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Recantation and Retribution: ‘Remembering Francis Spira’, 1548–1638

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

M.A. Overell
M.A. Overell*
Affiliation:
The Open University
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Extract

By 1600 many, perhaps most, English people knew the story of Francesco Spiera, whom they usually called ‘Francis Spira’. Spiera, an Italian lawyer, recanted his Protestant beliefs in 1548, then he despaired and died, convinced of his own damnation. For Protestants during the mid sixteenth-century persecutions, the moral of the tale was urgent and could not have been clearer: recant and you will meet with God’s retribution – in agony, like Spiera.

Spiera’s story was part of the ‘anti-Nicodemite’ propaganda campaign aimed at faint hearts who would not stand up and be counted. Contemporaries called them ‘Nicodemites’ after Nicodemus in the Gospels, who came to Christ by night. This theme was begun by Protestants in the 1540s and 1550s, but was later taken up by Catholics, when they too faced persecution. One particular quotation from Scripture was hammered home relentlessly: ‘The one who disowns me … I will disown’. Recantation was that sin against the Holy Ghost for which there was no forgiveness. In this European polemic, Spiera acquired a totemic significance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 40: Retribution, Repentance, and Reconciliation , 2004 , pp. 159 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004

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References

1 In this study the Italian name, ‘Spiera’, will be used except in English tides and quotations which adopt ‘Spira’. There is variation in the sources.

2 John 3: 1; 7: 50; 19: 39. There is a complex relationship between anti-Nicodemite propaganda and two different contemporary literatures: the martyrologies and resistance theory; see Gregory, Brad S., Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 154–7 Google Scholar; Eire, Carlos M. N., ‘Prelude to Sedition: Calvin’s Attack on Nicodemism and Religious Compromise’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 76 (1985), 120–45 Google Scholar.

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4 Cf. Matt 10: 33; 12: 32; Mark 3: 29; Luke 12: 10.

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11 Cf. the image The temptation to despair’ from the Ars Moriendi, reproduced in Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, 1992)Google Scholar, fig. 117. Several early reformers developed the medieval tradition that desperation was ‘the sin that is death’ (1 John 5: 16). See, for instance, Frith, John, A Disputacion of Purgatorye (? 1531) Google Scholar, STC 11386.5, Book 2, sig. f8r. Sister Mary Catherine O’Connor, The Art of Dying Well: the Development of the Ars Moriendi (New York, 1942; repr. 1966); Overell, M. A., ‘The Reformation of Death in Italy and England, circa 1550’, Renaissance and Reformation 23 (1999). 5–21. 6–7 Google Scholar; Marshall, Petet, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002), 4–5, 241, 316 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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13 For instance Sigismund Gelous in Curione’s collection, Francisa Spierae, 98.

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16 A Notable and Marveilous Epistle, sigs Aviii and Ciii.

17 Ibid., sig. Aiiii.

18 Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, ed. H. Robinson, PS, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1846–7), 2: 401, John ab Ulmis to Henry Bullinger, 25 March 1550.

19 These lectures were published laten Pietro Vermigli, In Epistolam S. Pauli Apostoli ad Romanos (Basel, 1558) and then translated into English, Most Learned and Fruitfiill Commentaries of D. Peter Martir Vermilius Florentine, Professor of Diuinitie in the Schole of Tigure, vpon the Epistle of S. Paul to the Romanes : wherin are Diligently [and] Most Profitably Entreated All Such Matters and Chiefe Common Places of Religion Touched in the Same Epistle […] Lately tra[n]slated out of Latine into Englishe, by H. B. [Sir Henry Billingsley, d. 1606] (London, 1568), STC 24672, 301.

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23 Latimer’s reference suggests quite widespread knowledge of the story by 1552.

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29 Epistle of the Ladyejane, sig. Bii.

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31 Freeman, Thomas, ‘The Importance of Dying Earnestly, the Metamorphosis of the Account of James Bainham in “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs”’, in Swanson, R. N., ed., The Church Retrospective, SCH 33 (Woodbridge, 1997), 267–88, 281 Google Scholar.

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