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Reginald Pecock and the Renaissance Sense of History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Arthur B. Ferguson
Arthur B. Ferguson*
Affiliation:
Duke University
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Extract

Irony plagued the career of Reginald Pecock and has pursued his memory. One of the most vigorous and original minds of his generation, he squandered his vast energies in the cause of a decadent orthodoxy which thanked him by bringing him to trial for heresy. And he resorted with the utmost confidence to the traditional weaponry of the medieval schools which, however, he used at times in ways as disconcerting to his scholastic contemporaries as they have proved tantalizing to historians. Small wonder that he remains an isolated figure, his place in history equivocal. If, in addition, it now turns out that his writings can be made to shed as much light on the origins of the English Renaissance as they ever did on the culture of medieval Christendom in which he gloried, it would be but one more thread in this skein of ironies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 13 , 1966 , pp. 147 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1966

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References

1 Interpretations of Pecock range from J. L. Morison's perceptive but somewhat enthusiastic estimate of him as a forerunner of the Renaissance, made in the introductory essay to his edition of Pecock's Book of Faith (Glasgow, 1909), to W. C. Greet's emphasis on the traditional character of Pecock's thought in his introduction to The Reule of Cry sten Religioun (1927, Early English Text Soc, Original Ser., no. 171). For the most part, however, they have struck a cautious balance. See, especially, Green, V. H. H., Bishop Reginald Pecock, a Study in Ecclesiastical History and Thought (Cambridge, 1945)Google Scholar and E. F. Jacob, ‘Reynold Pecock, Bishop of Chichester', Proc. of the British Acad, XXXVII (1951), 121-153. Pecock scholarship may be found surveyed in Green, chap. 1. See also E. H. Emerson, ‘Reginald Pecock: Christian Rationalist', Speculum xxxi (1956), 235-242.

2 For a good example of this approach, see Pocock, J. G. A., The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, 1957).Google Scholar See also the same author's paper, ‘The Origins of Study of the Past: a Comparative Approach', Comparative Stud, in Society and History IV (1962), 209-246.

3 Book of Faith, p. 113. In quotations from Pecock's works, the spelling of words still in use is modernized and their and them are substituted for her and hem.

4 Ibid., p . 123. See also Reule, pp. 461-462; Jacob.

5 Although he had something of the nominalist in his preference for the concrete instance, he saw no reason for following the nominalist tendency to place all religious truth beyond reason. Cf. Jacob, pp. 149-150. In fact he sought to bring faith and reason together in a working partnership.

6 See reference in Green, p. 127.

7 By reason, Pecock of course meant something more than a critical method or simply the discursive intellect. He saw it as the voice of the law of nature ('law of kind’) and of man's moral sense, both of which he tended to identify and to trace to the original inspiration of God. Thus reason was capable of judgment as well as of understanding.

8 Book of Faith, part I, chaps, ii and iii. See also Green, pp. 137-139.

9 Pecock, The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. Churchill Babington (1860, Rolls Ser.), 1, 103.

10 E.g., Repressor, 1, 103, 117-121,11, 518-522; Book of Faith, pp. 250-252; Reule, pp. 417 ff.

11 Book of Faith, pp. 174-175; see also p. 152. It does not, however, follow that the church errs in matters of faith.

12 Book of Faith, p. 264.

13 Ibid., p. 294.

14 Ibid., p. 270.

15 Ibid., p. 303.

16 Ibid., pp. 250-251.

17 Ibid., p. 252.

18 Ibid., part n, chap. v.

19 Reule, pp. 461-462.

20 Repressor, u, 316-319.

21 Ibid., 1, 277 ff.

22 Ibid., n, 315.

23 Ibid., n, 320.

24 Book of Faith, part n, chap. i.

25 Ibid., pp. 264-265. It is interesting to notice that Pecock was on this point ahead of the humanist Polydore Vergil who ascribed the invention to Moses (Denys Hay, Polydore Vergil, Oxford, 1952, p. 160, n. 4). Pecock maintains that the Old Testament prophets very probably also had access to written texts, especially of the law (Book of Faith, pp. 267-268).

26 Ibid., p. 255; Green, p. 173.

27 Repressor, 1, 60-61.

28 Ibid., I, 64-65.

29 The Donet, ed. E. V. Hitchcock (1921, Early English Text Soc, Original Ser., no. 156), pp. 130 ff.

30 Book of Faith, pp. 304-305.

31 Green, pp. 175-181.

32 Sellery, G. C., The Renaissance, its Nature and Origins (Madison, 1950), p. 213.Google Scholar

33 Repressor, II, 350-366.

34 Among recent commentaries, the best are Sellery, pp. 209-214, and Green, pp. 183-187.

35 Repressor, II, 354.

36 Ibid., II, 366.

37 Donet, pp. 158-159.

38 Reule, p. 30. See also Donet, p. 129: that one day should be set aside at regular intervals for prayer and thanksgiving is implicit in ‘law of kind’ and is the practice of'all nations, and diat afore Moses’ law and after'.

39 Repressor, I, 241-251.

40 In the course of his appeal to the superior credibility of the canonical books, Pecock speculates on the origin of the Apocrypha. ‘In the beginning of the church, soon after Christ's passion', there was a great scarcity of ‘devout books'. Consequently Christian men included the apocryphal writings in their Bibles, even though, as Jerome and others admitted, they knew they were not Holy Scripture (ibid., I, 251).

41 Book of Faith, pp. 242 ff.

42 Ibid., pp. 273-275.

43 Repressor, I, 106-109.

44 Interesting examples of his use of church history may be found ibid., 1, 254, and n, 496-501. He also urged the educated layman to consult the chronicles for himself (ibid., n, 496).

45 There is some reason to believe that Pecock might have enjoyed the patronage of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, but it would appear that any such connection rested on Pecock's reputation as a man useful in the politico-religious controversies of the day rather than as an exponent of the new studies then fdtering into England from Italy (Green, pp. 16-17).

46 Repressor, II, 434-435.

47 The Folewer to the Donet, ed. E. V. Hitchcock (1924, Early English Text Soc, Original Ser., no. 164), p. 80.

48 E.g., An Exposition of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, Delivered as Lectures in the University of Oxford about the Year 1497, ed. J. H. Lupton (London, 1873), pp. 1-2, 91-96; Exposition of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, in Opuscula Quaedam Theologica, ed. J. H. Lupton (London, 1876), p. 58. Recent works that cast light on this aspect of Colet's thought are P. A. Duhamel, ‘The Oxford Lectures of John Colet', Jour, of the History of Ideas xxv (1953), 493-510, and E. W. Hunt, Dean Colet and his Theology (London, 1956), chap, iv, esp. pp. 92 ff.

49 Exposition of Epistle to Romans, in Opuscula, pp. 134-140. See also E. F. Rice, John Colet and the Annihilation of the Natural', Harvard Theological Rev. XLV (1952), 141-163.

50 Letters to Radulphus, in Opuscula, pp. 8-9, 23-28.

51 See J. K. Yost, ‘Christian Humanism in the Writings of the English Reformers', (diss., Duke University, 1965), for a discussion, among other things, of the historical sense revealed by these men. Pecock's approach was, of course, in general quite different. He was interested primarily in theology, they in the Christian life, though there is a strain of moral activism in Pecock's work which could do with further study. See, for example, Repressor, 1, 292-293; Donet, p. 46; Reule, p. 200. Cf. Jacob, esp. pp. 149-153. Pecock had unlimited faith in reason, they a profound distrust of that brand of rationalism which expressed itself in terms of scholastic logic, though even Tyndale would, I think, have recognized in Pecock something more fruitful than the ‘chopological’ interpretations of those whom he considered typical of the scholastic torturers of texts.

52 Cf. Morison, Book of Faith, introd., pp. 72-74.

53 Green, p. 231. On Pecock's relationship to Hooker, see also Munz, Peter, The Place of Hooker in the History of Thought (London, 1952), pp. 41–45.Google Scholar

54 In addition to references made in passing in the preceding pages, see Donet, p. 160; Book of Faith, pp. 250-352, 277-278; Repressor, 1, 106-109, 248-249. To the Lollard argument that, had religious orders been of any value, Christ would have created them, he answered that many profitable things, both secular and religious, have been established by man himself. The entire structure of the church is post-apostolic and hence of human origin, and the Old Testament is full of examples of religious institutions humanly ordained. Moreover, monastic institutions naturally developed in diverse forms because, like inns, they met the varying demands of men. (Repressor, 11, 518 ff.)

55 A. B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, N.C., !965), chap. vi. For other examples of fresh attitudes toward public issues, see the preceding chapters.

56 See ibid., chaps, i-vi.