains de Berne en 1507-1509, Revue de l’histoire des religions, 52 (1905), 237-59; Die Akten ders Jetzerprozesses nebst dent Defensorium, ed. Rudolf Steck, Quellen zur Schweizergeschichte, 21 (Basel, 1904).

29 1570, 926; also see Bale, Catalogus, 644; Sebastian Munster, Cosmographiae universalis (Basel, 1554), 424-5; Caspar Peucer, Liber quintus chronici Carionis (Frankfurt, 1566), 242-3; Johann Stumpf, Gemeiner loblicher Eydgnoschafft Stetten, Landen und Vöckeren Chronikwirdiger Thaaten Beschreybung (Zurich, 1548), fols 455r-459r; Thomas Murner, De quattuor heresiarchis ordinis predicatorum de observantia nuncupatorum, apud Switenses in civitate Bemensi combustis (Berne, 1509).

30 Foxe cites the ‘story of loan Stumsius’ (note the error) and an unnamed history of the scandal published at Berne in German and Latin (1570, 926); this last must be Murner’s treatise.

31 E.g., Foxe states that the frauds were exposed by the Franciscans alarmed by the revenue they lost as the people of Berne no longer frequented their shrines (1570, 926). Actually the Franciscans played no role at all in unmasking the Dominicans; this was accomplished in an investigation initiated by the bishop of Lausanne and furthered by a papal commission.

32 1570, 926.

33 Michael A. Mullett, The Catholic Reformation (1999), 21-2.

34 Carroll, Michael P., Madonnas that Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy since the Fifteenth Century (Baltimore, MD, 1992), 106.Google Scholar

35 Mullett, Catholic Reformation, 115-16.

36 Duffy, Stripping, 593.